Taika Waititi warns that his pirate show Our Flag Means Death might turn viewers into pirates
People who tune into the HBO Max pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death aren’t going to be surprised by the tone or nature of the humor. Co-stars Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby worked together on the TV series Flight of the Conchords and Waititi’s moviesHunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows. (Darby, famously, was the profanity-hating leader of the “werewolves, not swearwolves” pack.) The new series shares some of the same subdued absurdist comedy they use in those projects, built around the same kinds of endlessly awkward, puffed-up strivers who have no idea how ridiculous they look to everyone around them. This time, Darby stars as awkward, incompetent pirate captain Stede Bonnet, and Waititi backs him up as his partner and mentor, Edward Teach — aka the notorious pirate Blackbeard.
What may surprise people, though, is that the show’s silly confrontations, outsized characters, and weird story developments are all drawn from real history. Stede Bonnet, the “Gentleman Pirate,” was an actual 18th-century plantation owner who abandoned his wife and children, bought a ship, declared himself its captain in spite of his lack of nautical experience. He was notoriously inept at the job, and the records of his career show him repeatedly being wounded, captured, or suborned as captain. He did in fact wind up partnering with Blackbeard, in a troubled relationship seemingly designed to fuel plot twists.
While the historical record marks some of the facts — what ships he looted, when he lost control of his own ship, and so on — there’s relatively little information about the smaller details of his life, or about what happened between him and Blackbeard to cause the various wrinkles in their personal and piratical
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