David Oyelowo and Hayley Atwell lead the cast of Treasure Island, a new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's book for Paramount+ which has now started releasing episodes on Mondays.
While Oyelowo plays classic character Long John Silver, Atwell plays Bess, the mother of protagonist Jim Hawkins, whose role has been significantly expanded.
Speaking alongside Oyelowo exclusively with Radio Times, Atwell has now revealed her initial surprise at being asked to star in the series, and how she changed a crucial scene to pay homage to real life female pirates.
"I read the novel in my teens, and I don't remember any women in it really," Atwell said. "So when the offer came through, I was like, 'Who do they want me to play, the parrot?'"
Oyelowo said that "that would have been good," while Atwell agreed that "I could have given a good parrot."
Atwell said of the series: "Obviously it has the heart and the spirit and the themes of the book, which is about greed to an extent, but also the pursuit of one's own destiny, calling, also the responsibility that comes with power, and how that can be easily corrupted - all of that was of course, in this series too.
"But also, I was realising how much of the words of that pirate swashbuckling world had come from the book that we use in phrases, and that you kind of see in the cultural lexicon in a way, and how influential the language of that book has been."
Meanwhile, Oyelowo revealed that he had "watched the Disney version, the Robert Newton version, as a kid" and had "read comic book versions of it and simplified versions of it, and wanted to be a pirate as a kid".
"I wanted to be an astronaut, a cowboy and a pirate, and I've now played all three," he explained. "So I have the trifecta with Treasure Island. But yeah, I think there's something, in terms of those genres that I've just mentioned, this one is the one that I think is just the most unadulterated in terms of adventure.
"Just being out on the high seas, and you know the costumes are of course fantastic, and will never go out of style just in terms of what anyone and everyone gravitates towards. So getting to do it in a TV show under these circumstances… I was in a sort of pinch me state for a lot of the shoot because this is stuff that I was doing as a kid for free."
When asked for their favourite scene or sequence in the series, Oyelowo said he liked Atwell's fighting, while she confirmed that it was her idea for Bess to get involved in a fight.
View Green Video on the source website"There was a suggestion that Bess, as soon as the fighting happens on deck and there's a big battle, that she was going to go below deck and hide to let it pass," Atwell explained. "And I went, ‘Oh no, no, no, no, no! She won't be doing that.’ Because it felt like an opportunity to also have a subtle way of playing homage to female pirates that existed.
"There were very few of them, of course, but they were extraordinary forces of nature. And I thought, inspired by someone like Grace O'Malley, to have Bess there with her gowns on and all her finery, but also being able to whip out a gun and use it in a way that feels true to who we've seen her to be by that point - someone who is sort of making it up as she goes along, grabbing whatever she can around her to use as a weapon or as a defence.
"She's always in some way fighting. So that felt like an absolute natural progression of what had already been written."
Oyelowo noted that he and Atwell learned sword fighting at drama school, expressing that he'd done it to "an obsessive degree at LAMDA", and that this was his first opportunity to do it on screen.
"That was some of the most fun stuff," he said. "And when you're having to navigate having a peg leg, and the fact that with the way we're doing on Long John Silver, it may seem like a weakness, but it's actually kind of a superpower for him. He wields it as this sort of wooden club that he uses in these fights as well. That was a lot of fun."
Treasure Island releases new episodes weekly on Mondays on Paramount+. You can sign up to Paramount+ for a seven-day free trial.
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