U.N.C.L.E. movie changes Solo’s back story a bit

Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo

ShortList.com has published a feature story on actor Henry Cavill that indicates The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie changes Napoleon Solo’s back story a bit.

In the original 1964-68 series, Solo had served in Korea under a Col. Morgan and had joined U.N.C.L.E. by 1954. In THE SHORTLIST STORY, there’s this passage:

Cavill’s character in The Man From UNCLE is Napoleon Solo. Or, ‘the one played by Robert Vaughn’ for those of us who spent childhood Saturday teatimes being entertained by TV repeats – always featuring men in roll necks – from this strange, colourful decade our parents banged on about. Solo, a postwar art thief-turned-Cold War agent, is the dapper playboy – who Cavill describes as “an arsehole with a heart” – working alongside Soviet spying machine Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer in the film, David McCallum when it was on TV). It’s Solo’s look that inspired the shoot. Cavill likes this. (emphasis added)

In the movie’s trailer that went online last month, there was a passing reference to Solo being a thief. There may be additional Solo back story in the movie. There’s a young Napoleon Solo character in it, but no details have come out about that.

It was already known that the movie made one other major change: that U.N.C.L.E. didn’t exist in 1963 (the year the film is set), whereupon in the show it had been operating for some time.