Soccer AM

Every big boy loves dressing up as a pirate.

Kevin McNally
Quotes of the week

Kevin McNally told Soccer AM that there's nothing better then getting paid to play a pirate!

The Birmingham born actor was one of the stars of Jerry Bruckheimer's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and he admitted he loved every minute of playing first mate Joshamee Gibbs.

"Every big boy loves dressing up as a pirate," he said. "We had to spend a lot of time on boats together and everyone just seemed really happy to me.

"You'd notice fully grown men, when nothing was happening, playing with their cutlasses in the background! And then you would spot them and they would say 'I'm just checking to see... you know if it's alright'!"

CGI

It seems impossible these days to watch five minutes of TV without wondering if what you had just seen was all CGI.

So it would be more than reasonable to expect a film on as large a scale as Pirates of the Caribbean to have mostly been filmed in front of a blue screen... not so according to McNally.

"The big thing that Jerry Bruckheimer wanted to do - and in a way it might be the last time it's ever done like this because CGI is taking over so much - is he wanted to make the film with real boats.

"In fact there is a bit in the second film where the Cracken's arm comes down and actually splits the boat in half, well they actually did that! It wasn't CGI they got this boat with this blooming big thing on it and smashed the boat in half.

"So that was a great idea, but for us it meant rather than sitting behind blue screens, going to café's and sitting in trailers, we were actually on the Black Pearl for weeks on end."

Stuck

But McNally admitted there are worse places to be than stuck on a boat with the brilliant Johnny Depp and the 'easy on the eye' Keira Knightley!

"Johnny Depp is a lovely fellow. We would all be stuck on these boats for weeks and days on end and he was as good as gold.

"We didn't have much in the way of support boats because we were so far out, but he really was a good fellow and he had some wonderful stories as well."