The first season of Our Flag Means Death came seemingly out of nowhere in 2022, a wry yet deeply earnest, joke-dense fantasia about 18th-century piracy, workplace culture, and dream-following. David Jenkins’ Max comedy became both increasingly gay and increasingly beloved over the course of ten episodes, centering highly fictionalized versions of several fabled historical figures: self-styled Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby); Stede’s hero and eventual beloved, Ed Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard (Taika Waititi); and Ed’s ferocious, long-suffering first mate, Izzy Hands (Con O’Neill, in the show’s most riveting and affecting performance). Season two delivered even more heart, exploring questions about the work involved in sustaining long-term relationships, the many ways humans express love, and even the meaning of piracy itself — but was at its most assured when leaning into workplace comedy and wending its way toward a definitive, lasting union between Ed and Stede.
Season-two finale “Mermen” chronicles the death of Izzy and his funeral before closing on Ed and Stede settling into their new home ashore as the Revenge sails into the future led by newly minted Captain Frenchie (Joel Fry). Now that Ed and Stede’s relationship is a settled question, the energy between them has a lived-in calm and surety to it. Jenkins confirmed “the story of Stede and Blackbeard could well go for three interesting, good seasons,” and Our Flag Means Death is fundamentally a show about love and how its many and varied splendors emerge and evolve over time. Whether it’s on a pirate ship or in a restaurant, Jenkins — who animatedly categorizes The Bear, Midnight Run, and Heat as love stories too — always wants “to see two people navigate each other and a community of people learn how to care for each other. That’s what’s exciting to me.”
Tell me about what you were writing toward this season and in the season finale itself — what were your big storytelling and character-development priorities?
The big thing was to give Izzy Hands a great send-off from this mortal coil. To have him become a father figure to Blackbeard, and on some level to the rest of the crew, and to see him become the heart of why we’re giving pirates the chance to stand for being able to live how you choose. In reality, they’re thieves and criminals, but what our pirates stand for is a life of belonging to something larger than they are in the face of a crushing, slightly fascist normalcy.
That comes up in Izzy’s speech to Ricky Banes just before the great poisoning: that piracy is really “about letting go of ego for something larger, the crew.” How does mutual obligation figure into your conceptualization of piracy?
You know, pirates and pirate crews were kind of socially democratic, much more so than anything else in contemporary governance in the 1700s. So to talk about a crew’s responsibility to each other to make a ship function was important to that episode and where Izzy ended as a character. When we meet him in season one, he’s a bit of a loner, a scary middle manager, and then he goes through the wringer. That’s how he learns that he has to be responsible for his crewmates, who then build a leg for him out of the ship’s unicorn figurehead. That makes him realize that they’ve taken on responsibility for him, too. He learns a new way of being a pirate that isn’t just every person for themselves.
It seems like it took being almost at death’s door for him to be vulnerable enough to receive and understand that kindness without reflexively telling them to fuck off.
Both Izzy and Blackbeard have ego deaths this season. And on the other side of the ego deaths, weirdly, Izzy is a father figure to Ed. It’s such an unusual journey. The character is kind of a jilted lover who then becomes a maimed and discarded employee and emerges from that into being a father figure who says as he’s dying, “You’re all right. Just be you.” The love they have for each other is real and goes from a toxic kind of love at the beginning of the season to something that’s actually quite recognizable and moving.
I was surprised by how much grief Taika imbued his performance with. Everyone can see that Izzy is dying, and Blackbeard’s having such a hard time accepting it.
In On The Waterfront, Marlon Brando finds Rod Steiger dead in an alleyway. And all the longshoremen are looking. It’s awful, he’s embarrassed and sad — it’s just crushing. So there was something about the entire crew witnessing what was happening, but also giving Ed space to send him off, that I loved. A thing I really like to do when I make something is to get really funny people to act in dramatic roles and get really good dramatic actors to be funny. At first, they both scare the shit out of each other, but by the end of the season, they’ve created their own language and built such a comfort level with each other. Those deep, intense feelings are very available to Taika. He’s locked in, and playing opposite Con, who gives so much in his performance, is a huge help.
Was Con aware that Izzy was going to die at the end of this season? When did he find out about that?
