{"id":885547,"date":"2026-06-22T19:53:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T19:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/885547\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T19:53:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T19:53:20","slug":"death-of-robin-hood-michael-sarnoski-breaks-down-his-revisionist-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/885547\/","title":{"rendered":"Death of Robin Hood: Michael Sarnoski Breaks Down His Revisionist Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Death of Robin Hood writer-director Michael Sarnoski<\/a> never set out to make your father\u2019s Robin Hood.<\/p>\n

\n\tLong known as the heroic outlaw who robs from the rich to give to the poor, Sarnoski\u2019s revisionist take wasn\u2019t purposefully trying to knock Robin Hood down a peg or cater to either political party\u2019s preferred interpretation of the legendary figure. Instead, the Pig<\/a> and A Quiet Place: Day One<\/a> director was simply trying to capture the stark reality of a 13th century brigand.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was less, Let\u2019s make Robin Hood a bad guy, and more, Let\u2019s think about what the life of a medieval bandit might\u2019ve actually been like,\u201d Sarnoski tells The Hollywood Reporter. \u201cThe old Robin Hood ballads, they\u2019re very brutal. The things Robin does are pretty grotesque at times. I wanted to add more gray and more complexity, and a lot of the subversions came naturally out of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSarnoski remixes elements from the 17th century ballad, Robin Hood\u2019s Death, as Robin (Hugh Jackman<\/a>) nearly loses his life while helping Little John (Bill Skarsg\u00e5rd) with a familial matter. The latter then transports Robin to a hillside priory where Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer<\/a>) nurses him until he\u2019s able to get back on his feet. But unlike the ballad, it\u2019s Robin who\u2019s the monster, not the prioress who treats him with bloodletting, an ancient medical treatment to combat illness and infection. This idyllic island community may know Robin as \u201cRandolph,\u201d but his chickens still come home to roost, forcing him to reconcile his dark past with the valiant yarns regaled about him.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Sarnoski, The Death of Robin Hood serves as a reminder that we need to be more careful about the stories we retell.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c[Jodie Comer\u2019s] prioress has this line where she talks about storytelling and says, \u2018Knives cut bread as well as they do flesh.\u2019 And what she\u2019s saying is that she uses stories to help and heal people, whereas Robin used them to perpetuate violence,\u201d Sarnoski explains. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t make the stories themselves good or bad. But we need to be responsible in how we use them and how we let them be used upon us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSarnoski and Comer will soon be reuniting for the pilot episode of The Chain<\/a>, HBO\u2019s limited series adaptation of Adrian McKinty\u2019s New York Times bestseller. Showrun by Emmy winner Damon Lindelof, Comer plays Rachel, a divorced mother who must do the unthinkable to recover her kidnapped child.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve read a lot of scripts with people asking, \u2018Hey, would you direct this?\u2019 But nothing had clicked yet,\u201d Sarnoski shares. \u201cSo this was the first time I read something that I didn\u2019t write that was just a no-brainer [for me to direct]. It feels so me. I get it 100 percent. It\u2019s been really reassuring and exciting to see that I could direct something that someone else wrote and still have it feel personal and exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBelow, during a conversation with THR, Sarnoski also breaks down the Death of Robin Hood\u2019s overlap with the Nicolas Cage-led Pig and Jackman\u2019s Logan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIn Pig, a mythical figure named Robin lives in isolation until his young associate brings trouble his way that nearly kills him. In the Death of Robin Hood, a mythical figure named Robin lives in isolation until his young associate brings trouble his way that nearly kills him. Is Robin Feld partially based on Robin Hood?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tRobin Feld is not based on Robin Hood, but the name was definitely inspired by Robin Hood. I chose the name of Robin because I had always been a big Robin Hood fan. And when I was doing Pig, I never thought I would make a Robin Hood movie, so I assumed I was in the clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI also chose the name Robin for Robin Feld because I liked the transition from thinking his name is Rob to Robin. From a grunt to a poem, Robin just has such a sweetness to it. He\u2019s a connected-to-nature woodsman, and that was part of what always really appealed to me about Robin Hood. My dad and I were big fans of Robin Hood. My dad was this very outdoors-y Eagle Scout\/camping guy, and that man-of-the-woods element was a big thing for me.<\/p>\n

\n\tBeyond that, I am always fascinated by reclusive characters or characters that have removed themselves from society because they\u2019re done with it. So I wasn\u2019t overtly thinking about Robin Hood for Pig, but clearly there was something going on in my head there.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tHugh Jackman in The Death Of Robin Hood<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAidan Monaghan\/A24<\/p>\n

\n\tThey both have the same gray, unkempt hairstyle and beard, but that\u2019s more a byproduct of being a recluse of a certain age.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t(Laughs.) Yeah, there\u2019s a shortage of good barbers out in the woods.<\/p>\n

