“We’re not the police. We’re not the spooks. There’s no safety net,” Steve Coogan’s Don – a lugubrious Mancunian, who’s himself a former undercover officer – tells a group of dissatisfied, but ambitious, employees of HM Revenue and Customs gathered in his dusty 1990s classroom.
Tom Burke’s Guy, among others, has passed the test to join a secret anti-drugs taskforce, set up by the historical Customs and Excise after Margaret Thatcher declared war on the gangs flooding Britain with heroin. Before they can go under cover, though, Don explains that this dangerous work means the new recruits have to leave their old lives behind and take on new identities – the “legends” of the show’s title.
And then they’re sent off into the field: Guy infiltrating Turkish heroin importers in London, while Don stays back at base, directing operations. It’s a role, Coogan tells me in a break between scenes, he was happy, as “an older actor”, to take on.
View oEmbed on the source website“Don’s a bit more dyed-in-the-wool, a bit more working-class,” Coogan says when we talk again, nearly a year on. “But I’m not a million miles from that. I’ve met people like him. So it felt familiar to me. But also something I hadn’t really done. So I thought: well, I can tick that one off. I don’t want to be always repeating myself.”
So he wasn’t envious of Burke’s action scenes as the no-nonsense Guy, who’s based on a real-life figure interviewed by the assiduous Forsyth as part of his research while writing the drama? Coogan laughs. “It’s a bit unedifying when you see a guy who’s over 60 knocking out a 32-year-old bloke who’s really fit. You just think: ‘Nah, I’m not having that!’ So, play to your strengths. Don’t try and be something that’s just too outlandish.”
When we met on set, Coogan talked of his memories of the period depicted in Legends: “It’s set in the 90s. To me that’s like last week. I remember it very clearly. I was a real, functioning human being. I had a job, a car and a house.”
Those “showbizzy” things included a voice-star role on Spitting Image, then a hugely popular show – “I was the John Major… people of our age might remember him. A lot of people won’t, like the two ladies who are staring at me in this room,” he says, smiling at the Netflix PRs accompanying him today. “They’ve no idea what we’re talking about! But in 1990, he was prime minister. So, yeah, I was a young Turk, trying to hustle.”
“I like that Neil pointed to that,” says Coogan. “Because these people are not all on the same virtuous path. These campaigns, these individual acts of bravery and nobility, can be set against a background that is only there because of political decisions. Had the economy been going well there might not have been any kind of hunger to resolve or curtail an endemic drugs problem.”
Last year Coogan played Brian Walden in Brian and Maggie, the Channel 4 drama about the former PM’s favourite TV interviewer, with Harriet Walter as Thatcher. Would the younger Coogan have believed that somebody who was, as he puts it, the “devil incarnate when I was growing up”, could be such an active figure in his acting career?
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