I didn't want people to go out wanting to go tool up against the bad guys (and at impressionable ages). I said, don't shy away from the violence or pull back on this, commit to this.

Well, I'm not a natural gym person myself, anyway.

The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything. That's the genuis of having Ken Branagh here as well. Shakespeare doesn't require you to have a doctorate in his language or whatever to understand him. It just has to be directed and played right. It's all about scale and presence and getting these huge, epic stories across.

I consider it an actor going to work with other actors. It's not a competitive sport, it's not to outact anybody else, sorta thing, you can be a bad actor but you don't outact anybody, you just bring your character as best as you can.

When you're wearing jeans, there's a shift in your center of gravity.

Really Edward Teach, Blackbeard, was actually tall, so he was literally larger than life and so he knew that and actually the more you read about him, you realize that he actually respected and knew about the theatricality and he'd rather take a ship by threatening and having the power of his personality and the threat of the oncoming danger to sway the ship to just acquiesce and just give up their cargo and so none of his crew got hurt and they would just take their bounty and he wouldn't have to kill anybody, but of course he earned that reputation, so he was no saint.

There's not a lot of direct back story but you do get to see them playing around each other a lot.