Taika Waititi Says Our Flag Means Death Sidestepped A Very American TV Trope

In a recent virtual panel discussion for Outfronts, series star and pilot episode director Taika Waititi explained that the lack of period-specific homophobia is refreshing. “If it was any other film it would be like, ‘We can’t kiss because it’s 1952! It’s frowned upon, and we can’t hold hands!'” he said. “It’d be just all about that, and this is not about that at all.” The show actually features multiple queer couples, from amateur pirate Stede (Rhys Darby) and scourge of the seven seas Blackbeard (Waititi), to non-binary fighter Jim (Vico Ortiz) and sweetie pie Olu (Samson Kayo), to the quippy, open pairing of Lucius (Nathan Foad) and Black Pete (Matthew Maher).

While some characters in “Our Flag Means Death” ooze toxic masculinity, they’re framed largely as villains, in the long — but annoyingly infrequent — tradition of coding only the bad guys as homophobes that dates all the way back to “M*A*S*H.” “I love that no character is like, ‘Oh, are those two holding hands? What’s up with that?!'” Waititi says. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I knew they’d get together,’ all the peripheral characters.” As co-star Con O’Neill, who plays perpetually angry first mate Izzy Hands in the series, puts it, gay love stories have “never been just about the process of falling in love, it’s always been about the barriers. F*** that, we’re beyond that!”