Warning: Full spoilers for the March 5th Black Sails episode, “XXXIV,” below.
The end is nearly here on Black Sails, and in the fifth to last episode, there was a huge character death as Eleanor Guthrie (Hannah New) met her maker after a brutal fight with a Spanish soldier.
I spoke to New about when she learned Eleanor was dying, what it was like to film her final scenes, what fan reaction might be like to the end of her polarizing character and more.
IGN: How much heads up did they give you? When did you know that this was coming for Eleanor?
New: I knew at the beginning of the season, which was really great because sometimes it can be sprung on actors and that’s really difficult, I think - especially when you’ve been so dedicated to a character for long. You want to give them the opportunity to flesh out a lot of their story before it ends. The writers did that so beautifully and I think without giving clues that that was going to happen. They just built in in a very subtle way all the moments of reconciliation, of reflection... her conversations with Mrs. Hudson. It builds in such a beautiful way that doesn’t make you think “Oh, she’s about to [die.]” I was really excited I was going to get all of those super meaty scenes because you probably wouldn’t get it if your character wasn’t going to die. It was sad to know that this would be the end for her but it was also beautiful because it’s great to have a character that has a full arc and that you know where the story goes. Also, for me what was so exciting was that curveball being sent by the fact that she’s pregnant. That changes who she is completely and changes what drives her. In so many ways, what motivates her changes. In a way, that character dies [at that point]. The only thing that has ever really driven her is the island and the vision she has for the island. The minute that that’s no longer important, that there’s something bigger than the island and bigger than herself, that changes her overarching objective. And that’s the death of the Eleanor Guthrie who she always thought she was.
IGN: You can’t help but wonder how this would have played out if Woodes Rogers knew that she was pregnant. Do you think if he knew that he wouldn’t have gone through with his plan to involve Spain?
New: That’s the kind of brilliant question that the writers have posed because at the end of the day, I think Eleanor thinks that she doesn’t want to influence him and that he would do anything for her in this battle and what needs to be done is the more important thing of securing the island. I think she doesn’t want to be the barrier to that. But the reality is, he doesn’t have very many options left. So, I don’t know how things would have played out but one of the things I learned from watching the series is that I’m not sure how well she knows Woodes Rogers. I think she loves this idealized version of him. He’s very kind and has saved her life and he means so many things to her and is very symbolic of a fight that she’s been fighting for a long time. I think all of those things maybe cloud her judgement of him. There is very much this sense that there is this private and public persona of Woodes Rogers. He’s a man that is very much concerned with his reputation and the way he behaves to do something as brutal as keelhauling to strike fear into people is a very significant -- I’m not sure how Eleanor would really react to that. Even though she’s seen so much brutality, this is a man who is supposed to be this symbol of civilization and that was pretty brutal. When somebody does something as inhumane and brutal as that to create power through fear, it’s an incredibly terrifying prospect. How the island would be run from there on in... It’s interesting now to hypothesize about how she would have felt about it. She is always quite forgiving about men who do desperate things to achieve great ends. I think, for Eleanor so much changes when her body and when her existence becomes about something bigger than herself. I think that’s what’s really symbolic in this moment of her death.
IGN: That fight with the man who ultimately kills her was incredibly intense.
New: The actual scene itself is an incredible metaphor for how she lives her life. She grapples with everything she has at hand to survive. When I first read it, I was like “Geez, guys I know I’ve been going on at you for three years to give me kick ass stuff but you just gave it to me all in one scene!” [Laughs] I think there was eight different weapons when we first read the scene. We had one morning with a couple hours available because of our shooting schedule for stunt rehearsals. I had to learn it in no time. Steve Boyum, our director -- who is the most amazing, lovely man -- also directed the scene where Eleanor confronts Vane in the cell. So I knew I was in really good hands and I could trust what they were going to do. But in the scene, he was like “We basically want you to do it all except for one throw.” We shot the whole thing in maybe three parts. It was pretty much one shot for most of it. So I knew it was going to be this massive physical challenge but I was so ready for it and so gasping for it. That was one of the things when I got cast in a pirate show like, “I get a to do really awesome stunt stuff!” And I got to do a few kick ass scenes but they didn’t come as often as I would have liked.
IGN: Well this one went big!
New: It‘s shot in a visceral, beautiful way. That sounds like a weird adjective to use for a death scene but it’s so real to me when I watch it. I had to give a heads up to some family members because I know they would find it hard to watch. In fact, I had some family members visit me on set the day we were shooting it and their faces just went white and they were like, “I don’t think we’re going to stay around to watch you shoot this” because it was horrific. When you’re in it you don’t realize and I tend not to stay in it between takes. So I’m goofing around with all this blood everywhere and my family members were not finding it funny in the least. But I’ve learned from the best. If you look at some stuff that Clara [Paget] has done it’s phenomenal. I remember calling her up the weekend after shooting the death scene and saying, “Oh my god, I feel like I’ve been hit by a mack truck.” And she was like “Yup, welcome to my world, every weekend.” It’s a really physically challenging thing to do.
One of the amazing things as well is there was one point, where I’m being choked out on the table. Because I’m wearing a corset, I can only breathe into my upper chest so any pressure on my upper chest, I can’t breathe and we hadn’t thought it out and I actually nearly passed out. And I got up and was suddenly overwhelmed because the reality of being a woman in that situation is just horrific. The visceral sense that this is the end, it really hit me. I suppose you can only get that by really going there and getting the stunt routine in the most visceral way possible. But I felt safe! I had a whole team around me and I felt safe.
