Sean Bean, Ali Larter, Tina Majorino and Morris Chestnut Talk About ‘Legends’

TNT brought the cast of the upcoming drama series Legends to the 2014 WonderCon to discuss what viewers can expect from the thriller based on the novel by Robert Littell. Sean Bean, Ali Larter, Tina Majorino, and Morris Chestnut joined executive producer/showrunner David Wilcox for a panel discussion as well as for a press conference in support of the show’s August 2014 premiere.

With Wilcox leading the way, the cast talked about the set-up for the series and their characters.

Legends Press Conference

Can you explain the premise of Legends?

David Wilcox:  “Legends is a show about a special group of FBI agents who handle covert investigations.  A ‘legend’ is an identity that is created by an undercover agent to help infiltrate and go undercover, but it’s actually a fully, deeply imagined life.  And Martin Odum, who Sean plays, is really sort of the best of the best.  These guys, just as a division, are really the tip of the spear in doing investigative work within the FBI. That’s the arena.

The show itself is basically about a guy who can’t tell his legends from his real life.  These questions of his identity are really the driving mythology of the show.”

Can you tell us a little about the characters?

David Wilcox:  Sean plays Martin Odum – if that is his real name – and Sean is an FBI agent who works legends undercover.  He does deep cover infiltration.  In the pilot, somebody comes up to him and says basically says, ‘Martin Odum is a legend.  It’s not who you really are,’ and this launches Martin on a deep quest to discover what may actually be happening in his life and who he really is.  If there is a grand conspiracy afoot behind this, he’s going to get to the bottom of it.

In the division of covert operations, which is a special elite division in the FBI, his handler – or sort of the person who runs the operations for Martin Odum – is Ali’s character, Special Agent Crystal Maguire, and there’s a little bit of history between them.  There is some degree of tension between them, in terms of tactics and methods. But together, they make a formidable team.  They are supported and backed up by Tina who plays Maggie Pool.  Maggie is trained on every database you can imagine: NSA, DoD, FBI, all of that.  She is instrumental in sort of creating the deep backstory of these legends, which becomes absolutely instrumental in many times saving Martin’s life.

And then lastly, we have Special Agent Morris Chestnut. [Laughing] That’s what I wanted to call him, actually, it’s just coincidental. No, Special Agent Tony Rice who is an agent who begins investigating a murder that he believes Sean’s character may have committed.  We’re not actually sure because when you do deep cover work and you’re in these cases, often times you’re pushed into a situation, into a position where you actually have to cross some moral lines that you wouldn’t otherwise do.

But as an FBI agent, Agent Rice doesn’t believe in the FBI that that’s acceptable and so he picks up the beginning of this investigation against Martin and discovers that there may in fact be more of a systemic corruption afoot in DCO.  And along the way, he begins discovering this large conspiracy that underlines what’s happening.  Eventually, he may in fact join the DCO.  We’ll see how it goes.”

Morris Chestnut: “I’m looking forward to seeing that.”

Did you take training and fight choreography from previous roles and apply it to this project? Or was it all learning a whole new skill set?

Ali Larter:  I’ve been doing a lot of in-the-field work, and I’ve had a lot of experience working with guns from Resident Evil and Heroes and different projects that I’ve worked on, so I’m pretty comfortable with a Glock.  But it was really exciting to get in there and be with these guys and try to really learn more on how to walk like butter and make it very smooth.  It’s easy to get tensed up.  One of the things that I learned from them, which has been really helpful to me, is just that everything’s second nature.  You just have to be in your body and be really smooth and flow and focus.  That’s been really interesting.”

What real or fictional people did you draw from for these characters?

David Wilcox:  “The show itself is based on a book by Robert Littell who created at least a couple of the characters.  That was really, I think, where all this began.  Obviously, it’s changed a little bit somewhat from the book.”

Sean Bean:  “I read the book just before we started the pilot and I’ve been reading it since.  It’s good to just dip in and out of it because the characters are very interesting. They’re fascinating characters.  That’s a good basis to work from, the book itself. I think it’s an excellent book and it certainly helped me, in terms of Martin Odum and Lincoln Dittman, the other character that I play, and Dante Orbach, which I play.  It was good.

Rather than kind of just inventing the characters, at least I had that material that I could refer to to try to create these characters.  That was very useful for me.  But it becomes a thing of its own, after a while.  I think we take that as a basis and an anchor for what we’re trying to achieve, but we kind of go off on tangents.”

David Wilcox:  “The thing that’s so cool about this show is that each of these deep cover identities, these aren’t like a new identity of the week or anything like that.  These are actually pre-existing characters and pre-existing legends, if you will, that are out there. They exist. They have their own apartments, their own cars, their own wardrobe, their own contacts, and their own friends.

