Guy Remmers Is Ready for Anything

Based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel about a group of adventurous and wealthy young American women searching for husbands in Victorian England, the hit series The Buccaneers appears on its surface to be a frothy and frivolous fantasy, with all the expected period trappings of corsets, costume balls, and carriages. The second season, which wraps up today, began in the aftermath of the wedding of the American heiress Nan St. George (Kristine Froseth) to Theo, the Duke of Tintagel, played by Guy Remmers in his television debut. Over the course of its eight episodes, however, the show has tackled serious social issues ranging from domestic abuse to the legal fight for women’s rights, adding a sense of wider import to the love triangles and relationship dramas. “Something I’m really proud of with this show and with this team is that there’s all this light, glossy, shiny stuff,” says Remmers, “but it also touches on some really quite dark, important stories that need to be told, which are unfortunately so relevant today.”

Just as the series has deepened in its second season, Remmers’s performance as Theo has as well. Whereas the first season from 2023 focused largely on Nan’s conflicting affections for both the Duke and his best friend Guy (Matthew Broome), with both suitors coming across as charming paragons of gentlemanly conduct and manners, the latest episodes find Theo freed from some of the constraints of his title and his public role after he discovers that Nan slept with Guy the night before their wedding. For Remmers, who spent months practicing horseback riding, swimming, painting, and his accent to embody the Duke physically, the new season has offered an unparalleled opportunity to challenge himself on an emotional level. “To play a character that has lots of different shapes and sizes and shades to them is really exciting—and shapes and shades that were very different to season one,” he says. “I was really excited to evolve this person and see how he copes with these new challenges that present themselves in his life.”

As in Bridgerton, The Buccaneers approaches its historical era from a refreshingly contemporary perspective, diverse in race and sexuality while reconsidering issues from the past for a current generation. As the Duke, Remmers says that he felt a responsibility for his performance to be somewhat more “period-accurate” given his character’s social standing, but that embodying Theo was more about connecting with him on an individual level and trusting the process. “Something I’ve taken from many actors I look up to is that you do all this prep, and then when you get to set, you just try and forget it all and just empty your head,” he explains. “So much changes, and you can plan how you want a scene to go meticulously, but it’s always going to be different on the day. If you’re able to just know that all that work that you’ve done is somewhere within you but to not hold tightly onto it when you’re shooting and to just let go and be present with the other person, that’s when beautiful things present themselves that you could never have prepped.”

With few credits to his name at the time, Remmers was first asked to audition for a much smaller role on The Buccaneers before being brought back to read for Theo, one of the two male leads. He recalls being immediately drawn to the project and says that coming in fresh for Theo may have been to his advantage. “I think it was almost a blessing really, because I actually hadn’t had much time to overthink this person,” he says. “I hadn’t taped for that character, so I kind of went in there as a blank canvas and I think that probably freed me up a bit.” Still, he felt an intimate connection with the role from the very start. “I felt like I knew him and I felt like he was in me and I didn’t have to dig that deep or stretch that wide to find who this person was,” he explains. “His voice was in me quite naturally. I just remember really enjoying being him and seeing the world through his eyes, and I think that’s the magic ingredient.”

This second season has allowed Remmers to understand his character even more intimately, as he has struggled to come to terms with the betrayals he has experienced, deciding to focus on his private life as Theo rather than the public role of Duke. “We’re tapping into who he is in his core and how he’s feeling,” Remmers adds. “We start to see a side to him that the shackles are off and he’s not restricted by the pleasantries and the decorum that is expected of him. I think there’s some beautiful moments where he’s just feeling from the heart and they’re not necessarily all positive feelings. There’s a lot of anger and hurt and pain.”

The Buccaneers has brought Remmers to worldwide attention for the first time, but the thirty-year-old has been focused on acting since a fateful encounter at secondary school while growing up in Bristol. “I remember one day walking past a rehearsal of Oliver! and I just have this distinct memory of literally stopping and going, ‘Whoa, what is that? What’s happening over there?’” he recalls. “There was just this energy of play and performance and storytelling, and I was just like, ‘Whatever that is, I want to be a part of that.’” He auditioned for the next school play and landed the role of Smolsky, a police officer, in the gangster comedy Bugsy Malone. “I remember doing it and I remember hearing people in the audience laugh at what we were doing,” he says. “That feeling was just so incredible and infectious and it was the first time where I felt like I was decent at something. That’s the origin and I’ve never looked back from there.”

He soon joined the Bristol Old Vic’s Young Company, a regional youth theater, and performed in a play called The Grandfathers that traveled to the National Theatre in London. “That was the moment when I was like, ‘This is it, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life professionally, this can be my life,’” he says. “I was very lucky that I had that moment when I was eighteen years old.” He spent a few years traveling around Europe modeling while pursuing acting, and The Buccaneers is the fortunate result of many years of hard work and perseverance. “There was a seven-year period of auditioning for things and getting close and not getting them and doing short films and all that stuff,” he recalls.

With his recent success, Remmers says he feels up for “anything,” although he notes that he would particularly like to play a detective. Still, it’s clear that he would relish, he says, any challenge. “I still have that feeling from when I saw Oliver! and did Bugsy Malone when I was tiny, I still have that feeling with me today where I just love getting to be a part of an ensemble and a team and getting to tell important stories and see the world through different people’s eyes,” he adds. “I’m excited to and passionate about playing and being in many different worlds and filling many different characters’ boots.”

The Buccaneers is now streaming on Apple TV+.