Flashy suits, fancy clubs and Freudian fights: a new film about Ronnie and Reggie Kray polishes their brutal myth into a glossy true-crime thriller. Legend director Brian Helgeland on getting under the skin of the notorious East End gangsters and shooting two Tom Hardys

Brian Helgeland first heard of the Kray twins in 1998, when the writer-director met a veteran English showbusiness manager with a dramatic scar. Eventually, curiosity nudged him into asking how it happened. That, he was told, had been the Krays. The bloodcurdling story involved would work its way into the script when, years later, Helgeland was making Legend, a new film about the brothers. Soon afterwards, a letter arrived from the manager’s lawyer.

“It said, ‘First off, none of that ever happened. Second, if you put it in the movie, we will sue you.’ Then it said he didn’t even remember meeting me.” Puzzled, Helgeland dug back into the original story; he realised his source had been in prison when he claimed to have met the twins. “So the very first thing I heard about them was a lie.”

This much seems only fitting for a film about the Krays, the truth of their story forever lost somewhere in a half-century of hearsay and tabloid exclusives. And Helgeland was new to it all. On screen, Legend is filled not just by the presence of Tom Hardy – who plays both Reggie and Ronnie – but by London and its folklore.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A true-crime Romeo and Juliet … Emily Browning as Frances Shea, Reggie Kray’s wife. Photograph: Allstar/Studiocanal

In person, its maker is a crewcut man of 54 from Providence, Rhode Island, in crumpled beige chinos, who had, until recently, never set foot in the East End. Matching Helgeland to the Krays was the idea of Working Title, the muscular London production company. The logic was straightforward. The screenplay Helgeland wrote for the company’s Iraq war thriller Green Zone was well regarded; further back in his career had been the script for Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed Mystic River and an Oscar for writing LA Confidential, each dark-eyed tales of men, crime and violence. As a director, he had got good reviews for 42, a recent biopic of the African American baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson.

His nationality never gave him pause. He took the job, collected up the vast weight of Krays literature – including Reg Kray’s Book of Slang, published from Parkhurst prison in 1989 – and decamped to London. There he met surviving henchmen and acquaintances including Barbara Windsor, former gangster Freddie Foreman and Maureen Flanagan, hairdresser to the Krays’ mother Violet.

Between the books and the old pals, the chaos almost defeated him. On the one hand were the endless stories of rough-hewn Robin Hoods helping Bethnal Green grannies across the road. On the other were the accounts of sadism and psychosis. “The truth about them seemed very elusive, and the more I researched it the more I thought ‘You know, I don’t know if I really do want to make a movie about these guys.’ Because I couldn’t figure them out.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest I shot the Krays … Legend director Brian Helgeland. Photograph: Jilly Wendell/Corbis

He watched the other film version of the brothers’ story, 1990’s The Krays, starring Spandau Ballet’s Gary and Martin Kemp and a ferocious Billie Whitelaw as Violet. It didn’t help. “The matriarchal stuff in there was great. But they did that. I had to do something else.”

In the end, the something else was Frances Shea. The unhappy bride of Reg (played by Australian actress Emily Browning), married for eight weeks in 1965 and a suicide by 1967, Shea gave Helgeland his angle. Legend would be a true-crime Romeo and Juliet, young love poisoned by the malign influence of Ron – here flamboyantly unhinged – and Reg’s demons too. Yet for much of the film Reg is quite the catch, a gleaming slab of charm in tailored suit and tiepin, strutting out of his Mum’s to a soundtrack of Booker T’s Green Onions.

Legend goes big on 60s glitz with the sheen of men’s magazines. Is Helgeland worried he over-did it? “I know that’s where the film lives or dies. But they were glamorous guys. Everyone says, ‘Oh, the Richardsons were a tougher gang’. But David Bailey didn’t want to photograph the Richardsons. The Richardsons weren’t hanging out with movie stars. Gangsters are glamorous on some level. I didn’t invent the glamour that goes with them.”

Helgeland’s career began with horror movies (his first screenplay credit was A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: the Dream Master). But he talks with an enthusiast’s knowledge about gangsters, how the Krays compare to American examples such as Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. He says the ethics of portraying such men had to be weighed alongside the job at hand.

“They’re the heroes of the film. I want to be on the ground with them, rather than looking down and judging them. I don’t think I’m looking up at them or saying they didn’t do what they did, but you have to be on the side of your protagonists.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The toast of London … Tom Hardy as Ronnie Kray Photograph: Allstar/Studiocanal

With fact and fiction so eternally mixed up, the film’s title sets the tone. Wading through his library, Helgeland arranged events into timelines to find points of consensus. From there, he applied what might be called scriptwriter’s licence: peppering the landmark facts – the murders of George Cornell and Jack McVitie, the tabloid sex scandal involving peer Lord Boothby – with more speculative set-pieces such as Reg shinning up Frances’s drainpipe with a ring and Ron parading in a silk scarf with a donkey. “Grounded in reality,” Helgeland says of his approach. “I didn’t want to invent too much.” He says of one pivotal moment: “if it’s not true, then it should be.”

Legend trailer – watch Tom Hardy play both Ronnie and Reggie Kray Read more

Getting the dialogue right was a matter of personal pride, but even with Reg Kray’s Book of Slang it fell to Hardy to change a reference to Betty Crocker into England’s own Fanny Cradock. (Sticklers may still wince as Ron recalls a sexual encounter leaving the other party “like a pretzel”.) With its insistent voiceover from Browning, the sense is that Legend was made for America. Helgeland shakes his head: “No, no. It was definitely made for the UK.”

Helgeland alighted on Hardy as his star not after seeing his singular turn in prison head-trip Bronson, but the low-key boxing drama Warrior. This, he thought, was his Reg. With Working Title just as keen, a dinner was arranged to sound out their quarry. “And all he talked about was Ron. Afterwards, he said ‘I want to do it but only if I can play Ron as well.’”

To Helgeland luring Hardy into playing the matinee idol is a coup. “We get Tom as the groomed leading man everyone wants him as – but he’s never let himself be before – because his side of the deal is getting to play Ron.”

He says his preference had always been for one actor to take both roles, avoiding the parlour game of finding two male leads who could pass for twins. “And actors always get competitive.” But while visual effects can do remarkable things, he realised the basic technology of splicing together split screens hadn’t changed since Hayley Mills played identical twins in 1961’s The Parent Trap. He began to brood. “I looked at films with one actor playing twins, but I’d get depressed because you were always so aware of what they were doing, and by that time I was committed to it. I’d think ‘This is not going to work.’”

In fact, Hardy’s charisma is all you notice. There is, inevitably, a brawl between the brothers, staged in their nightclub Esmeralda’s Barn with an eye-catching degree of violence; Freudian viewers can soon unpick the sight of one Tom Hardy endangering the testicles of another. That same tone pervades the film: Greek tragedy in expensive suits with a large dash of slapstick.

“I’m a big believer that any scene can be goofy and poignant at the same time. But it’s a challenge to make it work. When we were filming you could tell people were looking at us like, ‘What are they doing? This is just silly.’ But you know, in the editing room, we would grind off the stuff that was too funny, or that crossed the line.” On set, Hardy was encouraged to ad lib. “He had to have the freedom to do that. To get it right, he had to …” Get it wrong? “Right.”

Helgeland ponders what the Krays themselves would make of his film. “Well, I think Reggie would say ‘Fair enough. That’s how it was.’” And Ron? “I think Ron would enjoy the fact that Tom Hardy was playing him. So yeah, all told, they would dig it.”

Legend is released in UK cinemas on 9 September



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