All of that, and so as a case comes in to the FBI and they turn to DCO to help investigate, Martin is an operative who can pick one of his pre-existing legends, not unlike a surgeon would pick an instrument.  Like, what is the best way that he could infiltrate?  There’s a more organic and realistic way that he’s able to infiltrate some of these groups.  But I think the appeal is the fact that each of these legends is a character in their own right.  They have to be deeply imagined.”

Sean Bean:  “It’s total belief in the character. It’s total belief that I believe that he is this man, and that’s why it’s a very interesting drama.  Psychologically, it’s fascinating.  He becomes this person, totally.  He immerses himself in these characters, has his own apartments, as you said, and his own preference for food.  He totally believes in that character.

And when those characters collide, that becomes a problem psychologically, for him, even though he doesn’t want to admit it.  He thinks he can carry on doing these characters and still become himself.  Just like actors, we think we can play this part, but sooner or later that’s going to come down on you and you’re going to have some problems.  And this guy certainly has some problems, and that filters through to all the other departments in general.

Martin is a good guy. He does some good things.  The people he’s working for are not dissimilar to other illegal organizations.  It just happens that they’re part of the government and they’re legal.”

David Wilcox:  “Yeah, at the end of the day, he’s got a badge.”

Legends Cast
Tina Majorino, Sean Bean, Ali Larter and Morris Chestnut star in ‘Legends’ (Photo @ Richard Chavez / Showbiz Junkies)

Are you playing this character as if he’s playing somebody else, like two characters, at the same time?

Sean Bean:  “I do three characters, which is great.  It’s fantastic and fun.  It’s an actor’s dream to be able to do that.  But sometimes it gets a big confusing for me, too.”

How do you approach all of the different characters and how much do you know about the possibility that his real identity might not even be real? 

Sean Bean: “They don’t let me know very much.”

David Wilcox:  “Martin doesn’t know where the bottom of this rabbit hole is.  In fact, what makes him such an interesting hero is that his greatest power and his greatest asset, and the thing that lets him be this incredible operative, is the thing that is jeopardizing his own psyche and, frankly, his own soul.  It’s this question of, ‘If he commits a crime in legend, does Martin Odum have to answer for that?’  What does the soul of a guy look like who steps into all these different shoes and these different identities?  He can’t be responsible for what these other identities necessarily do.”

Sean Bean: “He can do anything, but it’s not really me that did it.  It’s just somebody that I’m playing.  So, that’s interesting.”

Sean Bean in Legends
Sean Bean stars in TNT's 'Legends'

Sean, why do you always die in everything that you’re in?

Sean Bean: “I think I’m still alive in this one.”

David Wilcox: “We don’t have any plans for Sean’s character’s death, at this time.  I’ll just say that.”

Sean Bean:  “Yeah, I do die a lot.”

Where is this show set?

David Wilcox: “DCO’s based in Los Angeles, in the federal bureaucracy here in LA. But obviously as a federal agency, they go anywhere in the country and beyond.  It’s FBI, so it’s predominately domestic but they’ll go where the stories take them.  It will not only be in the United States.”

Do you deviate from the book?

David Wilcox:  “We deviate completely from the book. It’s all a different path.  It’s rooted in those characters, but the demands of storytelling in a really good novel like Legends, and the demands of doing a TV show are totally different.  We approach story totally different. We created this very cool cast, so we’re not bound by the book but it’s a terrific book, in and of itself.”

Tina, what do you see as the difference between Mac and Maggie?

Tina Majorino:  “Oh, god, I knew that question was coming.  Mac is all computers.  I think it started out as a hobby or a way to get revenge on people to do right – or wrong sometimes.  But with Maggie, what we know about her so far is that there’s a conviction behind what she’s doing.  She’s highly trained.  It’s not just something that developed out of nowhere. You know what I mean? It’s not something that was based in a hobby.  This is a life path for this character.

What I like to think about this character is that there’s more of a patriotism behind it.  There’s a real need to participate in a solution to things, if that makes sense.  I know I’m being very elusive, but those are the differences to me.  Even though I knew there would be comparisons, two totally different mind-sets, two totally different people. When I think about Mac, there’s so much of a sarcasm and a sense of humor and a levity to her that we’re still discovering who Maggie is, at this point. I don’t feel that it would go in that direction.”

Morris, what can you tell us about Tony? 

Morris Chestnut:  I don’t know actually what role Tony’s going to play.  Right now, he’s having a good time in pursuit of Martin Odum and trying to just figure out the truth, in regards to whether he’s really involved or associated with the murder, or if it was really part of a larger cover-up within the DCO.”

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Legends debuts on TNT on August 13, 2014 at 9pm ET/PT.