TCA: Black Sails cast talk Season 2, new trailer released

Captain Flint , Captain Vane, John Silver, Max and Eleanor — all characters in Starz’s bloody swashbuckler Black Sails — took center stage in Pasadena today at the 2015 Television Critics Association’s Winter Press Tour to talk about Season 2, returning Saturday, Jan. 24 at 9pmET/PT. The first season averaged 5.3 million viewers an episode and was one of the network’s most watched series. The series has already been renewed for a third season.
The new season begins where it left off with the Walrus crew stranded with an army of Spanish soldiers standing between them and the Urca gold. Flint (Toby Stephens) and Silver (Luke Arnold) join forces in a desperate bid for survival. Captain Vane’s (Zach McGowan) left to decide between his men or Eleanor Gutherie (Hannah New). And unbeknownst to all of them, a prize of immeasurable value has already been smuggled onto the island, where its discover will alter their world and force everyone in Nassau toward the ultimate judgment: are they men or are they monsters?

Season 2 explores the origins of Flint’s deep-seated rage and his drive for revenge against the Crown. It also shows some of the complicated circumstances on how he was driven to exile and how he ended up in Nassau.

The new season also challenges Eleanor’s authority. “There are plenty of figures that are going to come in and completely threaten this way of life on the island and threaten her own life,” New says. “So as much as she has been a figure of power and authority for a long time, she is suddenly thrown into a very, very difficult situation where she’s balancing not only threats from outside, that we’ve got the threats of colonial powers of Britain, you’ve got the threat of very, very dangerous pirates, and you also have the fact that she’s balancing these two big powers of Flint and Vane on the island as well.”

As for Flint, Stephens tells that redemption isn’t part of the plan. “In the long term there’s no redemption for him because we know that he ends up dying before Treasure Island. But what I hope the audience will get from the second series is we take Flint back to these flashbacks, which are 15 years before, and we start unpeeling him for an audience, his story prior to Nassau and how he became the pirate that he now is. And we get to know a lot more about him and what is motivating him and what is driving him to do these quite extreme things and that he’s perhaps a lot more complicated than you think at the end of Season 1.”