\n\tRobin Hood has long been a mascot for anyone who opposes tyranny, greed and corruption. What compelled you to recharacterize the \u201cPrince of Thieves\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI have always been fascinated by Robin Hood\u2019s Death, and this movie is based on that early ballad. There\u2019s this evil nun, or prioress, who bloodlets the goodly, heroic Robin Hood. And for such an intimate act, I always felt like their characters were a little black and white. So I really wanted to explore that relationship in more depth, and part of that meant trying to humanize these characters. I wanted to understand what worlds they came from and what brought them here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was less, Let\u2019s make Robin Hood a bad guy, and more, Let\u2019s think about what the life of a medieval bandit might\u2019ve actually been like. There\u2019s a lot of basis for that in the old Robin Hood ballads. They\u2019re very brutal. The things Robin does are pretty grotesque at times. There are even early mentions of him that call him a cutthroat who\u2019s had all these common folks come up with stories about him. It all comes from different cultural contexts, but there is a basis for the brutality there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tA lot of it also came from wanting to understand the prioress character and what a header of that time may have been like. I took a lot of inspiration from Hildegard of Bingen, a German prioress from the 12th century. She was a composer, a theologian and a healer. So I really wanted to explore someone who feels so driven to help society\u2019s outcasts, lepers and orphans that she creates a commune for healing people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo it was less an attempt to subvert Robin Hood, or the lore of Robin Hood, and more a way to just dig into these characters a little more. I wanted to add more gray and more complexity, and a lot of the subversions came naturally out of that.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tHugh Jackman and Jodie Cromer in The Death Of Robin Hood<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAidan Monaghan\/A24<\/p>\n

\n\tThere were a number of people I idolized as a kid, and slowly but surely, they all revealed themselves to be highly flawed figures. So if Robin Hood were real, it\u2019s really not that big a leap to imagine him also being a product of hype.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, and that\u2019s the thing that he\u2019s grappling with in this story. These stories have taken over his identity at this point. He knows he wasn\u2019t some great hero, but when people talk about him, that\u2019s not what they say. There probably wasn\u2019t a real Robin. He might\u2019ve been an amalgamation of a few people. The first written stories about him aren\u2019t till 200 or 300 years after he theoretically might\u2019ve existed. So that\u2019s a long time for the edges to get sanded off and turned into these happy folkloric stories. But the reality of what he did was probably pretty brutal, and there\u2019s a lot of brutality even in the whitewashed cheerful version.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie also got me thinking about that famous <\/strong>Pig<\/strong> scene where Robin Feld goes off on another chef. He shatters his illusions about his restaurant and the lies he tells himself about his career. Does all of this suggest that you generally don\u2019t buy into hype or larger-than-life reputations?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, I think we all should be pretty suspicious of hype. This is a movie about storytelling, narrative and heroes. Between social media and whatever else, we\u2019re surrounded by narratives these days. We\u2019re constantly trying to put some sort of narrative onto everything around us. And in a weird way, it\u2019s made us worse at assessing the world and our place in it. It\u2019s made us worse at understanding ourselves and connecting to other people and empathizing with them. We feel this need to assign heroes and villains, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s making us better as humans. We need to take off the gilding on everything and think about people as human beings, whether they\u2019re good or bad, or do great things and terrible things. We need to get a little better at gray-area thinking, and this movie is about this person who\u2019s struggling with that in his own life.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn researching for this interview, I didn\u2019t realize that there\u2019s a political tug of war involving Robin Hood. Both sides of the aisle project their preferred interpretation onto him. Did you go down that rabbit hole at all?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tNo, I tried to avoid that kind of stuff. I was just really focused on exploring the human side of this story. But I\u2019ve definitely seen it crop up in the marketing that Robin Hood is either a socialist or that everyone has their own take on what the character means. The amazing thing about folkloric characters is that they can carry different cultural connotations depending on who\u2019s telling the story and when it\u2019s being told or retold.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWithout getting directly into that, this is a movie that asks, Who\u2019s telling these stories to what end? Are stories dangerous or helpful? Even [Jodie Comer\u2019s] prioress talks about this. She has this line where she talks about storytelling and says, \u201cKnives cut bread as well as they do flesh.\u201d And what she\u2019s saying is that she uses stories to help and heal people, whereas Robin used them to perpetuate violence. That doesn\u2019t make the stories themselves good or bad. They\u2019re just tools that humans can use for various reasons, but we need to be responsible in how we use them and how we let them be used upon us.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tHugh Jackman as Robin in The Death Of Robin Hood<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAidan Monaghan\/A24<\/p>\n

