Marco Robinson was a boy who used to hide at the back of the classroom, looking out of the window pretending he was a spy, pretending he was James Bond.
His waking life was one of escape from a childhood that saw him move to 50 different schools before the age of 10 years old.
He was small, pale, and had bright ginger hair that he used to dye with shoe polish to hide from the onslaught of bullies that hounded him for years.
At the age of two years old, his mum left his biological father because he was a gambling addict and used all the money he could lay his hands on to bet on horse racing. Marco’s earliest memory at twelve months old was crawling around the living room on newspapers sprawled everywhere with cigar smoke and an aroma of smelly feet. Now he knew his dad was studying the form of the upcoming weekend’s race schedule.
Yvonne was twenty-three years old and had run out of money. It went on gambling. Not her gambling—her husband’s.
She decided she had no option other than to leave the marriage to greener pastures.
She traveled to the north of England to live with her mum and stepfather. What Marco didn’t know then was that his mum had been sexually abused by the same stepfather since she was four years old. In fact, when she was twelve years old, he put his hand on her breast and said “I didn’t marry your mum for your mum. I married your mum to get to you.”
She was terrified. It was freezing cold, yet she had no option. And her stepfather said to her mum on the doorstep while she was holding Marco in her arms, “It’s either me or them.”
Her mum said, “You cannot stay here.”
Yvonne was devastated, and the only place she could find to stay was in the park in freezing-cold temperatures.
They survived and eventually got taken in by strangers. And the next few years of their life was spent moving from job to job and school to school.
Yvonne remarried when Marco was 10 years old, but this new stepdad used to physically abuse his mum, and Marco very often cried himself to sleep under his bed and ran away from home many times.
His only true escape was his imagination, and he knew for a long time he wanted to be in the movies.
Forty years later, after a very successful business career, in which he started and ran a billion-dollar company, he drew a line in the sand and said to himself, “I have to make this movie.” And his seven-year journey began with no acting or filmmaking experience.
He ran through a hundred brick walls and eventually made a film trailer so good, he won a million-dollar grant from the Ukrainian state film agency to make the film. The catch was that he had to find an A-list actor who could de-risk the entire project, so he could make a bigger and better film that would make money.
After one year of trying to cast that actor, Scott Adkins, probably the best action martial arts actor in the world signed on to the film, after loving the script and deep Eastern European plot and locations.
More money poured into the project from private investment and pre-sales of the film from different countries buying the territory they could stream the film and get into cinemas.
Post-production finished in December 2019, then the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe and Legacy of Lies could not be premiered in theatres.
The movie was held back from release until February, 2021, when the rights were sold to Netflix UK, where it shot to number 4 in the charts and stayed there for many weeks. And in October, Netflix USA bought rights and things just got better as it debuted at number 2—beyond what Marco had ever thought possible. It was definitely a dream come true, a boyhood dream, an amazing story of incredible adversity to create phenomenal success.
What is next for Sir Marco Robinson, who was also knighted for making a short film called Are You Blind, which helped 350,000 people in Malaysia be allowed guide dogs in public places?He is writing and starring in his own musical called Legacy of Spies. Yes, he can sing!