Jack Sparrow
Captain Jack Sparrow is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the Pirates of the Caribbean film series and franchise. An early iteration of Sparrow was created by screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, but the final version of the character was created by actor Johnny Depp, who also portrayed him.[1][2][3]
For the song by The Lonely Island featuring Michael Bolton, see Jack Sparrow (song). For the Jamaican singer, see The Ethiopians.Captain Jack Sparrow
The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Ted Elliott
Terry Rossio
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp (2006)
Jared Butler (2007–present)
James Arnold Taylor (2006)
Smith/Smithy
Justice Smith
Jackie/Jacky
Jackie boy/Jacky boy
Human
Male
Captain
Pirate Lord of the Caribbean sea
Pirate
Formerly: Captain for the East India Trading Company
Crew of the Black Pearl
Formerly: East India Trading Company
Blackbeard's Crew
Edward Teague (father)
Jack (uncle)
The characterization of Sparrow is based on a combination of The Rolling Stones' guitarist Keith Richards and Looney Tunes cartoons, specifically the characters Bugs Bunny and Pepé Le Pew. He first appears in the 2003 film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. He later appears in the sequels Dead Man's Chest (2006), At World's End (2007), On Stranger Tides (2011), and Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017).
In the films, Sparrow is one of the nine pirate lords in the Brethren Court, the Pirate Lords of the Seven Seas. He can be treacherous and survives mostly by using wit and negotiation rather than by force, opting to flee most dangerous situations and to fight only when necessary.
Sparrow is introduced seeking to regain his ship, the Black Pearl, from his mutinous first mate Hector Barbossa. After succeeding, he attempts to escape his blood debt to the legendary Davy Jones while fighting the East India Trading Company. Later, when searching for the Fountain of Youth, he is abducted and taken upon Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge and is forced to lead him to the Fountain while the Black Pearl is trapped in a bottle. In a later adventure, when the ghost spanish Captain Armando Salazar comes after him, he searches for the Trident of Poseidon while also seeking to restore the Pearl to its original form.
The Pirates of the Caribbean series was inspired by the Disney theme park ride of the same name, and when the ride was revamped in 2006, the character of Captain Jack Sparrow was added to it. He headlined the Legend of Captain Jack Sparrow attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios, and is the subject of spin-off novels, including a children's book series, Pirates of the Caribbean: Jack Sparrow, which chronicles his childhood years.
Concept and creation[edit]
Character[edit]
When writing the screenplay for The Curse of the Black Pearl, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio envisioned Captain Jack Sparrow as a supporting character in the vein of Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx.[4] The producers saw him as a young Burt Lancaster.[5] Director Gore Verbinski admitted, "The first film was a movie, and then Jack was put into it almost. He doesn't have the obligations of the plot in the same ways that the other characters have. He meanders his way through, and he kind of affects everybody else."[6] Sparrow represents an ethical pirate, with Captain Barbossa as his corrupt foil, though both characters viewed as both light and dark tricksters.[4] His true motives usually remain masked, and whether he is honorable or evil depends on the audience's perspective.[7] This acts as part of Will Turner's arc, in which Sparrow tells him a pirate can be a good man, like his father.[4]
Following the success of The Curse of the Black Pearl, the challenge to creating a sequel was, according to Verbinski, "You don't want just the Jack Sparrow movie. It's like having a garlic milkshake. He's the spice and you need a lot of straight men ... Let's not give them too much Jack. It's like too much dessert or too much of a good thing."[6] Although Dead Man's Chest was written to propel the trilogy's plot,[8] Sparrow's state-of-mind as he is pursued by Davy Jones becomes increasingly edgy, and the writers concocted the cannibal sequence to show that he was in danger whether on land or at sea. Sparrow is perplexed over his attraction to Elizabeth Swann, and attempts to justify it throughout the film.[9]
At World's End was meant to return it tonally to a character piece. Sparrow, in particular, is tinged with madness after extended solitary confinement in Davy Jones's Locker,[8] and now desires immortality.[10] Sparrow struggles with what it takes to be a moral person,[11] after his honest streak caused his doom in the second film. This is mainly shown by his increasingly erratic behaviour and Jack's hallucinations, which appeared to be simply his deranged mind in the beginning where dozens of "Jack Sparrows" appeared to crew the ship in his solitary exile, but later the hallucinations grew more important and there were mainly two "Jacks" constantly arguing about which path to follow: the immortality or the mortality. The last hallucination took place while Jack was imprisoned on the Dutchman, where his honest streak won.[12] By the end of At World's End, Sparrow is sailing to the Fountain of Youth, an early concept for the second film.[13] Rossio said in 2007 that a fourth film was possible,[14] and producer Jerry Bruckheimer expressed interest in a spin-off.[15] Gore Verbinski concurred that "all of the stories set in motion by the first film have been resolved. If there ever were another Pirates of the Caribbean film, I would start fresh and focus on the further adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow."[16]
On Stranger Tides was first announced on September 28, 2008, during a Disney event at the Kodak Theatre. Verbinski did not return to direct the fourth installment and was replaced by Rob Marshall. The movie uses elements from Tim Powers' novel of the same name, particularly Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth, but the film is not a straight adaptation of the novel.[17]
The fifth film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, was co-directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg.[18]
Fictional character biography[edit]
Before the films[edit]