I had to tell him about halfway through the season. I asked him to go to dinner — you know, “We’ll talk.” And then he wrote me back, like, [a perfect impression of O’Neill’s northern English rasp], “Is it gonna be bad? I’ll need cake. X.” He knew it was coming.
It’s such a real thing to tell an actor that their character is dying, you know? We built Izzy together. And there’s a weight to it, that we’re not going to see this character alive again. But also, we created something beautiful together, and we’re deciding that he is going to die. He was very gracious about it; he’s an amazing creative partner. I just want to work with Con on everything.
Can you say a little bit more about where you place Our Flag Means Death in the lineage of other stories — across TV, film, literature — about love?
I’m always trying to make a little Hal Ashby or Robert Altman movie. Boogie Nights is a great story about a community with shared values, and we’re along for the ride, watching them come of age together. Midnight Run is one of them, but Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a great love story too! I love people from different classes and backgrounds learning to care for each other. Another thing I love is what I call shaggy stories, stories about people navigating each other. When you plug them into different genres, you get this great engine that comes with it. I’m not particularly dying to write a pirate thing, but I want to write a bunch of characters trying to navigate each other in a pirate thing.
How do you imagine Ed and Stede navigating the next phase of their relationship in a third season?
On some level they have to grapple with the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? thing — do we become Bonnie and Mary Read? How are we going to evolve as a couple who have decided to stay together? Are we cut out for that work, or is it too scary? We’re both people who are very damaged. One has real rage issues, and the other runs from things, so how will we make that work? It’s great to tell a love story that turns into the understanding that love is work. You work for your partner, and hopefully they work for you every day, and you find your way through it together.
This season, I noticed so much narrative symmetry, particularly around yearning for authenticity. Early on, Jim tells the story of Pinocchio to Fang to help him calm down, and Ricky Banes wants to be a real pirate. Ed sees Stede as a literal little mermaid, Wee John emerges in an homage to Ursula the Sea Witch in “Calypso’s Birthday.” Zheng Yi Sao and Auntie grapple with the intersection of leadership and softness, and Buttons literally transmogrifies into a bird! What draws you to yearning for authenticity thematically and to exploring it with a light touch?
I love the core element of Stede, going all the way back to the pilot, wanting to become a real boy. All of these characters are searching. They have big dreams and big emotional lives, and they want very big things for themselves. I like that change is possible. It’s fun to see these characters actually change instead of reset, which happens a lot on comedies, because you have to keep some stasis. I want life to be a little expensive on this show. Piracy’s a dangerous occupation, and some characters should die. And when someone loses a leg, they should really lose a leg.
As the Revenge sails away at the end of the season finale, we can see how well they’ve merged multiple workplace cultures, incorporating Zheng Yi Sao and Auntie, as well as Spanish Jackie and the Swede, and it seems like they’re charting this very bold — but soft! — new course. Their new flag even features a white cat with a golden halo, so what does our flag mean now?
Now, our flag means transition — I tear up every time I hear that Nina Simone track, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” especially against the image of Ed and Stede as the parents kind of watching the kids take the ship. Frenchie’s the captain now, he’s going to captain in his own way, and that crew is going to run into their own things. Changing of the guard is a big part of the entire season — Frenchie becomes first mate; Jim and Oluwande’s relationship shifts; Oluwande ends up in a totally different romantic relationship with someone who’s very high-powered. And then Stede and Blackbeard, on some level, are letting go of “childish things” to be more serious with each other. It’s what middles should be — they’re transitions.
Looking ahead, what do you think could be next for the Revenge’s crew under Captain Frenchie?
Captain Frenchie’s Revenge would be a wild, wild place to work. He’s like the outsider artist of pirates. If you’re boarded by Frenchie, I think it could go any number of ways — it could be amusing, it could be terrifying. Frenchie’s a wild card! It’ll be interesting to see how the power dynamics with the crew shift, how that family grows. What do they value now? I want to see how that family under that parent survives.
What even is the objective of piracy for that crew?
It is still plundering, not so much raping. It’s the plundering and the joy of sea crimes. They want to party, and they want to be free. And a lot of them have had terrible things happen to them at the hands of colonial forces, so they want some payback. Party, plunder, and payback — the three P’s.
