This is long and there’s no TL:DR, so if that bothers you, either go grab a drink, or stop reading now. I’m not sure i’ll send a link out on social media for this post; I haven’t so far for any other posts. This website has always been a site that I use to pour my heart out, and if people find it, great. if they don’t, it doesn’t matter. Although maybe people might find it a bit more now. Let me explain.
Last Wednesday night 15th June I was tooling about on the internet, as you do, reading reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and looking at some Masterclass videos, when someone on reddit posted up a link to a site called Ao3 and some fanfic written about the main characters in ‘Our Flag Means Death.’ Now i’m on reddit as Damien-G, and i’m active in the OFMD subreddit, so I thought i’d go have a look at this website and just see if there was any fanfic about my character, out of idle curiosity.
Honestly, I did not think there would be. I really didn’t. I’m in a minor role in two episodes.
But there was! Admittedly, all the fanfic portrayed my character as a complete dick, because he was, because that’s what I set out to do, because that was in the script.
Still, as a nerd myself who used to write fanfic, this was a major bucket list item ticked off! I have fanfic that mentions a character I played in a tv show! Are you kidding me?! I didn’t care how my character was portrayed in these stories; the fact that people took their time to write, creatively, about MY CHARACTER, was huge! I started to cry a little bit, in fact I am kinda sniffling as I write this. I affected people in my acting work! This is all I ever wanted!
Holy fuckballs!
So just before I went to bed, I posted something up on Twitter and did a little shout into the void about how happy I was, expecting my usual level of engagement. Maybe four or five likes and a comment.
Thursday morning, I woke up to an absolute avalanche of love and support from probably the best fandom I have ever been lucky to be a part of, the ‘Our Flag Means Death’ family. What did I do to deserve you guys? God, I love you all! I’m humbled beyond words. I’m just this guy, you know?
My phone blew up and I was here for every second of it. Engaging with real people on social media is something I just didn’t think i’d ever do. And engaging with real people who liked my work, was a dream come true. All my years of training validated in an instant.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore acting and will never give it up, but I have been trying to find my way into the industry for a while now. I’m not interested in achieving fame and fortune solely to get those things, but I am interested in being able to use any fame or fortune I get to help make even just my corner of the world a better place. Help people where I can. Pay all the help i’ve received in the past, forward to other people without any consideration that I am dong it for anything in return. I am helping others purely because I want to live in a world where people help others.
I’ve met a few actors from reddit in real life to give them advice on their careers, or how to get an agent, and i’ve always dismissed any offers of recompense, saying to these people that if they want to repay me, pay the help I gave you forward to someone else if they need it.
Now, after I got diagnosed with cancer in 2018, my life fell apart. I had to stop acting because the chemo and radiotherapy I had made me sick as a dog for over a year. I thought my life was over, but I never stopped believing in myself. I told the doctors to give me everything they had, no matter how sick it made me, because I have too much to live for and too much I still haven’t yet done. Depression still took hold though.
And yeah, it was a miserable time for me. If I had gone back to the UK, while the healthcare was free, the level of actual care meant that I would probably have died. So I accepted the exorbitant medical costs, reasoning that there’s a better chance i’d be alive to pay them off (which i’m still doing, and no that’s not a cry for money). But at the end of January 2020 I got given the all-clear from the doc, after three separate surgeries leaving me with ten horrible scars on my stomach/chest. But I was alive. I had made it through!
I rejoiced, and started to get my acting life back in order. New headshots, acting classes (thank you, BGB Studio in North Hollywood, you guys helped me more than you realise) and all that good stuff.
Then the pandemic hit. Are you freaking kidding me? The world ground to a halt. Depression took hold again and I started to eat. I know everyone else got hit by it too, and many worse than me, but as someone with zero immune system at that point, I had to hide myself away at home and literally see no one at all until my immune system had built itself back up again, because COVID would have killed me. And there’s no way I was going to survive cancer just to be killed by COVID.