\n\tI read somewhere that the firsthand stories we retell eventually overwrite the actual memory the story is based on. So whatever embellishments or omissions we\u2019ve made over the years end up replacing the memory. Do you think that\u2019s how myths like Robin Hood take root?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, that\u2019s a huge part of it. Myths are the stories that we culturally tell ourselves over and over again. They are going to transform in time, and while they\u2019re trying to access some other deeper truth, they\u2019re not exactly the truth. But it\u2019s absolutely true that most of our memories are stories we\u2019ve told ourselves or been told. I have memories from when I was a kid that I\u2019m a hundred percent sure are not the literal memory. In my mind, I can see the images from when I was there, but these are images that, in time, I\u2019ve repainted and retold until they take on their own life. Myths are the extreme, cultural consciousness version of that, and it happens over centuries or millennia involving many different societies and groups of people. So these stories are going to get adjusted and tainted, or they\u2019ll sometimes get distilled down to something more essential. But they\u2019re certainly not going to be the accurate representation of what happened.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are definitely shades of Logan in Death of Robin Hood, namely Robin\u2019s guilty conscience and his relationship with a little girl named Margaret. Did you and Hugh ever talk about Logan in order to create contrast?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, that was one of the things that most excited him. On paper, there\u2019s a man of violence dealing with his legacy, but that traces back to Westerns and Samurai movies. You can also go all the way back to Epic of Gilgamesh. It\u2019s an old archetype. What excited Hugh and me was to explore that before taking it in a completely different direction than where Logan goes. If you come into this movie associating Hugh with Logan, it\u2019s, weirdly, a good starting point until we take you in a completely different direction. His performance is also going to go in a completely different direction. So we weren\u2019t worried about that because it gave us a basis, and it was fun to explore how different we could make this. Death of Robin Hood is a very different movie.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMichael Sarnoski and Hugh Jackman on the set of The Death Of Robin Hood<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAidan Monaghan\/A24<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s fitting that you have a Skarsg\u00e5rd in the first third of the film. It just feels like an act that requires one of those guys.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t(Laughs.) Yeah.<\/p>\n

\n\tWas Hugh a good sport about crawling around in the mud during that section?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tHe was an incredibly good sport. It was real mud too. We had stage mud on the day, but we didn\u2019t have to use it because it started pouring rain. We were in a field with a foot deep of mud, and he let us bury his face in the mud. He was like, \u201cI hope I don\u2019t get an eye infection,\u201d but he was there for it. His beard would fall off in the middle of it, and we would just stick it back on with mud. I know for a fact that it was one of the hardest shoot days he\u2019s ever had, but he was just raring to go. He was like, \u201cNo, we\u2019re going to get this.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe whole shoot was only 30 days, and everything at the farm we shot over three days. There are three pretty hefty action scenes there, and each one of those had a night to shoot. These are scenes that Hugh would\u2019ve shot for weeks on a Marvel movie, but we shot the three of them [across three nights]. So we couldn\u2019t have done it without him being so supportive and prepared. He would then have to turn around the next day and do some super contained emotional scene that would make the crew sob. The guy is just incredible.

Did you and Noah Jupe bond over your past run-ins with Death Angels in the Quiet Place franchise?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYes, we did. I adore that kid. He\u2019s such a talented young actor. He was 20 when we shot this movie, and knowing what I was like when I was 20 years old, it\u2019s amazing to see how wise he is beyond his years. He\u2019s been in this industry for so long, and he so knows what he\u2019s looking for and trying to do. So I was really impressed by Noah and his performance. I cannot wait to see where his career goes.<\/p>\n

\n\tAre you looking forward to seeing Lupita Nyong\u2019o take on her own adaptation of a mythical character in <\/strong>The Odyssey<\/strong>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m very excited about that. I can\u2019t wait. I love Nolan, and I love The Odyssey. I love all old myths, so I cannot wait to see what they do with that. Lupita is just incredible, and she\u2019s going to be so good at that.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou and Jodie Comer are reteaming soon for HBO\u2019s adaptation of <\/strong>The Chain<\/strong>. Who recruited whom?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tNeither of us. We both came to the project separately. We met with [EP] Breannah Gibson and [showrunner] Damon Lindelof, and we were both separately excited about it. They both floated to us, \u201cHey, we\u2019re thinking about this person.\u201d And we both were like, \u201cAbsolutely. I would love that.\u201d But it was just like, Ooh, that would be pretty amazing if it worked out. And then it just happened to work out. We both loved working together on Robin, and we\u2019re super psyched to get to do it again. Thankfully, it was just a kismet-y thing that happened.<\/p>\n

\n\tHas Damon outdone himself again?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYeah. This will be the first thing I\u2019ve ever directed that I didn\u2019t write. I\u2019ve read a lot of scripts with people asking, \u201cHey, would you direct this? \u201d But nothing had clicked yet. So this was the first time I read something that I didn\u2019t write that was just a no-brainer [for me to direct]. It feels so me. I get it 100 percent. It\u2019s been really reassuring and exciting to see that I could direct something that someone else wrote and still have it feel personal and exciting. That\u2019s just a credit to the writers on the show. They\u2019re super smart and incredible.<\/p>\n

\n\tIs<\/strong> Death Stranding<\/strong> the next feature? Or do you have several pots on the stove until one starts to boil?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m working on the Death Stranding script now, and yeah, that\u2019s going to be the next feature, for sure.<\/p>\n

\n\t***
The Death of Robin Hood is now playing in movie theaters nationwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Death of Robin Hood writer-director Michael Sarnoski never set out to make your father\u2019s Robin Hood. Long…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":885548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[359425,171,12165,477,351144,53,42318,246518,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-885547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-a-quiet-place-day-one","tag-entertainment","tag-hugh-jackman","tag-jodie-comer","tag-michael-sarnoski","tag-movies","tag-pig","tag-the-chain","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116795515022339666","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=885547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/885548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=885547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=885547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=885547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}