Dan's Firm favourite; Mays plays gang leader in football flick: Movies.

Byline: Susan Griffin

SEEING 200 men heading towards you with a hint of menace in their eyes is terrifying, admits actor Daniel Mays, talking about his first day filming football-based flick, The Firm.

Especially when you're expected to lead them, the Essex-bred man adds with a smile.

Behind his working-class, tough-guywith-a-heart acting persona, the 31-year-old clearly has a far softer personality.

Having made his name in films such as Atonement and Vera Drake, Mays says he vividly recalls his initial outing as a gang leader.

"It was the first day of filming," says Mays. "All of a sudden these men were walking really slowly around this corner.

I'll never forget it."

Not least because all 200 had been cast as members of a gang - or Firm - led by Mays's character, a vile and violent man known as 'the Yeti'.

"It was really intimidating and to then go and have to act like their leader and take command, it was quite a challenge," he says.

His tall stature and voice may lend him the 'geezer' tag, but there's nothing hard about Mays. Instead of swaggering attitude, you get a warm and open bloke who likes to talk.

Written and directed by Nick Love, the man behind The Football Factory and Goodbye Charlie Bright, The Firm is loosely adapted from Alan Clarke's 1989 classic TV drama of the same name, which starred Gary Oldman.

Set in 1984, four years before Clarke's groundbreaking version, the story follows two rival Firms of football hooligans. One led by the charismatic Bex and the other by the Yeti.

But while the original was seen from Bex's viewpoint, in Love's version, events are seen through the eyes of a young and impressionable teen called Dom.

"It turns everything on its head," says Mays. "Dom's not violent but he's influenced by a lot of factors and he falls in with this incredibly dangerous Firm. It's a coming-of-age story really.

"Plus it's very relevant to this day and age when there's a lot of gang culture about and knife crime, and then unfortunately there's been that fight between West Ham and Millwall recently," he says.

It's not for the faint-hearted. "All the fight scenes were really choreographed," explains Mays.

"We weren't going, 'Right, there are 400 guys, 200 on each side, just go at it' because people would have got really damaged," he adds. "And I'm really proud of those scenes and how they're filmed. It's a real documentary-style, so you feel you're in the midst of a riot. Do ya know what I mean?" It's not the first time Mays has had to explore the darker side of life. Among his former roles, he's played a violent thug who abuses his girlfriend in Mike Leigh's All Or Nothing and a heroin addict in Rehab.

"Yeah, I've played a fair few nasty characters," he says, adding with a laugh: "I need to do a nice Restoration or something next."

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Actor... Daniel Mays stars in The Firm.