Treasure Island star David Oyelowo: "When I was a kid playing pirates in my room, the images in my head were not of people who look like me"

What kind of man is horrid to Hayley Atwell? David Oyelowo shakes his head at the memory. “There was a scene where she’s throwing up over the side of the ship and I accost her,” he says. “I had to take myself to one side and say, ‘This is not Hayley, it’s Bess and she is becoming an archenemy. You have to go at her!’ She’s literally one of my closest friends and I hadn’t anticipated how difficult I’d find being mean to her, but my character does not share that emotion.”

Oyelowo’s character is Long John Silver, pirate antagonist of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic 19th-century high-seas adventure, now reimagined as a six-part Paramount series filmed in Tenerife. Atwell, who Oyelowo first met in London when they appeared in the Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound in 2005, is Bess Hawkins, mother of the novel’s hero Jim Hawkins. Bess is also landlady of the Admiral Benbow Inn on the West Country coast where Oyelowo’s shipwrecked and terrifying Silver turns up one night. He is searching for fellow pirate Billy Bones and the map that will lead to the treasure buried on Skeleton Island. Much buckling of swashes follows, in which Atwell is very good but Oyelowo electrifies.

Born in Oxford in 1976, the actor – who spent part of his youth in Nigeria – has wanted to play Long John Silver since he was a boy and it shows. “I lived in the UK until I was six and returned when I was 13,” he says. “I was highly influenced by British literature and that included the book Treasure Island.” Would he dress up as a pirate? “I actually went around with an eye patch.” Later Oyelowo would develop a film called Silver that wasn’t made. “I have,” he points out, “been trying to play him.”

Now Oyelowo has succeeded, becoming the first Black actor to have the role in a major production. The result is a Treasure Island for our times, where women and Black people no longer look on from the sidelines.

“When I was a kid playing pirates in my room, the images in my head were not of people who look like me,” he says. “Now Black boys and girls, and white and brown boys and girls, are going to see imagery that breaks down a subtle prejudice in their minds.

“That prejudice starts when you’re young, when you’re inadvertently and subconsciously being groomed into thinking that a certain demographic has more of a priority than others. Well that’s not true, it’s wrong.” Is helping to change that rewarding? “It’s a triumph,” he says. “These images are going to be beamed into people’s homes. It’s a beautiful thing to be part of.”

Specifically, Oyelowo’s Silver is Jamaican, a choice that is true to the Caribbean setting but also makes his compelling Silver feel contemporary. “The musicality in the way a Jamaican person would speak did a lot of heavy lifting for me,” he says. “If the accent wasn’t Jamaican, I would probably wince at myself each time I said, ‘Jim Lad’.”

Inevitably there will be those who claim Black pirates are a woke invention but that, Oyelowo suggests, would be to mistake popular culture for real history. “One in three pirates during the golden age of piracy were Black. Robert Louis Stevenson himself had Long John Silver’s wife as a Black woman, and there were historical figures like Black Caesar who were prominent pirates alongside Blackbeard. But we’ve had films called Pirates of the Caribbean, without many of the pirates actually being those people.”

Oyelowo, who is speaking from his home in California, has done his research. “Piracy was a way for enslaved or formerly enslaved people to gain agency, a path to wealth and a kind of autonomy,” he explains. “You could argue that it’s pure greed driving Long John Silver, but in my depiction of him, the driver was the freedom that comes from the acquisition of power and having money.”

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As well as having a Black Long John Silver, writer Robert Murphy, creator of ITV crime drama McDonald and Dodds, has reinvented Billy Bones as an erotically charged Spanish dancer and conjured up a ballsy Bess for Atwell who, since Prometheus Bound, has become an international star in the Marvel and Mission: Impossible franchises.

Oyelowo found his own fame when he was cast as Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the 2014 film Selma. An Englishman playing one of the 20th-century’s greatest American figures, he was, for a while, at the centre of world attention. “It was a very intense thing for both me and my family, and you can’t prepare for it in a sense,” says Oyelowo, who has four children ranging from 14 to 24 with his wife Jessica. “The kids were younger, but we navigated through it as a family. It was probably the most formative moment of my career.”

Starring in Selma was a very public affirmation of Oyelowo’s decision to swap the UK for the US in 2007, partly because he wasn’t being cast in period dramas. In 2015 he explained that decision to Radio Times: “We make period dramas here, but there are almost never black people in them, even though we’ve been on these shores for hundreds of years. I thought, ‘OK, you are stopping people having a context for the country they live in and you are marginalising me. I can’t live with that. So I’ve got to get out.’”

He's been an American citizen since 2016 with a sparkling career – two days after we speak he’s announced as the male lead in Sky’s new remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – so I ask Oyelowo if he is still angry about having to leave the country to get work. “It wasn’t anger,” he says. “It was just a fact, and I’m living evidence that things have changed.” Still, he points out, “without the notoriety Selma afforded me I don’t know if I would be playing Long John Silver in this show.”

There have been numerous versions of Treasure Island. As well as Tim Curry in 1996’s Muppet Treasure Island, other notable Long John Silvers include Charlton Heston, Eddie Izzard and Orson Welles. But it’s Robert Newton’s “Ooh-Aar” rendition in the 1950 Disney version that still hangs over the role. “You really risk being a walking cliché with the parrot on the shoulder,” Oyelowo admits. “That’s why we decided early on to be judicious with its use.” Happily the parrot, a bird called Dino, was a consummate professional. “Dino was the most consistent actor on the show,” he says. “I didn’t know it was possible to have a bird be that reliable, take after take.”

That other necessary prop, the wooden leg, becomes a fearsome weapon in Oyelowo’s hands. “The idea was for him to almost use it as a superpower, a giant block of wood that he can wield as a club.” To get the required limp, Oyelowo’s own leg was put in a brace. “I was physically impaired but in a way that let me get through the shoot in Tenerife. It’s an incredible place but the terrain is incredibly uneven,” he says. “And then there’s sword fighting... it was very physically demanding.”

It sounds, I suggest, like the sort of adventure the young Oyelowo, in his Oxford bedroom with an eye patch, would have relished. “That’s part of my joy in doing it,” he says. “I’m giving this as a gift to my 12-year-old self.”

Treasure Island arrives on Monday 12 October on Paramount+.

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