I don't think you see a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder, for example. And even with the accents.

Hence the genius of having Ken steer this ship as well. You have to invest these characters with a Shakespearian quality and not in a way that might disengage the audience but in a way that actually lets you play to an audience.

It does if you put yourself out there being a pirate. It's like if you have an army and your army sit around and not doing anything and living the lives of decadence and they're faced with a battle, and you slide. Do they deserve the right to call themselves an army? Do these pirates who are basically languishing deserve the right to call themselves pirates? They're victims of their own success.

I like bringing little subtle complexities to a character. It's all about the subtext. No one can really describe or fully know another human being, even if they get a hook on them. It's more about instinctively knowing whether you like somebody or not.

Life itself is pretty funny when you realize how absurd it can be.

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.

You just have to open the newspapers in most Western news to see real violence.