TV GUIDE: Eddie Izzard Brings His Cheeky Sass to Syfy's Treasure Island
May 4, 2012
by Michael Logan
Shiver me timbers! The original pirate heist caper, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, gets a muscular, edge-of-your-seat reboot on Syfy with Eddie Izzard — yep, the cross-dressing Brit comic — as that notorious peg-legged plunderer Long John Silver. The four-hour epic, which also stars Elijah Wood, Donald Sutherland and newcomer Toby Regbo, has already won big ratings in England, where it ran as a miniseries. Syfy airs it all in one night. The plot: Young Jim Hawkins (Regbo), who is in possession of a map to buried treasure, takes a swashbuckling voyage to the West Indies, little knowing that the ship's cook (that would be Long John) and the seemingly benign crew are actually cutthroat buccaneers determined to get to the gold first. Izzard gave us the lowdown on his killer role...
... TV Guide Magazine: Stevenson never wrote a follow up to Treasure Island, yet there's talk you plan to do one anyway. Isn't that a bit cheeky?
Eddie Izzard: "One has to be careful. I can't reel off a list of sequels to literary classics that have done well, but that won't stop us! We're already working on it. It'll probably be set in the Mediterranean so we can work in the Barbary pirates. Only four of us are left alive at the end of this one, but there are new places we can go, especially with the relationship between Jim and Long John. They're buddies, they're foes, they're like mentor and student or father and son. Long John loves Jim but is also prepared to kill him. [Laughs] I think they have big adventures ahead!"
Treasure Island airs Saturday at 7/6c on Syfy.
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