SETTING SAIL

‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ Star Reveals Whether He’d Return

Johnny Depp has been teasing a possible revival of the hit movie franchise.

Mackenzie Crook would make another Pirates of the Caribbean movie “for the hell of it,” he said.

The 55-year-old star of The Office played the dim-witted Ragetti, half of the series’ iconic comedy duo alongside the secretly not-so-vicious Pintel (Lee Arenberg), in the original Pirates trilogy.

“Obviously, it’s all about the script,” Crook told Obsessed: The Podcast. “It would be so interesting to even just have a cameo, just see what happened to those characters, Pintel and Ragetti, what happened to them after we last saw them.”

Five Pirates of the Caribbean movies were released between 2003 and 2017. Crook and Arenberg appear in the first three, and Johnny Depp, who played hero Jack Sparrow, appears in all of them.

Depp said in early Nov. that he would potentially return for a sixth movie, prompting speculation about the franchise’s future. Longtime producer Jerry Bruckheimer told Deadline in August that he was “talking with Johnny” about a sixth installment, adding, “We’re working on a screenplay, and hopefully we can get this done.”

Crook said he had “a blast” during the first three movies, especially digging into Ragetti’s character and playing off Arenberg’s comedy. He was even excited about Ragetti’s prosthetic wooden eye, which involved layering two contact lenses on top of one another: one to make his eye bulge and another to create the wood-grain effect.

“I was young and enthusiastic and happy to find myself doing these extraordinary things,” Crook said.

Still, filming was “grueling” at times, he said. It could be difficult to have a floating pirate ship as a movie set and remain “out at sea” during shoots.

“This sounds like I’m complaining,” Crook said. “I was never complaining. But we were out. We had to be all day out at sea on these ships.”

Crook noted that the current filming process would likely mark a stark shift from the initial trilogy, which shot between 2003 and 2007. Though they used CGI for many aspects of the movies, the crew didn’t always rely on special effects to create big explosions; instead, when a ship had to blow up, they “packed it with explosives and blew it up.”

“I don’t think you’d do that now,” Crook said. “It would all be CGI. This felt like the last remnants of old-fashioned movie making. It was special.”

Mackenzie Crook’s current series, Small Prophets, is streaming now on Apple TV.

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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