Steve Coogan on Legends: ‘Working with young people makes me feel relevant’

In the dilapidated, disused chapel of a private school in St Albans, Steve Coogan is contemplating the job that brought him here on a baking hot spring day.

“When I’m producing, I have a certain kind of leverage,” says the actor and co-founder of busy TV and film production company Baby Cow in a break between shooting scenes on Netflix thriller Legends. “So as a job, this is quite interesting. I don’t often get just hired.”

In the true-crime drama written by Neil Forsyth (The Gold), about Customs and Excise officers going undercover in heroin gangs in the early 1990s, Coogan – who, this month, won his sixth Bafta – is playing a “straight”, dramatic role, one that’s part of ensemble cast. And that “is an enjoyable process”, he says. “I used to complain, ‘why does no one hire me just as an actor?’, so I have to generate the material myself.” Legends might be an 89-day shoot but it is nonetheless “quite a nice vacation in a way”.

“And,” he goes on, considering the co-stars – Tom Burke, Hayley Squires, Aml Ameen and Jasmine Blackborow – also onset today, “I’ve got to the stage where working with young people who are at the cutting-edge of the profession is quite good. It makes you feel relevant.”

In the gripping six-part series, based on actual covert operations spurred by the Thatcher and Major governments’ “war on drugs”, the 60-year-old plays Don, a grizzled Customs veteran with personal experience of undercover work and, according to Coogan, “got scarred by it in some way”. He’s running a group of untrained but plucky, risk-taking officers operating under fake identities (“legends”), with Burke’s “Guy” blending into a brutal Turkish heroin gang in North London. Squires’ “Kate” and Ameen’s “Bailey” buddy up with murderous major-league drug dealers in Liverpool.

Squires says her character’s motivation for undertaking this work “is partly to do with the time it was in Britain, the political climate and the lack of opportunity. “She’s got a quick brain and street-smarts. She’s always had a sense that she could do more. As a working-class character who comes from estates, those were the parts of Britain, the communities that she’s from, that were being destroyed by heroin. She’s not a hero but [the drugs problem] hits home.”

Squires found similarities between herself and Eastender Kate. “She’s not a million miles from me,” admits the 38-year-old South Londoner. “But there’s a confidence about her that I don’t necessarily have. That was exciting.”

Guy, meanwhile, is directly based on a real-life Customs officer with the pseudonym Guy Stanton. He wrote the 2022 memoir The Betrayer: How an Undercover Unit Infiltrated the Global Drug Trade, which inspired the series. As part of his preparation, Burke met him. “That was very informative,” the Strike star says. “Just to see his energy. And also meet his partner. She’s not featured a great deal in this,” the actor adds of a part played by Charlotte Ritchie, “but was very instrumental in his whole decision-making process.”

What kind of guy is the real-life Guy? “Very buoyant. A lot of energy,” Burke says. “You can see how he would have needed to do something more than what he was doing. That’s the interesting thing about it: with all the characters who are transitioning from one life into another, you have a sense of why they’re at that crossroads. This opportunity presents itself. But you get the feeling that if that hadn’t come along, something would have had to give somewhere.”

The deeply immersed Forsyth – whose research for his previous series The Gold, which was based on the 1983 Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery, spawned two series, 12 hours of TV and a book – spent many hours with Guy, and expands on Burke’s point. “When we meet the legends, they are not necessarily going through life being the people who they truly are. And when they’re legends, equally that’s not entirely a fictional persona. It’s a grey area between the two things,” says the writer.

“What the people who did these undercover jobs in real life are doing and what the characters in our show are doing, is saying: ‘I’m not going to accept this existence. I’m going to try something new and different, no matter how dangerous it is.’”

For Squires – starring in her second edge-of-the-seat thriller this year, after the second series of The Night Manager – it was Forsyth’s scripts that made her want the role. “I was instantly drawn in. I was just propelled through the first three episodes. Then once we got into their legends, I had to really concentrate, just to make sure I was keeping track of everything!” she says, laughing. “But I loved the fact it’s a true story. And I loved the idea of these different, ordinary characters coming together in such a small group to fight such a big thing.”

When I speak with Coogan again, one year on from filming, I ask him what similarities he sees between Forsyth and Jeff Pope, whose ITV drama Believe Me, about so-called Black Cab Rapist John Worboys, has just concluded. Coogan played Jimmy Savile in Pope’s 2023 series The Reckoning, and both screenwriters are maestros of these ripped-from-the-headlines – or ripped-from-the-archives – dramas.

“It’s sort of what they’re not,” Coogan says. “They’re more grounded, from more authentic backgrounds. They’ve not gone the Oxbridge route. Which lots of very good writers have, and people I’ve worked with. But I always find people who’ve not gone that way have come through more interesting routes. That makes them have what I would call a more workmanlike approach to writing.

“That’s a good thing,” he clarifies. “It’s the difference between watching a carpenter do really great work and watching a landscape artist who works in watercolours. Very beautiful, very arresting a landscape can be. But a carpenter who makes a brilliant table and chairs is something you can really use – and can be beautiful in a functional way. That’s what I would say Jeff and Neil have in common. Does it do the job, and does it do the job well? I like that about them. It’s craftsmanship.”

Are there, I wonder, lessons to be learned from Legends, just as there were from the controversial, divisive The Reckoning? Might both shows contribute to better, more nuanced debates about the issues raised in their respective stories? With The Reckoning, that was the question of how Savile got away with his crimes for so long. In this case, that’s drug dealing and drug use, which, three decades after the events depicted, are as rampant as ever.

“When you’re dealing with people who your intuitive reaction to is revulsion, it doesn’t help you tackle the problem,” he says. Counterintuitively, to help victims means, sometimes, trying to see what creates these people.

“You can’t solve it. But the ‘why’ of people doing things is an important question to ask. If I played Savile as a pantomime villain, that doesn’t help anyone… we can take these people who do awful things, put them in the corner with horns on their head, and say they’re different from all of us. But that doesn’t help the victims. You have to go for a little walk around that garden of horribleness to get some understanding of it.”

That, he concludes, means taking bold decisions. “And that means sometimes portraying people who are…” He stops. “Put it this way: The Reckoning was a very interesting job for me to do. But I was glad when it ended.”

‘Legends’ is on Netflix now

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