In the early ’90s, Britain was losing its battle against illegal drug smuggling. In an effort to change the tide, a new mission was launched: Undercover operatives would infiltrate some of the country’s most notorious drug gangs. But the men and women charged with this task were not trained spies. 

Instead, they were a small group of amateurs from around the United Kingdom, tasked with creating new identities for themselves — and figuring out how to survive by thinking on their feet. What they lacked in training and resources they made up for in ingenuity and spirit — and a willingness to inhabit these new lives at the expense of their prior ones.

Forthcoming series Legends, written and created by Neil Forsyth (The Gold, Guilt), tells the story of ordinary customs employees who were covertly recruited for this work. They had to adapt quickly to the dangerous elements of the job and also to their newly created identities. To avoid being found out, they had to embody these “legends” completely.

Sally Mais/Netflix

“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 group of potential recruits in the trailer above. Don is the head of operations, and his refusal to mince words about the risks inherent to the work belies his paternal instincts. His charges have a true need for his mentorship as they embark on their mission. 

The task ahead is a formidable one, the recruits learn 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 men and women were tackling these unimaginable risks, the general public couldn’t, well, even begin to imagine what was actually happening. 

“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 important to unlock the reasons a handful of people were willing to put their lives on the line for work they’d never attempted before. 

Justin Downing/Netflix

“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.”

Sally Mais/Netflix

One of the people seduced by this opportunity is Guy (Tom Burke), a customs agent who works alongside his wife, Sophie (Charlotte Ritchie). Though happily married with a daughter at home, Guy is searching for something more. He’s looking for a way of advancing in his career, and he takes the opportunity that comes to shake up his life. Burke’s character is based on a real Legend named Guy Stanton, whom Forsyth spoke with when developing the series. “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 only be possible if there’s a life to get on with at the end 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.” 

Justin Downing/Netflix

It was the high stakes of the mission that made Coogan want to get Don’s character just right: “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 leader to find out who is and who isn’t —  sometimes, the most ideal people who could easily conjure up a new identity and leave everything else behind might not be the most desirable thing.

“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.”

Sally Mais/Netflix

Yet the fantasy doesn’t always last once it becomes a reality. 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 possible stakes when all six episodes of Legends stream globally on Netflix on May 7, and Guy and the rest of the Legends put everything on the line as they inhabit lives that run parallel to their own, no matter the cost.

“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].”