Will Turner Pirates of the Caribbean: Character Guide

Will Turner is the Port Royal blacksmith who grows into a pirate captain across the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, and Orlando Bloom plays him. The films credit the adult as Will Turner, and the boy in the shipwreck is credited as Young Will or Young Will Turner. In The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), directed by Gore Verbinski, he first appears as a boy pulled from the wreck by Governor Swann and his daughter Elizabeth, who secretly keeps a gold medallion he was wearing. Years later he is a blacksmith who loves Elizabeth, and when the cursed crew of the Black Pearl under Captain Barbossa carries her off, he teams up with the eccentric pirate Jack Sparrow to chase the ship.

Bloom is billed third in The Curse of the Black Pearl, second in Dead Man's Chest (2006), third in At World's End (2007) and 14th in Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017), directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg. Will is not in the cast of On Stranger Tides (2011), directed by Rob Marshall. That film follows Jack, Angelica, Blackbeard and Barbossa, and no studio or trade source gives a reason for the gap, so any explanation would be a guess.

The whole saga grew out of the Disneyland attraction that debuted in 1967, with the first film arriving in 2003. If you are new to the series, the pirates of the caribbean movies in order guide shows where each of Will's films sits, and the full list of pirates of the caribbean characters places him among the crews he sails with.

Will's closest ties are to his wife Elizabeth Swann, his father Bootstrap Bill Turner, his son Henry Turner and an uneasy partnership with Jack Sparrow. Elizabeth Swann, played by Keira Knightley, is the girl who kept his medallion, the woman he rescues in the first film and the bride Barbossa marries to him during the battle in At World's End. A scene after the credits of that film shows Elizabeth and her young son watching the Dutchman return.

Bootstrap Bill, played by Stellan Skarsgård, is Will's father and a cursed crewman on the Flying Dutchman. His link to Jack matters too: in Dead Man's Chest, Bill visits Jack and tells him he must either serve on Davy Jones' ship or be dragged down by the Kraken. Will's search for Bill drives his bargain with Sao Feng in the third film.

Jack Sparrow is part ally and part obstacle. Jack sells Will out to the Dutchman in the second film, yet the two kill Davy Jones together in the third. Will's dealings with the others are mostly practical: Norrington proposes to Elizabeth in the first film, Beckett sends Will to fetch Jack's compass in the second, and Barbossa is the captain who conducts the wedding.

In my opinion, Will works best when the plan matters more than the speech, and the film that shows it most is Dead Man's Chest. When Jack tricks him onto the Dutchman, Will turns the punishment into a mission, meets his father and steals the key from under Jones' nose. The Isla Cruces duel is the other high point for me, since Will, Jack and Norrington all want the heart for different reasons and the sword work keeps shifting as their motives do.

The cave finale of The Curse of the Black Pearl comes next. It could be argued that Will adds the last coins and his blood almost as a footnote while Jack and Barbossa trade blows, but the curse breaks because of him, which is the quiet payoff to his opening scene as the boy in the wreck.

The wedding in the whirlpool is the most unusual set piece, because Barbossa marries Will and Elizabeth while the Pearl and the Dutchman trade fire. It sounds absurd on paper, and perhaps that is why it works. The parting that follows, with one day ashore every ten years, is the one scene that gives the trilogy a real cost, and the late return in Dead Men Tell No Tales feels earned because of it.