Hayley Atwell Reworked a Treasure Island Fight Scene to Honor Female Pirates

Bess steps into the fight

Hayley Atwell’s Bess doesn’t retreat below deck when a battle breaks out in Paramount+’s new Treasure Island. Atwell asked for the character to join the fight, turning a brief action beat into a nod to women who made their mark in pirate history. The decision gives Bess a more active role in the danger around her, while keeping the scene rooted in the story’s adventure.

In an interview with Radio Times, Atwell said the original suggestion was for Bess to hide below deck during the clash. She rejected that approach, arguing that the moment offered a natural way to acknowledge real female pirates, including the Irish pirate Grace O’Malley. Her request also changes the scene’s emphasis: Bess isn’t simply someone the action happens around, but a character who chooses how to meet it.

“There were very few of them, of course, but they were extraordinary forces of nature,” Atwell said. She pictured Bess still dressed in her gowns and finery, but ready to draw a gun. That image keeps the character’s established appearance in view while refusing to treat it as proof that she can’t fight. The choice, Atwell explained, fits a woman who has spent the story adapting quickly and using whatever is nearby to defend herself.

“She’s always in some way fighting,” Atwell said. “So that felt like an absolute natural progression of what had already been written.”

A larger role for Jim Hawkins’s mother

The battle also reflects how the adaptation has expanded Bess’s place in the story. Atwell plays the mother of Jim Hawkins, a character with little presence in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel. That gives the series room to build out a figure who, in the source material, offers little for an actor to draw on. Atwell recalled being surprised when the role was offered: “I read the novel in my teens, and I don’t remember any women in it really. So when the offer came through, I was like, ‘Who do they want me to play, the parrot?’”

David Oyelowo, who stars as Long John Silver, joked that the parrot role “would have been good.” The exchange points to the novel’s familiar cast of male adventurers, and to the adaptation’s choice to give Bess more room within that framework. Expanding her part can broaden the story’s view of life aboard the ship, though the scene’s force still depends on how convincingly her actions grow from the character Atwell describes.

Oyelowo’s childhood pirate fantasy

Oyelowo said he grew up watching the Disney and Robert Newton versions, reading comic book and simplified editions, and wanting to be a pirate. Along with playing an astronaut and a cowboy, he said, the series completes his childhood trio of dream roles. That history gives his performance a personal connection to the material, but it also places him in conversation with earlier screen versions that helped shape his idea of Silver.

For Oyelowo, the appeal lies in the story’s open sense of adventure: life at sea, elaborate costumes and the chance to play a character whose apparent weakness becomes part of his fighting style. Long John Silver’s peg leg, he said, works like a wooden club. He also enjoyed bringing sword fighting to the screen after studying it “to an obsessive degree” at LAMDA. Physical detail matters here: Silver’s fighting style turns a visible limitation into part of the character’s capacity for danger.

What the adaptation carries forward

Atwell described the adaptation as retaining the novel’s themes of greed, personal ambition and the danger of power becoming corrupted. Those ideas give the pirate adventure more to work with than its treasure hunt and sword fights; they make the struggle over power part of the story’s central tension. She also pointed to the book’s lasting influence on pirate language and familiar phrases in popular culture. The series therefore has two jobs: to deliver the recognisable adventure and to make its characters feel present to viewers who already know the story.

This is more significant than it looks. Giving Bess a place in a fight is a small change in screen time, but it signals a broader choice about who gets to act within a story long associated with male adventurers. And yet, a single action beat can’t establish the full shape of that choice. If you’re watching for how the adaptation handles Bess, the more revealing question is whether her agency continues beyond this scene (and this is the part most people overlook).

A nod to history, then, but also a test of character. Atwell’s account suggests Bess’s intervention is meant to follow from traits already written into the role, rather than arrive as a detached gesture. Whether the series sustains that logic across her expanded place in the story will determine how much the change adds. That’s the promise—and the challenge.

Treasure Island stars Oyelowo and Atwell, with new episodes released weekly on Mondays on Paramount+. View Green Video on the source website

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