Joel Edgerton offered Kuryakin role, New York blog says

Actor Joel Edgerton has been offered the role of Russian agent Illya Kuryakin in Steven Soderbergh’s planned movie version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., according to A REPORT in Vulture, an entertainment blog of New York magazine.

The post also includes this passage:

This has post has been corrected to note that our sources just clarified that Bradley Cooper is still weighing the role of Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn’s old part), but is waiting to commit until seeing who WB gets to play the role of Illya. If Edgerton signs on and Cooper approves, the A-Team star may still play Solo.

David McCallum, who plays Ducky on NCIS, was Kuryakin in the original 1964-68 series. The character was created by Sam Rolfe (who got a “developed by” credit in the original), and expanded by writer Alan Caillou.

The Vulture blog earlier this year published a list of everything Soderbergh had watched at home over a year’s time. It included almost all first-season episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., an indication he was researching the original pretty thoroughly.

UPDATE: If you read the comment section of the Vulture post, it originally had some errors, calling the agents Nathaniel Solo and Ilya Kuryakin. A New York magazine staffer wrote, “@duckysgirl – Yep, we got the names wrong. Tongue lashing has been appropriately self-administered and spelling corrected.”

Steven Soderbergh catches up on his U.N.C.L.E.

Director Steven Soderbergh, who has said he’s “obligated” to direct a movie based on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., at least has been getting acquainted with the likes of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin.

Sodbergh kept a list, starting in February 2010 and running for a year, of the movies and TV shows he would watch. The list is online (we can’t put in a link right now, but will do so later). It includes 27 of 29 first-season episodes of Man From U.N.C.L.E., an indication Soderbergh is taking the prospective movie seriously. He also read Jon Heitland’s 1987 The Man From U.N.C.L.E. book. He watched the U.N.C.L.E.s starting in late October 2010 through mid-January 2011.

Other things of interest on his list were the three Harry Saltzman-produced Harry Palmer movies (The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain) as well as movies directed by the late Sidney Lumet that starred Sean Connery (The Hill and The Anderson Files Tapes). He also watched some episodes of Mad Men, the acclaimed drama that’s set in the 1960s and Soderbergh reportedly wants his U.N.C.L.E. movie to be set in the ’60s. Coincidence? Probably (he watched the Mad Men episodes in the summer of 2010). But who knows?

More interesting? No James Bond movies. Perhaps that’s a sign Soderbergh won’t try to make an U.N.C.L.E. movie into a warmed over 007 film, similar to the 1983 television movie, The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E.

UPDATE: To view Soderbergh’s list of movies and TV shows he watched for a year, JUST CLICK HERE. Warning: it’s a PDF file. The existance of the list was first disclosed by the Vulture Web site in a post IN A POST YOU CAN READ BY CLICKING HERE. The Vulure site, in turn, is part of New York Magazine’s Web site. You can view the main page of the magazine’s Web site BY CLICKING HERE.