'Don't be too precious'
His latest role in political thriller Legends takes steve coogan back to the 90s – a time where he couldn’t be picky about parts
Sally Mais/Netflix
- Craig McLean
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"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.
In reality we’re at a private school in St Albans, which is shuttered for the spring 2025 half-term, where Coogan and his fellow cast members are filming Legends, a new six-part true-crime thriller by writer and showrunner Neil Forsyth (The Gold, Guilt).
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.
At 60, portraying the “authority figure… a puppet master…” came easily. Not least as, unusually for a chameleonic actor and comedian best-known for playing Alan Partridge and, more recently, Jimmy Savile, he’s acting in his own accent.
Thatcher represented everything that was wrong with Britain. People shouldn’t sanctify her… that irritates me
“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.”
As he puts it, there are actors “who play the same thing over and over again. And they’re really good at it. They do it in different environments. But they’re essentially themselves. I have the opportunity to try and be mercurial and vary what I do, whether it’s broader comedy, or nuanced drama, or something that’s in the middle”.
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.”
Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge. PA
Specifically, in 1990, when the action opens, a 24-year-old Coogan was on the sofa at the BBC’s Daytime Live, wowing Alan Titchmarsh with his array of impersonations. When we speak again, he chuckles at the memory of his younger self. “I was doing – inverted commas – ‘showbizzy’ things. Because I went where the work was. Right now, am I doing what I want to do? Yes. Was I then? No. But it was like: get your foot in the door, get a gig, get work and figure it out later. Don’t be too precious.”
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.”
Major’s government were tasked with following through on Thatcher’s agenda-setting pronouncement. But as Forsyth’s script points out at the beginning of Legends, that was as much a distraction technique in the dying days of her premiership; don’t look at the failing economy, look at the resolute action on this societal scourge.
Back in the 90s 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.”
Still, even Thatcher couldn’t win a war on heroin, with misuse still a problem. Do we need a firmer stance on drugs? Or, alternatively, should we legalise them? “Getting away from the judgmentalism about it is probably the first thing,” replies Coogan. “Away from the Daily Mail attitude to drugs, which is: they're bad people who sell them, they're bad people who take them. Because people who run antique shops in Tunbridge Wells don’t sell or do drugs. That world view is all-pervasive. And doesn't actually help anyone tackle the problem. People who say they want to legalise them are demonised as nut jobs.”
Charlotte Ritchie as Sophie and Tom Burke as Guy in Legends. Justin Downing/Netflix
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 LI was growing up”, could be such an active figure in his acting career?
“Funnily enough, no,” he says with another smile. “She represented everything that was wrong with Britain… However, the one thing I will say in her favour is that she had a very strong ideology. That is something notably lacking in almost every politician today.” That said, “people shouldn’t sanctify her. That irritates me. People who are too young to remember just think, ‘Oh yes, she was great.’ No, she effing wasn’t.”
Secrets and lies
Neil Forsyth on creating a legend
What did you learn from your research interviews with the real people who took on these legend personas?
They all admitted to me that they weren’t entirely false. They were parts of them that they had perhaps pushed down over the years and had become reawakened as their legends. Or, to some degree, they were the people they always wanted to be. Their legends let them have a confidence, or bolshy-ness, they always wanted to have in normal life.
What was the personal impact on them of going so deep into these characters?
Tom’s character Guy is the one who goes deepest and quickest into his legend. He goes from living a generic family life in suburban Surrey to living in
a council flat in east London and figuring out how to work his way into a criminal community. And over the series, the line between legend and reality becomes a bit blurred. It becomes all-encompassing and immersive – which it did for a lot of these people. A lot of them told me there are times where you forget who you are.
Is there a similarity between your characters building their legends and your actors building their roles?
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Definitely. It’s an interesting challenge to play an acting part where the character is playing a part! There’s a lot of wheels turning there. And the cast all came up with their own solutions to that.
Authors
Craig McLean
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