Melbourne
March 29-30, 2025
Melbourne Showgrounds
Zach McGowan sailed into pop culture fandom over recent years with roles on The 100, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Walking Dead and more, but it’s as Charles Vane on Black Sails that he’s developed a cult following.
He stopped by Supanova TV in Brisbane to chat pirate voices, an exciting new project and more.
“When you start acting, you do every job you can get and I used to do voiceover work,” McGowan told Supanova TV host Bec.
“In LA, there’s this thing that happens that’s called voice matching, and you basically match some famous actor that is doing something and they maybe lost them due to a contract thing or they need some dialogue that hasn’t been covered yet.
“I signed a confidentiality agreement, so I can’t tell you who it was or what project it was for, but basically, I had to do an English accent and it was a very deep, cockney, raspy thing, and I kind of perfected it for that job and took that to Black Sails and dropped it a little bit further and upped the rasp.”
“In the casting notice for Vane, they wanted Vane to personify the pirate voice and idea, but they wanted it to be a new kind of pirate voice, they didn’t want that ‘arrr!’ thing. So I fashioned a voice that could not say an ‘r’; Charles cannot say ‘r’, he doesn’t have an ‘r’ in his vocabulary.”
He recently reunited with some of the Black Sails crew on the set of action/adventure/fantasy film The Scorpion King: Book of Souls in South Africa.
“It’s a really cool movie – the best way to understand is like, if you liked Conan the Barbarian, this movie is very much along those lines.”
Keep an eye on our website for the full Supanova TV video in the coming weeks!
Lead image: Zach McGowan at Supanova Adelaide. Pic by Bruce Moyle
