Starz Re-Creates the Perilous World of Pirates in Black Sails
Derring-do doesn’t fly among Sails’ hard-bitten fortune hunters living and dying by their muskets during piracy’s halcyon days. This prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 children’s novel, Treasure Island, is very adult. And not just because of the grit: “I’m completely naked in my very first scene,” says Jessica Parker Kennedy, who plays hooker-with-a-heart-of-tarnished-gold Max. The show airs on pay cable, after all.
On the Bahamian island of New Providence in 1715, peg legs are dead men and parrots are dinner. Troublemakers don’t walk the plank — they’re hacked to death. “There’s been a lot of mythologizing pirates over the years,” says star Toby Stephens, who plays chief buccaneer Captain Flint. “Black Sails is gnarly, bringing things back nearer to the truth.”
Three real-life historical blackguards serve as Flint’s biggest competition: barracuda Capt. Charles Vane (Zach McGowan), Vane’s foppish quartermaster, Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz), and Rackham’s cross-dressing Irish lover, Anne Bonny (Clara Paget).
“I love how Black Sails marries fact with fiction,” says action-movie director Michael Bay, who chose this as his first foray into producing for TV. “Being a pirate was grueling, but it was also a business, and the show gives an unvarnished account of how rogue entrepreneurs clawed their way to prosperity.”
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