‘Treasure Island’ Stars Hayley Atwell & David Oyelowo Explain Major Book-to-Screen Changes

Treasure Island is one of the most adapted stories of all time, but the newest iteration at MGM+ takes several bold leaps that make it full of surprises to even the most faithful Robert Louis Stevenson reader.

For one thing, Hayley Atwell has a leading role in the series as Bess Hawkins, the mother of Jim Hawkins (Tom Sweet), but the character was little more than a footnote in the original text.

“She’s hardly in the book at all. She’s Jim Hawkins’ mother, but that’s pretty much the only thing that we know about her. So to get the call to be offered a role in this was at first quite confusing because I wondered what exactly [it was]: Was the parrot female? What would I be doing?” Atwell admitted to TV Insider. “Then I read the scripts written by Robert Murphy and thought, ‘What a brilliant way of updating this version, which is still true to the spirit of the book and the call to adventure in the book and has all these universal themes, and … offering it to a modern-day audience and what feels like a much fairer representation of the female experience.”

Atwell looked to Grace O’Malley a.k.a. Gráinne Mhaol, a 16th-century Irish woman who took over her father’s trade business on land and sea, for inspiration. “Grace O’Malley was a reference point for me, both psychologically and emotionally, but also visually as well. And I had the picture of her that we used to think about costumes or illustrations of her and what she might have looked like. And so I found it this very freeing experience of going, ‘There’s not much to draw upon, and therefore I can create the version of Bess that feels most alive and most also useful for the whole story,'” the actress explained.

MGM+

Similarly, the backstory of Long John Silver, a book-based character for whom the word “iconic” isn’t hyperbolic enough, gets a major upgrade in this iteration: Here, he’s a former Caribbean slave, and actor David Oyelowo found the freedom of developing this new version of him to be “a relief.”

“I think it’s the only way I would entertain doing it and be excited about doing it is that there is a genuinely fresh way in as opposed to an imposed fresh way in,” Oyelowo explained to us. “I’m not interested in being tokenistically cast as a Black man in Treasure Island without there being an integrated explanation, given the historical setting of our way.”

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Oyelowo continued, “Once I started to dig in, just even the accent [being] rooted in Jamaican culture as opposed to what we’ve seen beforehand, and how that lends itself and actually helps with some of the more hazardous things you have to deal with when playing Long John Silver. The stump is one thing, the parrot another, but Robert gave us so many catchphrases and will literally have me saying, ‘Ahoy there, Jim lad,’ in the show, but somehow in a Jamaican accent. It feathers it and makes it feel specific and not derivative in the way it might otherwise be. There were all these reasons for me to be excited to play the role as opposed to terrified.”

MGM+

Despite these major updates to the characters, the appeal of this Treasure Island is still the same as it ever was.

“Adventure, of course, is something that we all aspire towards and crave in our lives. I think the open seas afford that awe, that wonder, the unknown, as it were,” Oyelowo said. “There’s something about pirates specifically in relation to that ship, those costumes, the fights, both in terms of what we’ve seen cinematically, what we’ve seen in literature, but also I think it evokes a sort of childhood spirit of play. That is the fun thing for us with this amalgamation of all of those things that draw people towards these kind of narratives, but to ground it in a specificity whereby you’re getting to see a Bess Hawkins, who you don’t really see in the book, certainly not on the ship, so you have a female perspective suddenly in this narrative. And then, for me, playing someone who’s formerly enslaved from the Caribbean, a region in which a lot of the piracy was taking place but you’ve almost never seen true respresenation of that demographic in this kind of narrative, it gives context to a world that we love to see and have loved to see, but with different perspective that we haven’t to this point.”

Treasure Island‘s first episode (of six) is now streaming on MGM+ and will continue airing new segments on Sundays until the series finale on November 15.

Treasure Island, Sundays, MGM+