Is Legends based on a true story? The 'extraordinary' untold story behind new Netflix drug thriller
Tom Burke and Steve Coogan star in the new show
Legends, as a story, is almost unbelievable: a group of everyday Customs officers going undercover to take on dangerous drug dealers. So, is it true?
The new Netflix series, created by Neil Forsyth (The Gold, Guilt), takes place in 1990.
With more drugs than ever being imported into the UK, and heroin deaths on the rise, the Home Secretary asks a Customs chief to come up with a solution.
The idea is… unorthodox. Rather than enlisting intelligence agents or police officers, they train bored civil servants to become undercover operatives. It’s an amazing story – and it’s about to get even more extraordinary.
Is Legends based on a true story?
Yes! Legends is based on a true story. More specifically, the real-life Customs officers part of Beta Projects, who infiltrated some of the most dangerous drug gangs in Britain.
While the series revolves around an ensemble cast and composite characters, one of them is a real-life man: Guy Stanton. In the show, he’s a Customs airport officer played by Tom Burke.
As the blurb for Stanton’s book – The Betrayer: How An Undercover Unit Infiltrated The Global Drug Trade Paperback, the basis of the Netflix series – explains, this is exactly what happened.
“Guy Stanton was a London gangster with a big reputation. For years he operated at the top of the drugs trade, moving huge shipments around the world, and knew the major players in global organised crime, from Asian warlords and Turkish heroin barons to Colombian cocaine cartels,” it reads.
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“Yet all along he lived a perilous double life. For ‘Stanton’ was the legend – the fake identity – of a covert investigator leading a bold new concept in deep infiltration. Beta Projects was Britain’s most secret undercover unit.”
How accurate is Legends?
While Legends is “spiritually true”, creator Neil Forsyth had to make some changes.
There’s very little we know about the actual events, beyond what Legends tells us. As the end credits say in the finale, the public has been “largely unaware of their work… until now”.
That said, this wasn’t an excuse for Forsyth to take loads of creative liberties. If anything, it made him keener to authentically portray the stakes and their “extraordinary” accomplishment.
“I started by speaking with some of the real people involved. I conducted lots of interviews. Some with people who were happy to talk to me publicly, others who needed to be a bit more clandestine,” Forsyth told Netflix.
With the help of researcher Adam Fenn, who trawled through court transcripts and newspaper archives, he started to realise why this story needed to be told.
“As a writer, the true excitement lies in the story’s complexity; the number of surprising worlds and people it involves,” he explained.
“I did need to condense and simplify it, because otherwise it would be extremely complicated and we’d have far too many characters. It’s about working out how to take the true story and make it manageable in terms of six episodes of television, because real life is very messy.
“So we did the research, gathered up everything that happened and all the people who were involved, and decided which characters to concentrate on. In some cases these are composites of real life people, to give a real breadth of experience, while being completely true to the spirit of what happened and the major incidents that occurred.”
What does Guy Stanton think about Legends?
Stanton has praised Legends and Burke’s performance.
Speaking to The Times, he admitted that his ‘Legend’ (his undercover persona) was “bullying, quite a violent individual and Tom brings that over well”.
“He brings over the ‘I’m not bothered’ sort of thing when dealing with people. I was very impressed,” he added.
While it doesn’t cover the full spectrum of his undercover duties (like “sitting in the back of a car for 24 hours”), he said the series captures exactly what it felt like for him and his colleagues.
Forsyth met Stanton several times throughout the drama’s development. “He’s opened up more and more about the emotional journey that he went through. I
think he would fully admit that the undercover experience had both negative and positive outcomes for him and his family,” the writer told Netflix.
“It’s just fascinating to imagine this normal bloke living such an extreme undercover existence.”
Is Steve Coogan’s Don a real person?
Steve Coogan plays Don, the government official who acts as the Customs officers’ handler during their undercover operations.
“Don is very much inspired by two real life people whom I researched at length. One of whom I also interviewed at length,” Forsyth explained. However, he’s not based on a specific person called Don.
Similarly, Kate (Hayley Squires), Bailey (Aml Ameen), and Erin (Jasmine Blackborow), who work alongside Burke’s Guy, aren’t real people, either.
“Kate represents a lot of the Legends I spoke to who came from working-class backgrounds, and who found themselves operating in working-class areas. They saw first hand the devastation that the drugs were causing, which gave them some of the personal motivation that drove them,” Forsyth said.
“Bailey is directly inspired by some fascinating real people. What I find really interesting with Bailey’s character is watching him grow in confidence throughout the series. He’s got a unique position in the show, in how he looks at the work that the Legends are doing.
“Erin represents the Legends who worked on the research component of the job, and on securing the supporting paperwork to create realistic Legends.”
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