IGN: Well, it certainly plays very powerfully. You mentioned how she did get these moments of reflection in the episodes leading up to this. Some of those moments really struck me, like when she and Max had a big scene talking about what could have been, and when she and Madi discussed her history with Mr. Scott and how they were a surrogate family for her.
New: Exactly, yeah. I think all of those things are coming back to her and coming back to her for a reason. There is a certain point where she has to reevaluate what her life has been on this island and whether she would want to repeat that for her own child. It’s beautifully played out with that scene with Mrs. Hudson where she says “When my mother and father first came here, they had a terrible argument.” It’s one of those moments where when you’re a kid and something really significant happens and you remember it with this crystalline vision and you don’t know why it sticks in your head for the rest of your life until a particular moment when you’re like “That’s why I remember it. That’s why it’s so significant.” Jon [Steinberg ] and Dan [Shotz] introduced it in such a beautiful way because she’s saying, “My mom was saying it’s too cruel for a little girl.” She was the only female that she remembers of her blood family. The other significant females would have been Madi and Madi’s mum. She remembers that one thing her mother said and never understood it until now. She wanted to deny her mother in a way by going “I’m a girl, this place is cruel and I’m going to make it a success. Watch me.” And now she’s going, “hold on a minute” because it’s a completely different ball game when you’re thinking about children and it’s not something she’s ever considered until this point. All those moments are reflection about what her life was and who she really is and now the responsibility of bringing a child into the world and creating an environment where they can be safe. It’s the most fundamental human emotion of wanting to protect and nurture your own kin. She never imagined it because she never felt it from her own mother and father. Her mother died in the first Spanish raid so it’s so incredibly symbolic that she would die in the second. It’s an incredible full circle that’s come around. It’s something that me, Jon, and Dan talked about in Season 1. "What’s her backstory? Where’s her mother?" It was in some early scripts. There were some little bits of dialogue where she explained what happened to her mother and how she remembers it has a traumatic experience as a child. So I think for me that was a beautiful reference to her backstory without it having to be explicitly said. I definitely think there will be fans of the show who will appreciate that and see that as a wonderful full circle.
IGN: We’ve spoken before about how there’s a section of the Black Sails fandom who have disliked Eleanor for awhile, which definitely escalated with Charles’s death. Some people wanted to see her get punished for that. Do you hope that perhaps some of those viewers will be reminded of some of her humanity with the way things played out?
New: Yeah, I think there will definitely be people cheering because they’ve been wanting to see her head on a block for so long now but there are definitely fans who… It’s incredible, [they have] such passionate defenses of Eleanor and I think the writers have allowed for there to be that intelligent interpretation of who she is as a human and the things that she’s had to face. I think that that’s such a beautiful thing to play a character that’s as complex and as undefinable. There’s no dichotomy of good and evil in this show. Everybody does deplorable things and everybody does things that are so humane and caring at the same time. You see it in the pirates as well. It enables fans of the show to start to reflect on who she was that in a way, perhaps if she went on living and you never know what happened to her, you’d never get that post-mortem or that analysis of who she was. It’s not as significant. There’s an ability to have a full picture of somebody when you can look at them in memoriam and evaluate what they did and how they struggled and both the good and bad. I think it’s a huge honor to Eleanor Guthrie as a character, in a way, to have fans debate that and have fans become so passionate about what she did wrong or what she did right or what she was trying to do. I am excited to see those analysis from the fans. At the end of the day, it blows my mind how much detail people have picked up from the show. It’s not an easy show to watch. It demands the audience sit up and pay attention. There’s a difference between reading a script and watching the show. There are definitely things that I picked up in the script that when you watch the show become so much more explicit because of the ways the actors have played it that make you think of other elements of their character or the conflicts they have or the relationships they have. I’m excited for people to watch the seasons again and reevaluate what she’s doing and what she wants to achieve.
IGN: What was it like to actually film the death scene with Toby [Stephens]? Flint is kind to her in her dying moments. Do you think she believes his lie?
New: I think she does. I think she has to in order to let herself go. It was such an incredibly moving thing to play. Even though I’m lying on the ground covered in icky blood stuff. [Laughs] We shot it a long time after we shot the physical fight because we shot it outside on a set we had, not our main set. It was the Barlow house that we’ve come back to again and again and again and such significant things have happened there. To lie on the ground and hear, in my dying breath, this house burning down, also felt incredibly symbolic. This place that was Flint’s safe haven as well is now gone. The fact that she dies in his arms is so incredibly beautiful and you have this moment of such compassion and humanity to tell her the lie that will give her a moment's peace that she’s been fighting for, in a way. It’s a tiny moment of peace -- a macro moment of the peace that she’s been fighting for. She does believe it, totally. At the time, I had read the script but I hadn’t seen [Woodes Rogers] going and bringing the Spanish. I hadn’t seen any of that on screen so for me it was very easy to have it as this kind of, “I don’t know what.” I don’t know where he is but I trust he loves me. I trust that this was the most ideal relationship that she ever wanted, even if that might be a falsehood and her lying to herself. It’s just so wonderful as well to play those scenes with Toby because I think about those scenes in Season 1 when they’re in the office and they’re talking about Odysseus and the oar and walking inland until it’s a shovel I think that as an image really captivated Eleanor and it drove her through the seasons to say “No, I’m going to make this place a sustainable republic. It’s going to be ours, it’s going to be prosperous. We’re not going to live under brutality.” Those are the things that drove her in the first few seasons. To then die in the arms of the man who gave her that vision, in a way, is incredibly beautiful, I think.
Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman, IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at http://ift.tt/LQFqjj.
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