The Strange True Story That Inspired the New Pirate Comedy 'Our Flag Means Death'

“It’s crazy that this is based on real events,” says David Jenkins, the creator of the new series Our Flag Means Death. And he’s not incorrect.

The comedy, streaming now on HBO Max, follows a very rich 18th-century Brit named Stede Bonnet who, for reasons at first unknown, his decided to upend his life of comfort, family, and piles of money to take up the somewhat unexpected new hobby of being a pirate, a job at which he was terrible, and somehow befriending another, much greater pirate in the process. And it’s based, believe it or not, on a true story.

Jake Giles Netter/HBO Max

“Weirdly, my wife offhandedly heard someone talking about this person and thought, oh that guy is interesting,” says Jenkins, who previously created the series People of Earth. “She told me to check it out, so I read up on him and quickly realized that he blew up his life and left his family to somehow befriended the world’s greatest pirate after being a terrible pirate himself. The structure of it was beautiful.”

WATCH OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH NOW

Equally beautiful? That Bonnet’s story was fleshed out enough to serve as inspiration for the series—which stars and is directed and produced by Taika Waititi—but not so much that there wasn’t room to play. “Very early on, I was talking to Taika about it, and he said, ‘don’t do any research,’” Jenkins says. “I was thinking the same thing. It was nice to go into this with a great setup and then invent things that feel true. Also, we don’t know why any of this happened, why Bonnet screwed up his marriage or why Blackbeard liked him, so we were able to fill in the blanks of the story that we wanted to have.”

Jake Giles Netter/HBO Max

It's a plan that worked out for Jenkins. Our Flag Means Death is essentially a 10-episode workplace comedy about a workplace that happens to be a pirate ship, and where the handsomely paid crew despises (and eventually begrudgingly admires) their class-tourist captain. It’s quick, witty, and doesn’t take itself too seriously, which makes it a blast to watch even if, like Jenkins, pirate shows aren’t your go-to.

“I’m a little surprised about making a pirate series to begin with, because that’s not a genre I’m interested in,” he says. “It was more about zeroing in on the circumstances this character was in, what his personal situation was, what Blackbeard’s situation was, and what they meant to one another. The piracy is almost incidental.”

Aaron Epstein/HBO Max

But did he ever get curious enough about the real Stede Bonnet to seek out how his own experience ended up? Not a chance.

“I had no impulse to read anything else,” Jenkins says. “It's a story about someone who’s a class tourist and a crime tourist, and automatically that’s interesting. The nice thing about this series is that we have a historical basis to go off, but all these people are dead. I was writing something on a living person before this, and with that you have to be careful because they’re real people and you have a responsibility. With this, all the stories feel made up anyway. And we know what we know, but there are also these holes, which gave us license to take the things we found interesting and use them to ground the show and then embellish. It helps, obviously, that it’s comedy.”

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