In the dilapidated, disused chapel of a private school in St Albans, Steve Coogan is contemplating the job that brought him here on a baking hot spring day.
“When I’m producing, I have a certain kind of leverage,” says the actor and co-founder of busy TV and film production company Baby Cow in a break between shooting scenes on Netflix thriller Legends. “So as a job, this is quite interesting. I don’t often get just hired.”
In the true-crime drama written by Neil Forsyth (The Gold), about Customs and Excise officers going undercover in heroin gangs in the early 1990s, Coogan – who, this month, won his sixth Bafta – is playing a “straight”, dramatic role, one that’s part of ensemble cast. And that “is an enjoyable process”, he says. “I used to complain, ‘why does no one hire me just as an actor?’, so I have to generate the material myself.” Legends might be an 89-day shoot but it is nonetheless “quite a nice vacation in a way”.
“And,” he goes on, considering the co-stars – Tom Burke, Hayley Squires, Aml Ameen and Jasmine Blackborow – also onset today, “I’ve got to the stage where working with young people who are at the cutting-edge of the profession is quite good. It makes you feel relevant.”
