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Promotions are in full swing for upcoming gangster movie LEGEND. The cast have been busy doing the media rounds and talking about their superb new film.

The stars of LEGEND Tom Hardy, Emily Browning and Christopher Eccleston, along with the director Brian Helgeland attended the premiere of the film and also took time out of their hectic schedule for a press conference with us lucky journalist folk.

The group all appeared on high spirits ahead of the premiere and were keen to share information about their experiences making LEGEND in only seven weeks. With so much hype around the film and the love for the legend of the Kray twins, it was only inevitable that a new film would be done about the mobster brothers who were so well known, well at least to some… “I honestly had never heard of them,” confessed Emily Browning who plays Frances Shea, the long suffering wife of Reggie Kray. “I didn’t know of them until I had read the script.”

For the film’s director, Brian Helgeland the stories about the twins were first brought to his attention over seventeen years ago and he knew it was something he would like to work on, “I had first heard of the Kray’s back in 1988, I thought it was about a wild animal. I didn’t know what a Kray was, but I quickly learnt!”

In the movie, it is Tom Hardy who is on double duty playing both of the brothers. Quite the challenge, but one he would happily take on as he had always been fascinated by the Kray’s history: “As a kid you see the books in the true crime section – well I did anyway – and I grabbed a book when I was about 15-years-old before going on holiday and that’s when I first came across them. Here in the United Kingdom, they’re about as familiar as a red telephone box! Playing them involved looking back at all of the source material on them – and there is a lot of material about the Kray’s.”

Tom Hardy

The weight of expectation may fall heavily on Hardy’s shoulders, but as he sat at the table looking very relaxed throughout the conference, he showed no signs of pressure. He happily shared his experiences and clearly enjoyed talking about his role – or roles – within the film, which required a lot of off-set investigations for the actor: “There’s always a question about research isn’t there – like ‘have you done your homework?’ ‘No.’ There is a plethora of research that one can do about the Kray’s. I even had Reggie’s watch which he died with on my wrist and we had various members of their world come out and talk and have private meetings. There’s only one visual primary source material, but you can’t really take a lot from that because they were on a BBC show, so you can’t really tell if that was their true voice or mannerisms. There are lots of photos, but a lot of it are the people’s mythical tales. I discovered there were patterns of stories or anecdotes that would reappear a lot and I had lots of diaries and some footage from a Panorama documentary as well. So yeah, I did loads of research. I did my homework!” (You can watch Hardy discuss this in the video at the bottom.)

For Emily, research was more difficult as there was very little known about Frances (Frankie) Shea who married Reggie. “It was kind of nice for me as I didn’t feel like there was as much pressure. People don’t have as much of a strong idea about who Frances is like they do with the Kray’s. I had little bits and pieces. Brian had got me a few letters that Frances had written to Reggie and that was my lighthouse, what I held on to and I built her around that. I am not very good at doing my homework. A lot of the research for me was learning about the accent, the time and the place, but otherwise, I just did it.”

Christopher Eccleston, who plays police officer Nipper Read was quick to pipe up his opinion on researching the Kray’s history: “To quote David Bowie, ‘I threw my homework on the fire!’ I think there’s a lot of b***cks spoken about research. I think what Brian had written sent a very clear message to me about what he wanted and so I relied entirely what was in the script and what happened on the set. We had conversations about what kind of dog Nipper Read might be and we decided on a bloodhound. Apparently a bloodhound – according to Brian Helgeland – will run until it dies. Will chase a criminal or its prey until its heart bursts, so we had a bloodhound. We thought of Nipper Read as a man of the Fifties and a man who did not want the Sixties to happen. He did not want the Kray’s to have sex and have fun, he did not want the Rolling Stones to have fun, so he is a man from the previous ten or twenty years. No homework!”

The Kray’s are like an enigma, a mysterious legendary duo that have folk tales told about them still today. Brian based his screenplay on the book The Profession of Violence. “I felt obligated to cover as much of it as I could. I read a lot of books, met people they knew when they were adults. What was interesting or not is the information was so extreme; whether they were helping old ladies across the street or nailing people to the floor. I never came across people before who had such an extreme mythology behind them, so I had to try and find something in the middle of all of that would be the truest thing I could do.”

