Hannah New in Black Sails [S1E3]
UPDATED 20:10 GMT |
‘New’ girl slings booze for the scurvy dogs of ‘Black Sails’
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| Hannah New has the kingpin look down in a scene from Starz' new pirate drama, "Black Sails." |
Meet Hannah New.
The London-born actress, who stars in the new pirate series “Black Sails,” had the pleasure of working with the Hoff in Spain, on a film called “Fuga de cerebros 2”(Brain Drain).
“I played an American college student in a wheelchair who fell in love with a rough kid. It was like an ‘American Pie,’” she says. “He played the father of the groom. There was a wedding at the end. It was that lofty. He did have a couple of lines in Spanish. I was the maid of honor in the wheelchair.
“He’s very tall, and he’s very tall when you’re in the wheelchair,” New says.
New was studying acting in Spain when she made the movie. Her fluency with the language, learned while she was a student at Leeds University, enabled her to continue working in Spain even after she returned to England for post-graduate studies at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
“My mom was like, ‘Do you want to just go to drama school? If you’re really committed, why don’t you learn a cool language so you can work in two markets?’ I’d fallen in love with the language and the culture as a little kid,” New says. “My sister lives in Berlin and speaks German fluently. My mother speaks Italian. I wanted to do my own thing. If you speak Spanish and English you can communicate with half the world. It’s kind of amazing.”
Living and working in a foreign country well prepared New for the “Black Sails” production schedule. She and the rest of the cast lived in Capetown, South Africa for half the year while filming.
As Eleanor Guthrie, the owner of a rowdy saloon who also runs her father’s black-market business, she is one of the few women in the cast, which boasts more than its fair share of swashbuckling dudes with the kind of rippling musculature and whitened teeth that say Chippendale’s more than Jolly Roger. The female staff in the makeup room have taken notice.
“A lot of the guys are in extremely good shape,” New says. “Lots of topless men. Makes the makeup girls very happy. All the scars [they have to put on].”
One of those very fit men is Toby Stephens, who plays Captain Flint, the most feared pirate. He is the son of “Downton Abbey” star Maggie Smith, but New says he doesn’t talk about Mum much on-set. “He has talked about the way he used to get ribbed as a teenager by her,” she says.
“Black Sails” takes place on the island of New Providence, which is now part of the Bahamas. Production has tried to re-create the bustling, raw feeling of the port of Nassau on a pristine beach, complete with hundreds of extras and a turquoise-colored ocean, outside of Capetown.
“It’s an amazing amalgamation of computer wizardry and Hollywood magic,” New says. “We don’t have miles and miles of coastland. The seascape is taken from stuff that was filmed in the Bahamas and footage created by computer whiz kids.”
New immersed herself in research before leaving home to play Guthrie and discovered that there were savvy, strong-willed women from the 18th century who ran taverns like her character. “Women had to keep the town running. You had a breakdown of the traditional gender boundaries that you wouldn’t have had in the 18th century,” she says. Besides Moll Flanders, the heroine of the Daniel Defoe novel, New found a real-life pirate, an Irish woman named Grace O’Malley who “saw an opportunity to intercept a trading route to the British Isles,” New says. “She received a pardon from Queen Anne.”
Willowy and petite in person with delicate bone structure, New comes across as rowdy as most of the men on the show, cursing like a sailor and sharing her bed with members of both sexes.
“My poor mother watched me and she was horrified at my potty mouth,” she says. “She said, ‘You’re very good in it, but I don’t like how much you swear.’ ”
Guthrie’s bisexuality, expressed with a native girl named Max (Jessica Parker Kennedy), was not a problem for New, who is single, to deal with.
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| Hannah New and Hakeem Kae-Kazim, who plays Eleanor’s right hand. |
If Guthrie sees plenty of action on “Black Sails,” New contents herself with the friends she’s made among the cast and crew, many of whom are far from home, and with the locals. She does not miss London.
“It felt like home [here] so quickly. I have really great mates here and I find the most amazing things to do on the weekends. We wind up dancing at a little dive bar, Aces ’n’ Spades. It’s actually a funky kind of club that plays rock ’n’ roll. The owners will be so chuffed if I get that in. It’s our old haunt.”
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