In the early ’90s, Britain was dropping its battle in opposition to unlawful drug smuggling. In an effort to vary the tide, a brand new mission was launched: Undercover operatives would infiltrate a few of the nation’s most infamous drug gangs. But the males and girls charged with this job weren’t skilled spies.
Instead, they have been a small group of amateurs from round the United Kingdom, tasked with creating new identities for themselves — and determining the best way to survive by pondering on their ft. What they lacked in coaching and sources they made up for in ingenuity and spirit — and a willingness to inhabit these new lives at the expense of their prior ones.
Forthcoming sequence Legends, written and created by Neil Forsyth (The Gold, Guilt), tells the story of unusual customs workers who have been covertly recruited for this work. They needed to adapt rapidly to the harmful components of the job and additionally to their newly created identities. To keep away from being discovered, they needed to embody these “legends” fully.
“Your legend has to be part of you. One wrong word, one wrong decision, and you’re a goner,” says Don (Steve Coogan) to a bunch of potential recruits in the trailer above. Don is the head of operations, and his refusal to mince phrases about the dangers inherent to the work belies his paternal instincts. His prices have a real want for his mentorship as they embark on their mission.
The job forward is a formidable one, the recruits be taught in the trailer. They’re warned: “It’ll be the greatest challenge of your lives, taking on a level of danger and risk unimaginable.”
While these males and girls have been tackling these unimaginable dangers, the normal public couldn’t, nicely, even start to think about what was truly taking place.
“I’ve written shows in the past that are about well-known events. You then tell the story behind it that isn’t so well known,” Forsyth tells Netflix. “This is unique, in that the work of the Legends is barely known at all … There was this core team of people that did all of this, and they did it almost without any public recognition.”
For Forsyth, it was essential to unlock the causes a handful of individuals have been prepared to place their lives on the line for work they’d by no means tried earlier than.
“Britain is entering a recession. A lot of [the Legends] are from working-class backgrounds without any kind of financial support underpinning their decisions. So they’re trapped, and that’s very important — they’re trapped,” he emphasizes. “They think they could have probably done more in life than this. They can see how the next 30 years are going to play out for them, and they don’t really fancy it, but they’re not in a position to go down a different route. And suddenly, they have this opportunity to do something completely different that satisfies a lot of their unique personal motivations and hopes and dreams, but with it comes an enormous danger, and they can’t resist plunging into that.”
“I think that’s what’s really interesting for me on a personal level,” Forsyth continues. “I think it’s a sort of last throw of the dice for them, in terms of doing something with their life where they really think they’ll make a mark in the world. And that’s very attractive and seductive. It’s the seduction of the opportunity that manages to get them past the perceived danger, to grasp the opportunity.”
One of the individuals seduced by this chance is Guy (Tom Burke), a customs agent who works alongside his spouse, Sophie (Charlotte Ritchie). Though fortunately married with a daughter at house, Guy is trying to find one thing extra. He’s searching for a manner of advancing in his profession, and he takes the alternative that involves shake up his life. Burke’s character is predicated on an actual Legend named Guy Stanton, whom Forsyth spoke with when creating the sequence. “I immediately got a sense of the human journey that he and others had taken in this remarkable story,” Forsyth says.
As Burke tells Netflix, “His draw to the recruitment poster asking ‘Could you offer more?’ feels quite universal… There’s a feeling that he’s never quite done what he needed to do; a side of him that he’s pushed down, or which has been pushed down by his environment.”
“I always thought [my character’s] drive was more individual and internal — that he simply needs to do something like this because it’s meaningful and purposeful but also because it’s dangerous, and he craves that,” Burke says. “There’s an adrenaline junkie in there somewhere. Perhaps somebody else would just go and do a bungee jump, but he needs a bit more than that. It’s like it’s something he’s got to do to be able to get on with the rest of his life.”
As the trailer makes clear, that’ll solely be potential if there’s a life to get on with at the finish of the mission. As Guy realizes and tells Don, “We do it with all the danger that comes with it. And if we die doing it, then nobody ever knows that we did it at all.”
It was the excessive stakes of the mission that made Coogan wish to get Don’s character good: “Don is someone who has been there, seen that, got the T-shirt, and all that — but he’s also someone who has made mistakes, which the audience gets a sense of. In some ways, his role is like parenting because [there’s] a duty of care that has to be coupled with the fact that they have a job to do. He’s not there just to look after their welfare. He’s there to get them to do their job effectively.”
As Don says in the trailer: “Some people are cut out for it and some people aren’t.” It’s his job as mission chief to seek out out who’s and who isn’t — typically, the most supreme individuals who may simply conjure up a brand new identification and depart all the things else behind won’t be the most fascinating factor.
“If you spend most of your time being someone else, then how do you know who you are anymore and who you’re supposed to be?” Coogan asks. “It’s quite an interesting topic for discussion — who we’re supposed to be as human beings or how we present ourselves professionally, how we act when we’re not in a professional space. All that stuff is examined in Legends in a really thought-provoking way. But that’s all gravy because the important thing is it’s a really entertaining, engaging yarn. And it’s always good when you’re really enjoying something, but then it’s only when the program is finished that you realize it’s made you contemplate certain things about identity … I think probably a lot of people would love to reinvent themselves as somebody else, just even as a sort of fantasy.”
Yet the fantasy doesn’t at all times final as soon as it turns into a actuality. Coogan says about Don, “I think you can see with his character that he’s subjugated himself for his job, and he suffered for that as people often do … All he has is his job. I think Don is like, ‘Well, I’m good at what I do. At least I’ve still got that.’ And I suppose he satisfies that emotional side of himself by caring about these people who he only really knows in a professional capacity, but he has that paternal instinct because everybody wants that connection. Everybody wants some sort of connection with people on an emotional level. He doesn’t really have that in his life, so he does that with his charges.”
You can watch that emotional connection play out amidst the highest potential stakes when all six episodes of Legends stream globally on Netflix on May 7, and Guy and the remainder of the Legends put all the things on the line as they inhabit lives that run parallel to their very own, irrespective of the value.
“The biggest thing for me,” Forsyth says, “ and this is absolutely thanks to Tom [Burke]’s performance as well — is that Guy said we captured how it felt to [be a Legend].”
