Legends on Netflix: The True Story Behind Britain's Most Dangerous Undercover Operation

Before I got the call about Legends, I had never heard of the HMCE undercover operation. I doubt many people had. That is exactly the point. It is the thing that hooked me the moment I read Neil Forsyth's scripts.

I play Ertan, a Turkish gang enforcer who is part of the London criminal network the undercover unit is targeting. I am in most of the six episodes. So I had a decent stretch of time on this production: the research, the conversations on set, watching the cast and crew collectively work to honour a story that most of Britain had forgotten existed. What follows is my attempt to share some of that from the inside.

The History No One Taught You

The first thing I did when I was cast was read The Betrayer, the book by Guy Stanton and journalist Peter Walsh that the series is based on. I read it in two sittings. That almost never happens to me.

The short version: in 1989, Margaret Thatcher declared a war on drugs. By 1990, the UK was losing it badly. Heroin was coming in at volume and Her Majesty's Customs and Excise could not stop it at the border. So someone inside HMCE made a decision that I still find staggering: they recruited ordinary customs employees (not spies, not soldiers, people with desk jobs) and sent them to live inside the gangs. New names. New identities. New entire lives. These were called Legends.

Tom Burke's character, Guy, is based directly on the real Guy Stanton, who spent eleven years undercover. Eleven years. Living as someone else, inside criminal organisations that would have killed him without hesitation if they had known who he was. When you read that and then read Forsyth's scripts, you understand immediately why this story works as television. It is almost too extraordinary to be fiction. Except it is not fiction.

What the book captures, and what Forsyth translates into the scripts with real precision, is the psychological dimension. The physical danger is obvious. What is less obvious, until you are deep into the material, is how the identity itself becomes the threat. At some point the Legend starts to feel more real than the life you left behind. The show does not flinch from that.

What Neil Forsyth Built

I had seen The Gold and Guilt before I came onto this production. I knew what Forsyth does. But reading his scripts for Legends up close, as an actor working out how to inhabit them rather than as a viewer being carried along, you notice things you would not otherwise see.

He is ruthless about what he leaves out. Most writers include scenes that earn their place logically but do not earn their place dramatically. Forsyth cuts those. What remains is dense. Every scene is doing at least two things at once. But it never feels compressed or rushed. The Radio Times gave the show five stars and specifically praised his ability to pare a narrative down to "just the fun parts." That sounds flip. It is not. It is actually one of the hardest things to do in long-form television, and he makes it look effortless.

Brady Hood directed episodes one through four. I had been aware of his work on Top Boy, but working with him in person you understand where that instinct for contained, pressurised scenes comes from. Julian Holmes took episodes five and six. His credits include The Boys and Reacher, and the handover between the two directors is seamless. Both share a refusal to let pace substitute for tension. There is a difference, and on a show like this it matters.

On Set: What I Saw of the Ensemble

I want to be careful about what I can speak to. Every actor on a production like this only really knows their own corner of it. But being across most of the series gave me more time on set than a single-episode role would, and you absorb a lot just by being present.

Tom Burke

Tom carries the whole show on his back and makes it look like he is not carrying anything at all. Playing someone based on a real person who actually lived this life, over a decade undercover inside organisations that wanted him dead, requires a kind of groundedness you cannot manufacture. It either comes from genuine research and commitment or it does not come at all. With Tom it was immediately apparent which category he was in.

Steve Coogan

Don is the head of the unit, described in the scripts as a sober and wounded man who built the operation and now lives inside its consequences. Watching Coogan work, what strikes you is how still he is. This is not the Coogan of Partridge or any of the comedic work. He has found something much quieter here, and the Wall Street Journal called it a "splendid performance as a man damaged by his profession." That is exactly right. The damage is always present, never announced.

Hayley Squires

Kate runs the Liverpool operation, embedded in the heroin trade in one of the city's most dangerous communities in 1990. Hayley is someone who finds the complication in characters that could easily be written as straightforward, and Kate is not straightforward. The Liverpool thread of the story carries a different texture from the rest of the series, and that is partly the writing and partly what Hayley brings to it.

Playing Ertan

Ertan is a Turkish gang enforcer operating within the London criminal network the customs officers are trying to infiltrate. Without getting into spoiler territory, his function in the story evolves as the series progresses. What he represents to the undercover unit shifts, which meant I had to build him carefully rather than simply play each scene in isolation.

A recurring role is a different discipline from a guest appearance. The continuity of the character, physically, vocally, in the logic of how he moves and reacts, has to hold across months of filming. Audiences notice when it slips, even if they cannot name what they have noticed. A lot of my preparation was about building a foundation for Ertan that I could return to reliably, whatever the scene required.

The research I did into the real history of this period fed directly into that. The criminal networks, the routes, the internal culture of the world Ertan came from. The more specifically I understood where he was from and how that world operated, the less I had to consciously think about it on the day.

The Rest of the Cast

Charlotte Ritchie as Sophie has been singled out by critics for a "quietly stunning" performance, and quiet is the operative word. Aml Ameen as Bailey, Alex Jennings as the Home Secretary, Jasmine Blackborow, Douglas Hodge, Tom Hughes, Johnny Harris, Gerald Kyd, Numan Acar. This is an ensemble where there is genuinely no place to hide, and nobody needed to hide.

The Locations: London in 1990

My scenes were shot across London, principally in Muswell Hill and Shoreditch. Other parts of the production filmed in Farnborough, Camberley, and Liverpool. The Morocco sequences, which stand in for Afghanistan in the story, belong to a different thread of the narrative entirely and involve a different set of characters.

The production design team's commitment to 1990 is total. Brick-sized mobile phones that actors had to learn to hold and use convincingly. Period interiors, clothes, cars. None of it tips into costume drama nostalgia. It just places you inside that specific moment.

That said, as someone who actually remembers London in the early 1990s, there is one thing that does catch the eye: it is very clean. The streets, the vans, the shopfronts. Real London in 1990 was not clean. It was grimy in a specific way that felt normal at the time and that you only properly register when you see a version of it that has been polished for camera. There is a delivery van in the Liverpool sequences that looks as though it rolled off a forecourt that morning. An actual working delivery van in Liverpool in 1990 would have had a decade of dents in it, patches of rust, a bumper held on with something improvised. These are the things you notice when you have been there and the camera has not quite captured the texture of the dirt. It does not undermine the show. But it makes you think about what authenticity actually costs in period television.

What the Reviews Got Right

The show has been out since 7 May and, honestly, the reviews have been beyond what any of us expected in terms of consistency. Five stars from the Financial Times. Five stars from the Radio Times. The Times called it "superb" and "filled with adrenaline." Variety: "a gripping tale of found potential and assumed identity." Collider named it the most watchable crime drama Netflix has released this year.

The word that keeps appearing across all of them is "grip." It is the right word. The show does not let you settle. That is a function of the scripts, the direction, and the performances. It is also a function of the source material. When the story you are telling is true, there is a weight to it that purely invented drama cannot manufacture. You feel it as an actor and apparently you feel it as a viewer too.