GALO: Was becoming a sword master and fight choreographer on Robin of Sherwood one of those divergent paths?

MR: Well, again, it was one of those things where I was extremely lucky. Robin of Sherwood came about in a certainly unplanned way. [My role as] Nasir became part of my life, but Nasir wasn’t even in the original script. The character that I had been asked to take a look at by [director] Ian Sharp was a character called Edmund the Archer. When I arrived on Thursday for filming, Ian came over to me and he went, “Oh, by the way, it’s not Edmund the Archer anymore. It’s Nasir the Saracen. Can you do a swordfight with two swords?” I said, “How long have I got?” And he went, “About half an hour.” I said, “Yeah, I’ll work it out.”

GALO: As a sword master and fight choreographer you’ve trained actors like Richard Gere and choreographed scenes with Keira Knightley, Clive Owen and Stellan Skarsgård. How do you begin training someone who has little to no experience with swords?

MR: Obviously, there’s a lot of technique in it. Most of it goes back to Robin of Sherwood because I was lucky to have trained and worked with Terry Walsh, who was our sword master; Steve Dent, who was our horse master; and Gabe Cronnelly, who was our archery advisor. These were all three of the top guys in the game at that time. I spent three years doing nothing but swordplay and archery and riding horses, and all of that kind of stuff. And you never forget how to do it.

GALO: You choreographed the fight scenes in the movie King Arthur but you have also appeared in fight scenes in Robin of Sherwood and Black Sails. Do you enjoy working behind the camera as much as being on screen?

MR: I get as much joy and pleasure out of watching Mads Mikkelsen and Stellan Skarsgård do the last fight in King Arthur, and watching Keira Knightley practicing around the set, [as I do being on set]. She worked so hard to do that. I got as much excitement out of watching that on the monitors as I did standing on the stage in the West End. To me, it’s all the same process. I was extremely proud of what Stellan and Matt did. In fact, everybody worked really hard to make this stuff look good. And it was great watching them perform. It was very exciting.

GALO: You just starred on the first season of Starz’s new pirate series Black Sails as Gates, the crew master. What originally drew you to the role?

MR: When I read the part, I realized straight away that I knew this man and I knew this character. Later on, I got called back to go and meet with [Black Sails creator] Jon Steinberg. We were just chatting away and he was telling me a little bit about the show, and he said, “Now, will you tell me what you know about this character?” And I said, “I know this character because I’ve done this job.” I was a non-commissioned officer in the British Army and their role as management is to take orders from the office and get the men to carry them out, sometimes in dangerous and nasty situations. So I said, “It’s true, the officers give the orders, but the sergeants carry them out and make things happen.” And he went, “I get it, that’s the character.”

[Gates] is a blue collar guy who is in a position of power of the crew. In those days, it was very democratic. They can vote people in and out, including the captain. So juggling all of these different cultural, racial, [and] spiritual elements within the crew, and trying to get that energy and put it behind Flint, that was an interesting role to me — one that I understood very well and one that offered a whole array of different facets to a character that Gates has to have. You have to be funny; you have to be charming; you have to be able to be a disciplinarian. You have to understand different cultures and the drives of human beings. It’s such a great character at so many different levels.

GALO: The island of New Providence was one of the most infamous criminal refuges of the 18th century, where people who didn’t follow conventional rules could find safe harbor. What was it like stepping into such a colorful world and preparing for your role?

MR: I think Jon [Steinberg] said something which was quite interesting; he said, “Everybody thinks they know this universe, the pirate universe.” But really what you get is either a cartoony sort of history, or a false idea of what it was like because of the pirate films of the ’30s and ’40s — whereas the history is very different, and actually much more interesting and intriguing. The background of how the pirates became pirates and outlaws, it’s fascinating in itself. The period is at the turning point of upheavals where it’s not long before the American Revolution; it’s not long before the French Revolution. It’s not long before the British Navy basically did become the commanding force on the surface of the oceans. But [the pirates] were rebelling against all of that traditional and royal control and against households and corruption. They were the privateers originally hired by the royal household to fight on behalf of the country, and were then outlawed by the very people who had hired them. So that made them feel like they had been betrayed by their own country, by the royal houses.

GALO: There are so many colorful stories about pirates being pirates, but nothing about this hidden political agenda.

MR: They think that pirates were just a ragtag, ragamuffin bunch of people running around robbing people. It was one of the first democracies in the sense that the crew and the captain only had control of the boat when they were in battle. They had to follow whatever the captain’s orders were, but only when they were in battle. So it was one of the first truly democratic systems of the modern era, and it was done on boats by pirates. But also, these guys were strategists. I mean, they were able to navigate around the world’s oceans with the most rudimentary equipment. If you think about traveling across the Atlantic in those little wooden boats, you understand how tough and how clever and dedicated these men were to have done that.

GALO: One of the most stunning aspects of Black Sails is the scenery and special effects. You can almost sense Michael Bay’s hand in the production, since it feels as big as Transformers.

MR: Yeah, I can honestly say that when we all saw the first episode projected down at San Diego Comic Con, we all looked at it and went, “Wow.” I mean, the special effects were just amazing.

We actually built one full size boat and a half a ship, so we could be in the decks. It was fully rigged with gun decks and storage areas. It was quite an amazing set to work on. It was in a couple of acres of water that were a few feet deep. The boats were built so they could actually walk the entire boat. The town itself, Nassau, which is where all the action takes place, they built that entire town. And it looks amazing. Whichever way you look, you see trees. You had pirate camps, you had the brothel, you had the tavern, storehouses, and you had the fort. It was all there. You were literally in that universe with a beach and the water and the waves. And that’s what you expect from a Michael Bay production; his production value is of that scale.

GALO: It’s amazing that the production crew was able to create such a fully immersive set. Did that help to transition between real life and your character on screen?

MR: When I used to come onto the set, the crew would shout out, “Hello, Mr. Gates!” and I would go, “Hello, you scabby bunch of knaves!” I’d be talking to them like they’re pirates. That was part of the role of the character; but as an actor, it was part of the way of creating that wave of reality, where people have that dedication to the job. So that was a lot of fun for me — being involved in that process.

You can catch Mark Ryan on Starz’s Black Sails, which has been renewed for a second season.

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Featured image courtesy of Starz.