If you could drop everything and go do anything in the world that you wanted, what would it be? If the answer is to become a pirate, then maybe you share some DNA with Stede Bonnet, an 18th-century pirate known affectionately as ” The Gentleman Pirate”. A somewhat wealthy landowner who gave it all up and turned to a life of crimin’ on the high seas, Bonnet’s crazy life is now fodder for Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby in HBO Max’s new series, Our Flag Means Death.
Created by David Jenkins, Our Flag Means Death chronicles the misadventures on the high seas when a new pirate sets sail. Darby stars as Stede Bonnet, the aristocrat who abandons everything to become a pirate, encountering at leat one legendary buccaneer, Blackbeard, played by Waititi.
“This guy had one of the world’s great, colorful midlife crises,” Jenkins told EW. “That’s a great way into a show in any genre, but to mix that with pirates, I was like, Oh, this is fantastic.”
“I hadn’t really acted alongside [Waititi] at all,” Darby said. “So when he came aboard as [Blackbeard], all hell broke loose because no one’s telling him what to do. Now [we’re costars] and he’s not capable of telling me what to do!”
“They are like an old married couple in certain ways,” Jenkins said. “If a scene isn’t quite working, Taika will be able to grumble about Rhys, and vice versa, in the way that only friends can. And then when it is popping, they know how to get the best out of each other. There’s a generosity and a real sweetness between them that you wouldn’t get if you weren’t using those two friends.”
Also in the cast are Joel Fry, Leslie Jones, Kristian Nairn, Ewen Bremner, Fred Armisen, and Rory Kinnear.
Our Flag Means Death hits HBO Max in March.