Then one of my little kitties died. Billy, my perfect little boy. Jack’s brother. We only had a weekend to say goodbye to him and it hurt a lot. Still does.
Here he is, in his usual place by my side. The big goofball.
Still, I stayed at home, trained with my acting coaches to get better, to be ready for when the pandemic went away and we could get back to work. I found a new voice agent and started going out for auditions with them. I booked the role of ‘Harry Stone’ in Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War
and apparently I nailed the audition so perfectly that they could have just dropped my audio straight into the game. Eight days in the voice studio from August to October for that game. I had already been in Black Ops 4 as a ‘Scorestreak announcer’, so the whole shebang was familiar to me. Still, dream come true.
In fact, I still play CoD BOCW now as the character I voiced and it amuses me that when I kill other players (I mean, i’m not very good), because they have no idea that they were killed by the actor who plays the character that just killed them! Meta!
But although I worked a bit during the pandemic, my bills were high and my depression almost crippling. Some days it was a struggle to get out of bed. I’m sure some of you know what I mean.
In 2021 I started to get more auditions. Some huge stuff too, none of which I booked. Until I got the audition for Stede Bonnet’s dad for an upcoming tv show. Now I already knew who Stede Bonnet was because of my pre-existing interest in all things piratical, and got excited. A couple of weeks went by and I heard nothing. Then on the 1st of July I got another audition for Blackbeard’s father in the same show, so I thought, oooh, the casting director likes me! So I pulled out all the stops. I really got into the role and did my research and shot off a couple of self-tape auditions to my manager for review. I thought i’d use my surgery scars to mimic cutlass scars. Authenticity! She loved them but told me that I can’t have my shirt open in my auditions as partial nudity is a no-no. I didn’t even think about that and offered to redo them. She said no, these were great and she’d send them over.
Well, it worked. I booked the role. At this point, I had no idea what this was about, save that it was an HBO show about pirates, and for the longest time I had wanted to be on an HBO show, ever since I auditioned for Game of Thrones in London back in 2013 (I think). Bucket list item ticked off! I was over the moon. I didn’t care about the money (well, I did a bit as I had medical bills to pay), I was just glad to be on my favourite channel. HBO has done most of my favourite shows, Game of Thrones, Watchmen, True Detective, Deadwood and so on, so it was a major item ticked off to be on that channel.
Then, when I get to set, I find out that I have my own stunt double! Seriously! How cool is that? ANOTHER bucket list item ticked off! And what a truly wonderful person he turned out to be too! And to add to it, I find out that i’m also going to be doing some low-level wire-work stunts of my own! I was so excited! Along with the stunt director, they both showed me exactly what I had to do. Wire work was another bucket list item ticked off! I was knocking them all off my list and I was grinning like a loon for days!
The people on ‘Our Flag Means Death’ were truly wonderful people. Professional and kind with a friendliness that just made them stand out from a lot of other sets I had been on in the past. Don’t get me wrong, it was a high-pressured and fast-moving environment, but these folks were all so happy to be there. This is where i’m meant to be. Doing what I love on a major TV show. I came home from work probably the happiest i’d ever been. Sure, my character was a dick, but I just couldn’t stop grinning.
Of course, I couldn’t talk about it at all. Not until the show came out. I saw all these Deadline Hollywood and Variety posts saying that such-and-such an actor had been added to the OFMD cast, and I hoped the same thing would happen for me, but it never did, as I am an unknown (currently) actor in a minor role. Still, my excitement grew.
Then I had to go back to the UK as my mum was very ill, so at the start of March, I headed back to see my parents for five weeks, literally two days before the first episode of OFMD was due to land on HBO. Gutted! We don’t have HBO back in the UK, so I couldn’t watch it!
I know there are ways and means of getting it, but my computer was over here! So I had to suck it up for a few weeks until I got back. You have no idea how painful that was, still my focus was on my mum and dad, so it took the edge off.
