�Clockwise from far
left: Daniel Craig’s
Joe Bang is collared
by Dwight Yoakam’s
Warden Burns;
Soderbergh and Craig
get down and dirty;
Riley Keough as Mellie
Logan; Katie Holmes
as Bobbie Jo Logan
Chapman; Close up on
Channing Tatum (Jimmy
Logan) and Adam
Driver (Clyde Logan).THE CREW
As luck would have it, he didn’t need to sound out any agents or endure
laborious studio meets to find his man. He just wandered across the set. “It
was the perfect Channing everyman part,” he recalls of his pick for Jimmy,
the more headstrong of the Logan siblings. “It seemed to have been written
for him.” Wary of distracting his old Haywire, Magic Mike and Side Effects
mate from his work on Magic Mike XXL, he didn’t chase a decision. He
needn’t have worried. “Steven mentioned this thing he said was a ‘hillbillies
Ocean’s Eleven’ and that got a giggle out of me,” remembers Tatum. “A bunch
of good ole boys robbing NASCAR? That sounded super-fun.” Before they’d
wrapped on XXL, Soderbergh’s heist had its ringleader. “Channing being
Channing, it would have been a four-word conversation, like, ‘Yeah, let’s do
it,’” says the director. “That was enough for me to start building the project.”
The second step was to recruit Jimmy’s crew, and every good crew needs
a cool-as-ice sidekick. Logan Lucky doesn’t have one of those. It does,
however, have Clyde Logan, Jimmy’s more measured, ex-soldier brother,
played by Driver. “They’re very different people,” Driver explains of the
brothers. “Clyde is organised, Jimmy is not. He owns a bar, while Jimmy is
fighting for work. Clyde is more thoughtful. But they’re a tight-knit family.”
Completing the clan is Mellie Logan, played by Magic Mike’s Riley Keough.
“She has the most going for her,” cedes Driver of the pair’s altogether more
together back-up.
It’s not, in truth, an especially high bar. Jimmy Logan has lost his job
and his brother a hand. The ‘lucky’ part of their moniker is definitely
missing an ‘un’. Typically, Clyde’s mishap happened in a traffic accident on
the way back from war. “It’s another obstacle [for him] to overcome,” says
Driver, who picked up an unusual new skillset for the role. “I think Adam’s
somebody who likes having something to learn,” suggests Soderbergh. “He
really enjoyed figuring out how to play scenes with a prosthetic arm, or
essentially no arm at all.” The most awkward of them required him to mix
a martini one-handed. “I literally tied my hand behind my back and tried to
figure out how to make a martini,” Driver recalls. “But when I got on set,
the countertop was two feet higher than the one I’d practised on at home.
It was anxiety-producing!”
Having never previously met, Driver and Tatum took the fast track to
brotherly bonding: a bunch of drinks and a yarn about Star Wars. “The first
night I met the guy, he came over and we ended up hanging out ’til 2am,”
Tatum remembers. “We drank too many bottles of wine and just bullshitted.
It was an all-night conversation about Kylo Ren.” He laughs at the memory.
“He only wanted to talk about Star Wars... no, I’m kidding. Though he will
bring it up occasionally and then say, ‘Oh, I thought you were asking about
Kylo Ren.’ He’s really good at making fun of himself.”
The brains of the operation — and likely cult hero in-the-making — is
Daniel Craig’s Joe Bang. A legendary local criminal, he and his brother Sam
(Brian Gleeson) are “even more country than the Logans”, according to
Soderbergh. Craig was given free rein to create his hick con from scratch.
“I told him, ‘There’s no wrong answer here,’” the director recounts. “‘Joe Bang
is a blank slate for you to draw on.’” Draw on him Craig did. He pitched up
on set with the most extreme look sported by a 007 since Sean Connery’s
Zardoz introduced the world to latex mankinis. “He did some research and
found some tatts he was excited about,” says Soderbergh of the world’s most
surprising redneck. “They’re... interesting. I think he enjoyed it.”
Tattooed, peroxided and in stripes, Joe is banged up when the brothers tap
him for help. All they need to do is spring him from prison — and they’ve got
just the plan. “It’s probably ill-advised,” says Soderbergh.