When questioned about his initial reactions to playing a gay character in the film, Hardy confessed it was something he had never thought about and didn’t distinguish between the sexuality of the brothers: “I didn’t even think about it. It just is what it is. I don’t think it’s something that needs playing – Ronnie was gay… that’s it. It’s all good. I think what was actually complicated was Reggie. We don’t know whether he was potentially gay or not. That was questionable. So that’s when I had to look at LEGEND as its own separate entity… and within this Reggie is heterosexual and Ronnie is gay… crack on.”

Other information that is well known about the two brothers is how different they were from each other. Ronnie was the slightly more unhinged of the duo; blood-thirsty and illogical. He was was declared as clinically insane, showing elements of paranoid schizophrenia. Whereas Reggie was seen as the more sensible of the two, the brains behind their dealings. With their differences in mind, it was pretty clear who Hardy had the most fun playing: “The truth of the fact is, from a technical point of view, Ron is predictably unpredictable, so from a performance point of view, its fun to play. You have multiple options to play and you can pull the rug on anyone you want at any given time. It’s a free ball character to free run with in any scene. Reggie is constrained to boundaries and strict discipline. He has to go like ‘a,b,c,d,e..’ and that’s kind of boring in some aspects for me because I don’t want to go straight down the line, I want to have choices and have fun. So initially because I have a bit of a disco ball head, I was drawn to Ronnie and I had options there.”

Legend

With the Kray’s status becoming a legend, it was Ecclestone’s Nipper Read who was desperate to stop them and he became borderline obsessed by the brothers: “He believed they were from similar backgrounds and he felt a great deal of class shame about what they were doing. I think Nipper was obsessive generally. I think what is interesting him about him is surviving in the metropolitan police at the time too – he was a Northern copper. I think he was a workaholic, he was obsessive and he was humiliated on numerous occasions by Ron and Reg and he didn’t forget that.”

There’s no denying that Browning’s Frances was dealing with her own demons too as a consequence of the Kray’s actions, but the actress sees her as anything other than weak: “I don’t see Frances as a victim. I think that the way that Brian has written her and the way I wanted to play her is as a human being. She is complex and she comes to a very tragic end and her story is quite sad, but I think she is also quite ballsy and she has the guts to stand up to the boys. I don’t know if many people would have had that strength, so I don’t see her as a tragic character by any means.”

Tom Hardy

Capturing their raw emotions and difficulties was rather easy for Helgeland, but the biggest challenge was having both brothers on the screen at the same time and the director stressed that he tried not to make the camera too aware of what was going on.  With the motion control shots taking a long time, they had a couple of tricks which they used without doing anything too fancy. “It was always a question of how we were going to do it. There was no CGI, so it was back to old school, basic drill,” explains Hardy. “We were finding out how that would work, split screen, talking to a tennis ball, or talking to Jacob. Ultimately, there had to be another actor there who would then not only take notes of what I was doing at the top of the table, but could replicate it at the end of the day, but also leave an opportunity to change it too. It was more of a mental puzzle that needed to be unpacked and then breathe life into it. Then at the same time, the rest of the cast were in real time having to deal with the fact that they’ve got a split dynamic in the room.”

When asked what it was like filming with ‘two Tom’s’, Hardy couldn’t help but add his own opinion: “Awesome. Just awesome. The lucky buggers!”

For Eccleston, he happily joked about his feelings on it: “It was a deeply humbling experience.” With that, sarcastic comment, the table erupted into laughter, but Eccleston enthused on a serious note how he was impressed by Hardy’s capabilities: “Most of my scenes were with Reggie. I had only one scene with Ronnie and that was a revelation. That was interesting because I had only met Tom as Reg and then he was Ron and they were completely different. It was very interesting to see an actor doing one role and then another… I was jealous!”

The transformation from Ronnie to Reggie and vice versa was about an hour’s worth of wardrobe and make-up work. “We had a wig, teeth, a plumper up the nose, ageing, so there was an hour’s worth of it. We only had seven weeks to shoot, so we couldn’t faff about, we had to get on with it quite quickly. I also had wedges in the shoes as Ronnie had to be taller and he had an extra layer of shirts because he had to be a bit bigger. They were double breasted and he had a waistcoat and a suit, showing the difference between the two guys obviously.”

It is not long until LEGEND arrives on the big screen and it is definitely a must-see. You can read our full review of the film here.

In the meantime, you can also take a look at a snippet of the press conference in the video below: 

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LEGEND arrives in cinemas September 9th, 2015 (United Kingdom), October 2nd, 2015 (United States).

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