David Oyelowo Makes History as the First Black Long John Silver in 'Treasure Island'
David Oyelowo is reimagining one of literature's most enduring pirates — and rewriting who gets to play him. MGM+ and Paramount+ released the first images this week from their six-part adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, confirming Oyelowo as the first Black actor to portray Long John Silver in a screen adaptation of the 1883 classic. The series premieres October 11 on MGM+ in the U.S. and the following day on Paramount+ in the U.K. and Ireland, with new episodes rolling out weekly through mid-November.
Oyelowo, best known for Selma, stars alongside Hayley Atwell as Bess Hawkins — a reworking of the source material that gives Jim Hawkins' mother a far more active role than Stevenson ever wrote her. Tom Sweet plays Jim Hawkins, with Jack Huston as the manipulative British agent Aaron Graham and Tomer Capone as Billy Bones. The project comes from Wolf Hall producer Playground Entertainment, with Fifth Season handling international sales.
More Than Color-Conscious Casting
What separates this Silver from prior screen incarnations is that the production isn't treating Oyelowo's casting as incidental. According to reporting on comments from Entertainment Weekly, the series acknowledges the historical presence of Black pirates, including people from the Caribbean and formerly enslaved people who turned to piracy while seeking freedom from oppression.
That detail matters enormously, because it's historically accurate and rarely depicted. Piracy's Golden Age — the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the exact period Stevenson's novel draws from — was far more racially integrated than pop culture has ever shown. Pirate crews, operating outside the naval hierarchies and slave economies of empire, sometimes offered escaped and formerly enslaved Black men something close to equal footing: a share of the plunder, a vote in ship's decisions, occasionally even command. It was neither utopia nor guarantee of safety, but it was a documented path to something like self-determination in a world that otherwise offered none. Hollywood's pirate mythology — built on Errol Flynn, Johnny Depp, a parade of swashbuckling white men — has almost never made room for that history.
By writing that context into Silver's characterization rather than leaving his casting to speak for itself, Treasure Island is doing something more ambitious than a diversity swap. It's using a 140-year-old adventure novel to reintroduce audiences to a maritime history popular culture has spent a century erasing.
A Silver With Teeth
The production also seems intent on avoiding a different trap: sanding down Silver's danger to make him more palatable. Executive producer Scott Huff has said Oyelowo brings humor, danger, charm, and humanity to a character who does some genuinely bad things, and Oyelowo himself has been clear that this isn't a redemption of the character — Silver remains dangerous, intelligent, and capable of manipulating the people around him, particularly in his complicated bond with young Jim Hawkins.
That's the right instinct. There's a version of "historic casting" that flattens a character into a symbol — noble, safe, uncomplicated — in order to make the representation feel unimpeachable. Keeping Silver morally messy, charismatic and genuinely threatening in the same breath is what lets the casting function as more than a headline. It treats a Black actor as capable of playing the full, contradictory weight of one of literature's great scoundrels, rather than a sanitized stand-in.
Why the Timing Isn't Incidental
Stevenson's novel has been adapted for screen more than 50 times since 1912, and Silver has been white in every one of them. That this reimagining arrives now, from a production explicitly built around restoring erased Black maritime history, says something about where prestige adaptation is willing to go in 2026 — using a text everyone thinks they already know to smuggle in the history nobody was taught.
Whether Treasure Island fully delivers on that ambition will depend on execution once the series actually airs. But the intent behind the casting — paired with the historical grounding the production is publicly claiming — is worth taking seriously as more than a casting press release. It's a rare instance of "historic first" framing that comes with the receipts to back it up.
