Shivangi Sinha
Netflix’s ‘Legends’ follows a team of customs officers trained by Don Clark, who become part of a secret unit to fight drug-related crimes. Clark is the leader who puts the team together to infiltrate major gangs smuggling large quantities of heroin into the UK from Afghanistan. The series is based on true events from the 1990s in the UK, when Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise trained officers internally to take on the “war on drugs.” Clark’s character is played by Steve Coogan, and it highlights the interactions and decisions at higher levels that shaped the directives and path for the undercover agents to follow.
Don Clark’s Character is Sketched From the Experiences of Real Officers
In the series, Don Clark is introduced as a tough, high-level officer in Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise in the United Kingdom. He begins recruiting uniformed officers from the department and deploying them to the Beta Project. The aim of the project is to infiltrate drug networks operating in the country and build cases against long-active targets. In the series, Clark also speaks about his own time as an undercover agent. In a poignant scene, he has a deep conversation with Guy Stanton and warns him about losing himself to the alter ego he is building. Speaking from experience, he helps bring Stanton’s focus back to the mission, which he ultimately completes successfully.
In real life, creator Neil Forsyth has spoken about how the thriller series draws from real incidents and tells the story of a government undercover project that took place in the 1990s. When asked if the characters were based on real life as well, he said that they were more or less similar. While Stanton’s character is inspired by a real person, the series takes creative liberties for dramatic effect, particularly by amalgamating other real-life individuals into composite characters like Clark. He explained that some real individuals have been condensed into single characters to make the story simpler and easier to follow, and the same has been done with Clark’s character as well.
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Don Clark’s Character is Based Upon Two Former Customs Officers
Speaking about Don Clark’s character, Neil Forsyth said that it is not a real person or the name of any real individual, but it is based on two real-life people. These were individuals he researched, and one of them he interviewed at length. He has not shared their names, and there are limited records available due to the nature of the work they were undertaking. So, while Clark’s character is not based on a single real person per se, much of what he does, such as managing and training the force, is based on people who actually held those roles. This gives the series a strong sense of the time in which the operations were conducted and highlights the role different stakeholders played in it.
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