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Complete Visual Guide gives a backstory to Jack Sparrow in which he was born on a pirate ship during a typhoon in the Indian Ocean and was trained to fence by an Italian.[61]
Books following Jack Sparrow's adventures before the events of the film include a twelve-book series focusing on his teenage years entitled Pirates of the Caribbean: Jack Sparrow,[62] and a five-books Pirates of the Caribbean: Legends of the Brethren Court series.[63]
The 2017 film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, features a flashback with how "Jack the Sparrow" meets the Spanish Navy Captain Armando Salazar. Sparrow was the helmsman aboard the Wicked Wench, a pirate ship which may or may not be the Black Pearl, under the command of Captain Morgan, who was killed in battle. In the flashback, as reminisced upon by Salazar, the Silent Mary attacked pirate ships in battle until Captain Morgan died aboard the Wicked Wench, giving captaincy to young Sparrow. Sparrow outmaneuvers Salazar while being chased into the Devil's Triangle, in which the crew of the Wicked Wench throw ropes around nearby reefs off the port side and use the rigging to slingshot the ship in the opposite direction. Jack steers the ship through the reef, saving the crew and the ship by changing the ship's course at the last second. Afterward, on the deck of the Wicked Wench, the crew rewards Sparrow with "tribute" and bestows Jack with his famous hat and other personal effects.[64]
Ann C. Crispin wrote the Disney Publishing novel titled Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom, published in 2011, which focuses more on the films' continuity rather than the other prequel books, and follows Jack's adventures as a merchant captain for the East India Trading Company, which was hinted in At World's End, due to Crispin reading the screenplay, though the scenes were deleted from the final cut of the film.[65][66] Jack Sparrow captained the Wicked Wench for Cutler Beckett for about a year, hauling various cargoes, but he refused to haul slaves. Hoping to recruit Sparrow as one of his many "operatives", Beckett indulged what he regarded as an odd peccadillo of Sparrow's until he and the captain came to part ways. Beckett had dispatched Sparrow on a mission to find the lost island of Kerma, and the treasure at the heart of its underground labyrinth, but Sparrow double-crossed the EITC official and claimed he couldn't locate the island. Suspicious that Sparrow had indeed found the island and the treasure, but had not given him its accurate location, Beckett determined to browbeat the captain into obedience and demanded that the young captain transport a cargo of slaves to the New World. Initially, Sparrow agreed, but when he realized that he was betraying the Wicked Wench, as well as himself, he rebelled and freed the slaves by taking them to Kerma for safe asylum. Furious that Sparrow had flouted his orders and stolen the "cargo" of "black gold", Beckett had Sparrow thrown into jail. After allowing him to languish for a couple of months, Beckett had Sparrow transported to the Wicked Wench's anchorage, about a mile from the coast of West Africa, near Calabar on the Bight of Benin. After personally branding Sparrow with the "P" brand (so he'd be forever identifiable as a pirate), Cutler Beckett gave the order to fire incendiary carcass charges at the Wicked Wench, to demoralize her captain. Sparrow fought his way free from his guards, dove overboard, and attempted to rescue his burning, foundering ship, but he was too late. The Wicked Wench turned into an inferno, then sank, taking Jack with her. But, while dying, Sparrow called upon Davy Jones, and struck a bargain with him: his soul and one hundred years of service aboard the Flying Dutchman, in return for continued human existence of thirteen years as captain, plus saving the Wicked Wench and transforming her into the fastest, most dangerous pirate ship on the seven seas. Jones agreed and raised the ship from the sea floor, now a charred vessel with an angel figurehead.[67] In keeping with her scorched appearance, Jack painted his ship black and added black sails, rechristening her "the Black Pearl".[68]
At some point, Hector Barbossa joins Jack Sparrow as his first mate. The original backstory was that Jack recruited Barbossa and his cronies prior to the voyage to Isla de Muerta.[4] However, in the Legends of the Brethren Court book series, Hector Barbossa was Sparrow's first mate in the quest for the Shadow Gold, where Tia Dalma tasks them with securing seven vials of shadow gold to stop the evil Shadow Lord from gaining total control over the seas by destroying the Brethren Court with his Shadow Army. Over the course of the novels, they are able to collect all vials shattered across the world by allying with or fighting against the other Pirate Lords. They are able to defeat the Shadow Lord with the combined efforts of all Pirate Lords, after which Jack wants to sail for Tortuga to recruit a new crew. Barbossa offers him to handle that in his stead, implying that he recruited men with the intent to mutiny against his captain.[69]
Two years after his deal with Davy Jones,[44] Jack Sparrow sailed the Black Pearl and used his magical compass in search of the mysterious Isla de Muerta with a new crew, where the legendary Treasure of Cortés was hidden. Bootstrap Bill Turner was already a member of Jack's crew, while the other crewmen, like Pintel and Ragetti, were recruited in Tortuga. Jack was also the one who told his first mate Hector Barbossa and the rest of the crew about the curse that was upon the treasure, though nobody believed this ghost story. Captain and crew agreed to equal shares of the treasure, but devious first mate Barbossa persuaded Jack that equal shares included knowing the treasure's location. Jack complied, and soon after Barbossa led a mutiny and marooned Jack on an island with nothing but a pistol containing one shot. Although Jack was okay with Bootstrap Bill staying on board with Captain Barbossa, Jack hated Barbossa for having violated the Pirate's Code. Jack was able to escape after three days on the island and began his pursuit of the Black Pearl. Within the next ten years, Jack learned of how Barbossa's crew found the Aztec gold and became cursed, despite not believing in the curse placed on it, as well as how they are trying to get all the gold back and add their blood to the chest.[4]