We interview Our Flag Means Death stars Nathan Foad, Samba Schutte, and Matthew Maher about their initial reactions to the scripts and much more.
Taika Waititi has been entertaining audiences for years by putting his unique spin on everything from vampires to Marvel's God of Thunder. With the new HBO Max comedy Our Flag Means Death, viewers get to see the world of pirates through Waititi's lens. The show is very loosely based on real-life aspiring pirate Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby), who struggles adjusting to life as captain of The Revenge. Among the ensemble cast are Nathan Foad, Samba Schutte and Matthew Maher.
Screen Rant spoke with the trio to discuss their initial reactions to the show, the best and worth things about their costumes, and much more.
Screen Rant: First of all, I have to say, I absolutely love the show. I binged through all five episodes that they gave us right away, I just loved it. It's great. When you first read the script or were told the premise of the series, what was your initial reaction to it?
Nathan Foad: I was totally excited by it because I think we're in such an exciting space in TV at the moment, where we're kind of genre-bending. I thought, "Oh a half-hour workplace comedy about pirates. That's so fun. I've never seen that before." I guess my expectation, I thought it was going to be smaller. I thought the scale was going to be smaller and then, it was so amazing to turn up and, because of Taika's involvement, it was such a huge operation making the show. I kind of felt like I was in a Marvel movie every day or something. It was always things on fire and then there were stunts and so, yeah, it was a lot of fun. It's such a unique premise for a show. It was the best.
Samba Schutte: I read the script and it made me laugh out loud a bunch of times and, because of the people attached, I've been a huge fan of Taika ever since his film, 'Boy,' and growing up and just watching a bunch of the stuff he's done. Then, David Jenkins moved people over [...] and then once I saw that Rhys [Darby] was attached like David, Taika, Rhys, it's like the holy trinity of hilarity. I knew it was gonna be hilarious. So diving in, it was just like, "I need to be a part of this. I want to be a part of this." And so I was chasing the casting director, Allison Jones for like a year, just like, "Give me this audition." And finally, I got the opportunity. When I booked it, I was so over the moon, because like Nathan said, I just thought it was a fun script. Then, showing up on stage and seeing that they built this massive real-size ship on the stage that had airbags, so it would rock back and forth with a huge screen around it, it was just like, "Oh my god. We're making a little comedy but with a massive stage that's like a Marvel movie!" That combination blew my mind. It was just exciting every day.
Did anybody get seasick?
Samba Schutte: I was just about to say, I got seasick. [Laughs] For the first week of shooting, I'd come home and be very miserable because of the rocking and the screen moving up and down with real ocean footage, and the guy with his wind machine in your face. It was just too much. It was just too much ocean vibes. And yeah, seasickness happened.
Matthew Maher: I knew David Jenkins' work. I was a fan of 'People of Earth' and I actually knew David in New York, too, as a playwright, and I was a huge fan, also, of Taika for a long time. I remember telling everybody to see the movie, 'What We Do in the Shadows' and thinking it was so funny. Similarly to Nathan, when I got it, and when I got the audition, and part of the audition was a prompt like you were being interviewed as a pirate. So my thought was thinking of What We Do in the Shadows. I was always thinking, "It's like What We Do in the Shadows, only pirates instead of vampires!" Or, "It's like The Office set on a ship."
Samba Schutte: What We Do in the Shallows.
Matthew Maher: Yeah! So that was my thinking and then, when we got there, it was epic. It's a huge ship. It's all these grand performances and, early on in the season, Rhys, actually, compared it to Blackadder, which is this old British sitcom, which is a really farcical, broad, but very smart, funny sitcom from the '80s on BBC with Rowan Atkinson, and I was like, "oh, right, that's it. I have to get rid of those other ideas about droll, understated humor, and we just have to commit to this kind of big combination of absurd comedy and rollicking adventure, and it's actually something new. There's nothing on TV that's really like it. Comparing it to different things, even other things that Taika has done or David has done, it doesn't really capture it.
I got really into like all of the pirates after I played this game, Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, so I knew who Stede Bonnet was. I'm curious for you guys, what was the most surprising thing in the show that turned out to be 100% true? Because the premise is based on a true story.
Samba Schutte: You know, there's something about Rhys playing Stede that's just perfect because Rhys is so good at being a manager. We saw that in Flight of the Conchords. So the fact that he's this really proper, well-spoken, intelligent man trying to delegate to these bunch of idiots. We're not good pirates. We are supposed to be very, very, very terrible pirates and the fact that we have this man who's trying to just educate us and make us function as a very dysfunctional group. It was very on point for me as Stede Bonnet. Someone who's never seen blood, never stepped foot outside of the safety of his comfort zones, suddenly being on a ship with these murderers and killers. It was pretty epic to see that transformation.
Matthew Maher: And we do research, and there's a surprising amount of stuff that is actually true. All the facts of Stede Bonnet's life are true. He paid the pirates a salary when no one else did. He did all these things that are laid out in the pilot. It's true. And he did have this relationship with Blackbeard. The story of Blackbeard, who's obviously much more famous. They connect [...] but then they break apart and they're not together, and then they connect again. All the research doesn't say what's going on in their relationship, but clearly, they have some intense, weird relationship. Actually, the show, I think, is, in some particulars, fairly accurate, but there are these weird, intriguing blind spots that David and the writers sort of fill in. I think the show is really filling in these two historical blanks, but in a really interesting way about their relationship and extrapolating from what that relationship could be, and then imagining what the relationship between all the pirates could have been like.
What are the best and worst things about your costumes that you wear on the show?
Nathan Foad: That's such a good question.
Matthew Maher: That's a good question.
Nathan Foad: That's a really good question. The costume design is so genius, I remember the costumes on the show, when we were doing my fittings, I got shown pictures of Boy George because she wanted it to look kind of like '80s, queer, cool. So, I love the jacket that I wear. I just think it's really chic and I wanted to keep it. I wasn't allowed. The worst thing is probably the shoes, actually. My gorgeous kitten heel in the show. They weren't the most comfortable thing in the world and hard to walk in. But yeah, I really, really coveted that red jacket. I thought it was really cool.
Matthew Maher: My costume was basically a set of pajamas. It was the most comfortable thing to wear. It was just a long, blousy shirt and pants that were too big for me. It was kind of amazing. It was also hot out. The main bummer about my setup was that every day, I really enjoyed spending time with the makeup department. They're amazing, which is good, because they had to spend the whole time making this whole thing sunburned and dirty and it took a lot of time, and my legs sunburnt and dirty. It was a lot of skin showing so, there's a lot of makeup involved.
Samba Schutte: Me, like an idiot, we got to create our own characters. David was very open to our interpretation and, like an idiot, I was like, "Oh, yeah, my character will have three tattoos." So every day, I would sit in that makeup chair for an hour-and-a-half just going, "Why did I choose to do this?" It's just three tattoos that they had to put on, and then a bunch of dirt and just messed up hair. It was just the easiest show to work on because you could show up totally messed up and be like, "Yeah. You're ready to go for camera." Because we were so dirty, so frizzed up, and coming home at night after a long day of shooting just covered in soot. It was quite an experience for four months.
Our Flag Means Death is now streaming on HBO Max.
