The posthumous performance of Ray Stevenson in the Star Wars series Ahsoka is being rightly praised despite his somewhat limited dialogue in the series, something he makes up for with his commanding on-screen presence.
Stevenson’s depiction of the force-sensitive character Baylan Skoll relies heavily on subtle facial expressions and his skill of emphasizing certain words with particular emotions, which is imperative considering the very restricted script for his character.
Yet, to everyone watching, it’s all quite sad because earlier this year Stevenson shockingly passed away just a few days shy of his 59th birthday.
He suffered serious chest pains while filming the movie Cassino in Italy back in May 2023. He was admitted to the hospital, but his chest pains worsened and he passed away the next day. No actual cause of death has yet been revealed.
One of Stevenson’s many memorable roles was as the infamous pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, in the award-winning Starz series Black Sails.
For those who have not yet seen Black Sails, I dare say turn away or consider the rest of this article a spoiler alert.
In the show, Teach is returning to seek out another pirate, Charles Vane, whom he had teamed up with on many adventures before and was a mentor to but who had also done him wrong the last time they saw each other. However, Teach wasn’t returning to take vengeance on Vane but rather seek him out to re-team with him. Why? As Stevenson so perfectly portrays in the series, Teach has something of a soft spot for Vane and sees him as the son he never had, something he eventually tells the fellow pirate.
Surprised over Teach’s sentimentality, Vane agrees to team up again with Teach but somewhat on Vane’s terms. Teach thus becomes a great help to Vane’s immediate aspirations.
Portraying a fearsome pirate with something of a heart is not exactly easy to pull off for any actor, but Ray Stevenson offered a model performance. His role, as a sword-slashing villain with complicated emotions, also likely greatly benefitted him in his role as Baylan Skoll, a lightsaber-slashing villain with complicated emotions.
However, Black Sails was not the first time he depicted a swordsman. Stevenson played Porthos in the 2011 film The Three Musketeers, which greatly swayed from the its source — a literary classic courtesy of Alexandre Dumas. In fact, the Musketeers sort of become pirates at one point in the movie, and even end up pirating on zeppelin-like balloons in the sky. It’s quite unique, really, though I personally prefer the 2014-17 series from the BBC, titled The Musketeers, which Black Sails coincidentally feels much more like, especially in terms of era depiction.
In episode XXIV of Black Sails, Teach reveals the single most motivating reason for wanting to forgive Vane and reconnect with him.
Teach is asked by a woman who knows him all too well what suddenly changed his mind about Vane.
Stevenson then delivered his lines with a natural poignancy, something perhaps slightly unfamiliar to the series about plundering Pirates. “Things are different now. It doesn’t need to last long.”
Teach then follows up his cryptic statement with a further explanation while pointing to just above his heart. “A little Spanish shrapnel. It went in there when I was not much older than him. Once in a while it migrates, ticks closer to reaching its terminus and striking its chime.” Teach ends his explanation by moving his fingers an inch or two to his heart.
Teach had little time left before his heart would suffer and fail him. While watching the scene now, it’s sadly difficult not to think of Stevenson’s untimely passing, and the chest pains he experienced while his heart failed him.
“A grim little timepiece.” Teach tells the woman, while all-too-aware of his own mortality.
The scene, filmed in 2015, can serve as a haunting reminder for us all. It’s just a matter of time before we meet our own respective mortalities and that unwelcomed meeting could be much sooner than we expect.
Nonetheless, for Ray Stevenson, he was kind enough to leave us decades of such impactful scenes and other more joyous work, much of it without depicting a swordsman. He may have left this world, but so did his Ahsoka character Baylan Skoll — who journeyed not only to another world, but to another galaxy.
Maybe that’s where we’re all headed.
Black Sails is now streaming on Netflix and I very highly recommend it.