The HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death, which hails from creator David Jenkins and executive producer Taika Waititi, is (very, very) loosely based on true 18th-century adventures revolves around the hilarious misadventures of self-proclaimed "gentleman pirate" Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and his motley crew of the ship Revenge, who don't necessarily have the greatest faith in their captain as he tries to follow his true dream of becoming a real swashbuckler. As the Revenge's crew begins to become more and more mutinous, their paths fatefully cross with that of the notorious Blackbeard (Waititi) — and from there, the two men forge an unexpected friendship, each learning lessons from the other along the way. The series is executive produced by Waititi, who directs the pilot episodes, as well as Jenkins, Garrett Basch, and Dan Halsted. In addition to Darby and Waititi, Our Flag Means Death's ensemble cast includes Nathan Foad, Samson Kayo, Vico Ortiz, Ewen Bremner, Joel Fry, Matt Maher, Kristian Nairn, Con O’Neill, Guz Khan, David Fane, Rory Kinnear, Samba Schutte, Nat Faxon, Fred Armisen, and Leslie Jones.
Ahead of the show's March 3 premiere, Collider had the opportunity to speak with Schutte, Foad, and Maher about their characters on the HBO Max pirate series. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, the co-stars discussed their auditioning road to joining the show and whether they incorporated any improv into their performances. They also revealed which cast member was the most likely to break character during filming, and which was the most likely to make others break.
Collider: How did you first come to be involved with this project specifically, and what aspect of your character appealed to you the most from the jump when you read it on the page?
NATHAN FOAD: I suppose I had a slightly odd way in because I wasn't really an actor before I did this job. I'm a comedy writer in the UK. That's what I do for a living, and then I got the opportunity to do this because Taika [Waititi] discovered me through Twitter, funnily enough. I was making comedy videos on Twitter, and he found me through there, and then I was asked to audition for the show.
I thought the show, the premise was so original. I thought the pilot that David had written was so funny. And the thing about Lucius that I really liked was it's so fun to play the... Lucius is kind of, in a lot of ways, the audience's eyes, the straight man, if you don't mind the pun. He's the audience's way in, and that's so fun to play. When you're surrounded by doofuses, it's so fun to have all of that happen around you and get to kind of roll your eyes. That was fun.
I feel you can't ever say that jobs through Twitter are impossible anymore. You're living proof of that, right?
FOAD: Hey, Twitter, that stupid website changed my stupid life. It was great. (laughs)
Samba, what about you? How did you come to the show?
SAMBA SCHUTTE: I had worked on a show before that was cast by Allison Jones called Sunnyside. I'm a huge fan of hers, and then when I saw that she was casting this project called Our Flag Means Death, I really wanted to get my hands on the script. When I saw the script and I saw that it was Taika and David Jenkins and that they had cast Rhys [Darby] already. I was like, "Oh my God, this, Taika, David, Rhys, that's the Holy Trinity of hilarity right there. I want this."
So I was hounding Allison Jones for six, seven months. I was like, "Any auditions? Please, just give me a chance to audition for this." And nothing, no news for eight, nine months, and then finally on a Saturday afternoon, I get an audition for this character called Roach that I have to deliver the next day. I got to create the character, and I was so happy that the character was a cook, he's the ship's cook, because I'm a baker myself. So I actually auditioned in my baking apron, and I knew that he was the surgeon on the ship too, which I was like, "Oh, that's perfect," because I used to play a doctor in my other show.
So I kind of combined those two passions of cooking and doctor knowledge, and the fact that his name was Roach made me feel like this guy's a survivor. He's seen his fair share of piracy. The last man standing is always the cook and the surgeon, because they're the most wanted jobs. Those people don't get killed off because they're always needed. So I gave him that edge of wanting to survive, but loving blood and loving torture, and I just love that thrill of combining my two passions into this character.
Matthew, there are times on the show where anything your character says is just going to be hysterically funny. In terms of finding those aspects of Black Pete, were those things that were on the page, or were there things that you were trying to workshop on your end when figuring out who this character was going to be?
MATTHEW MAHER: It was all on the page. It was 95% on the page, and any improv that I did was sort of inspired by what David had written. I liked the character, the idea that he... Because I relate to this as an actor and I know a lot of actors who are like this. You want to be, like, a serious, serious actor, and you want to be like Daniel Day-Lewis or Christopher Walken, and the only thing that's actually preventing you from being good is you've got this idea of what good is. Black Pete is like that, only for being a pirate, and he doesn't seem to really understand that he actually is a pirate.
What's funny about Black Pete to me is that the more he states that, "I'm a pirate, I'm a big pirate," the less a pirate he seems, and it diminishes his pirateness. I think he's aware of that on some level, but can't help it, because he doesn't know what else to say but, "I'm a pirate." So he just gets more and more wound-up in that way.
That was all in David's conception of the character, and just basically everything else is just working off of the energy of everybody else in the cast. Only our missing piece is what it's like to be in a group, and to compete, and I just told myself that I should let myself be free to just really only do what I actually think is funny, try and amuse myself and the other people around me the most. Because I too get in my head, and have this idea of what funny is, and I should only try and do what I think is funny, and that's it. Don't have any regrets about that. I felt very enabled by David and by the rest of the cast, because everybody else in the cast is also just very much themselves and I just felt like everybody was bringing their whole self to the character, and so I just wanted to match that energy.
I'm glad you brought up being part of this big ensemble. With a show as hysterical as this is, I'm sure there are times when people cannot keep a straight face. Out of the whole crew, who was the most likely cast member to break on camera, and who was the most likely cast member to get other people to break?
SCHUTTE: Oh my God. I think Samson Kayo—
MAHER: Samson Kayo.
SCHUTTE: —was the one who was breaking always. Every take, he'd ruin it. And then the one who would always get us to break, aside from Taika and Rhys, who are hilarious... from the crew, I think, it was Nat Faxon, who plays The Swede.
MAHER: For sure.
SCHUTTE: There's just something in his character. He's playing this very dumb character who just questions everything, and has a Swedish accent. There was nothing that he could do that would not make us break with each take. I think it was really hard to just stop, hide our laughter. I'm glad they managed to cut around that.
MAHER: The Swedish accent was evergreen. It never stopped being funny. The last day of the shooting of the pilot is a scene of Rhys reading us all a story, reading us Pinocchio, and always at the end of every scene, people started lobbing in their little funny bits. Rhys would finish where it's like, "All right, time to go to bed." That's my New Zealand accent for you people out there. And I remember Nat saying, "I'm not even tired," and it was funny.
FOAD: The great thing about Nat's character and the accent was [it was] so completely untethered to reality. It was the most deranged character. There was nothing he would do that wouldn't make me laugh. He was so funny.
SCHUTTE: I'll be honest with you, Carly, it was a lot of us goofing around and laughing until the serious actors came in, like the Rorys [Kinnear] and the Cons [O'Neill]. All of a sudden we're like, "Oh my God, okay, these are... This is drama."
MAHER: Rory did come improving himself.
FOAD: He's a great improviser. Yeah, oh my God.
MAHER: Rory did... a lot of extracurricular jokes came from Rory and Con, I would say. Con's way of improvising was to hit me, but that was also funny.
Our Flag Means Death airs new episodes every Thursday on HBO Max, with the season's final two premiering this week on March 24.