Our Flag Means Death Used 11 Pounds Of Glitter For Stede's Mermaid Tail
This article contains spoilers for "Our Flag Means Death" season 2.
"Our Flag Means Death" is not a show that can be accused of holding back. Like Spanish Jackie (Leslie Jones) meeting a new potential husband for her collection, David Jenkins' pirate comedy just loves to say "yes!" to its heart's desires. So, when the opportunity arose to create an underwater dream sequence in which Ed Teach, aka Blackbeard (Taika Waititi), has a vision of his lost love Stede Bonnet, aka the Gentleman Pirate (Rhys Darby), swimming towards him as a hunky merman, the "Our Flag Means Death" team was all-in.
According to a deep-dive into the making of this sequence published by Entertainment Weekly, Jenkins and the other writers had wanted to turn Stede into a merman for years. When the perfect moment finally came along at the end of "Our Flag Means Death" season 2, episode 3, "The Innkeeper," costume designer Gypsy Taylor pushed back against the idea of giving Stede a CGI tail. She wasn't about to pass up the opportunity of making a beautiful, functional mermaid tail and turning Darby into a "sweet, loving little goldfish." Darby was also game to learn how to swim with a fish tail instead of legs, and so construction began.
The base of the tail was made of Lycra and covered in around 3,000 silicone scales. The scales were then painted with glitter, which made the sweet little goldfish shine, but also complicated Taylor's efforts to make the tail as light as possible:
"We added a whole lot of weight accidentally by putting five kilograms [11 pounds] of glitter in ... I had to warn the stunt team. I was like, 'I didn't think glitter would be that heavy! But we needed a lot of it. And it's so pretty!'"
'He took to it like a mermaid takes to water'
Fortunately, Darby was able to pull off the underwater scene even with an extra 11 pounds of glitter on his legs. Alex Sherman, who co-wrote the episode with Alyssa Lane (pictured above alongside a glittery Rhys Darby), shared a behind-the-scenes video of the mermaid scene on social media that illustrates how the crew overcame the challenge of actually getting Darby into the water tank. It's quite difficult to climb a ladder with your legs tightly bound together by Lycra and glitter, so instead, Taylor recalls, "We'd all go up this ramp together, with him in his little wheelchair, and we'd just sort of dump him in."
The video unfortunately cuts off before we get to see said dumping. "I stopped recording because I was trying to respect [Darby's] dignity in case he looked a bit silly getting in," Sherman explained. "But he took to it like ... like a mermaid takes to water."
Indeed, Darby looks impressively majestic in the water when Mermaid-Stede arrives on the scene in "Our Flag Means Death," giving a skilled demonstration of swimming with a monofin. This isn't the actor's first time playing a fantasy creature opposite Taika Waititi; in the 2014 mockumentary film "What We Do in the Shadows" he played the alpha of a pack of Wellington werewolves, while Waititi played the fussy dandy vampire Viago. He really does wear fine things well.
The mermaid and the kraken
As strange and silly as the Mermaid-Stede scene might seem, it's not treated as an overtly comedic moment by the show itself. For a while television was stuck in the zone of queerbaiting for comic effect, but while "Our Flag Means Death" has plenty of ridiculous moments, it has always presented its central romance with total sincerity. Even the mermaid scene's use of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work," which music supervisor Maggie Phillips had her doubts about, ends up working remarkably well to heighten the emotion of Ed's return to the world of the living.
The choice to show Stede as a mermaid in Blackbeard's mind isn't just a random bit of oddness, either. Just as Stede's dream of being a cool, bearded, swashbuckling version of himself at the start of "Our Flag Means Death" season 2 mirrors his persistent insecurities, Ed's vision of Stede as a mermaid coming to rescue him reflects his tendency to rewrite his own life according to pirate myths and legends. It's an echo of season 1's reveal that the "kraken" who supposedly killed Edward's father was actually Edward himself. Since Blackbeard is stuck in a purgatorial nightmare for most of "The Innkeeper," where he is once again forced to confront his own self-loathing, bringing another mythical sea creature onto the scene to rescue him makes for a poetic end to the episode.
New episodes of "Our Flag Means Death season 2 release Thursdays on Max.