When I got back and watched it, I was blown away. It spoke to me on a personal level, and the acting in the show was sublime!
My scenes got cut down a bit from the dialogue we recorded but I can totally see why. It wasn’t because of me, the scene between Stede and Ed in the bath needed to be punchy and I was basically
just the reason why Blackbeard was how he is, so it needed to be a quick in-and-out to illustrate that, not a long preamble scene. So they cut out a bit where I threatened Ed jr with a bottle of rum and a line to my wife about making my son soft, and just went straight from the “slop” line to the “i’ve gotta get out of here” line. It makes sense in the context of the scene it was inserted into and allows the viewer to get straight back into the main plot.
It hurt a little though, not gonna lie, but I understand why it was done. It’s not the first time i’ve been edited for time/pace, and it won’t be the last time. The life of an actor and I know that every other actor has experienced the same.
I posted about the show a few times on Twitter and Instagram but no one apart from a few friends really picked up on it. Until the linked Twitter post above.
People went crazy. Waking up to 700 new followers, over a thousands likes, retweets and comments, was mind-boggling. I first panicked and thought i’d said something stupid, but then realsied pretty quickly that this was an outpouring of love and support from the fans of the show. I cried with happiness. Recognised! And what’s more, by my own people!
I am a fanfic writer too! Having written about Serenity/Firefly et al in the past. I’m a cosplayer (Judge Dredd) and here’s me in my costume. Look! It even has a Judge Gerard badge. Yes, i’m a nerd. Sue me.
People were worried that an actor seeing the fanfic he was in would be weird, so the OFMD Discord server I joined muted me. I thought it best to leave and not weird anyone else out. But I put up another post on Twitter flying my nerddom flag loud and proud. I’m a roleplayer (Vampire: the Masquerade is my favourite system, fact fans), I build Lego, I play World of Warcraft (Stormrage US), and I used to cosplay and write fan fiction too.
And that post blew up too, and has been picked up by so many different people on different sites.
So then, giddy like a drunk schoolboy, I started to post pictures of my cats, more of me, videos and all sorts of random things, and people didn’t get sick of me, and the outpouring of love intensified, and i’m STILL here for every second of it, as the people who have reached out have been the most wonderful people i’ve had the pleasure of chatting with.
Where a few years ago I was thinking, why am I doing this? Why am I shouting into the void and not getting anything back. In my career and on social media. Now I have voices shouting back at me and telling me how much they loved hating my character, and how good an actor they think I am, and how much they want to see me in the show in series two in a larger role.
This would break me. If I could come back for season two as a crew member, or in a larger role, it would be another dream come true.
I heard a quote that was attributed to Sharon Stone not long after her breakout role in Arnie’s ‘Total Recall’ that said “it took me twenty years to become an overnight success.” And although I don’t know if she truly said that line, the sentiment is true! I’ve worked my butt off for decades in my career. Training constantly, getting better as an actor and trying to be better as a human being all for the day when opportunity knocked and I was there, poised, ready to seize it.
It feels like i’m right on the cusp of something huge. I don’t know what but i’m excited to see where my acting career will go, because I have always believed in myself and my talent, and having others do the same energises me beyond compare. I have a great manager and agent and i’m talking to them as we speak to see what I can do. This is the start of great things for me; I can feel it in my bones.
And, dear reader, I want to share that success with you when it comes around, because your love and support keeps me going.
And i’ll leave you with a quote from a man who was born on this day in 1912:
“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”
― Alan Turing
Damien Gerard 
What an absolutely lovely post. I found it because I was just listening to your interview on the Never Left ofmd podcast.I’ve seen several of the actors express how uniquely supportive they have find the fandom and I can only say that I’ve found the reverse true as well. I don’t remember seeing any fandom with such supportive and involved actors/creators 🥰It must be something about the show but also just the mutual encouragement and love being sent and received by both sides.
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