Keith Richards is not an actor, and his two turns as Captain Teague do not pretend otherwise: they put him on screen in a hat and let the audience do the rest. His best minute on screen is in Gimme Shelter, doing nothing at all.
Fi1m perspective
In a studio in Alabama, in Gimme Shelter (1970), the Rolling Stones listen to a playback of "Wild Horses". Richards lies back with his boots on the console. Nobody speaks. The Maysles brothers hold the shot, and a man doing nothing turns out to be worth watching for as long as they care to run it. That is the whole of Keith Richards as a screen presence, and nobody since has found a better use for it.
His acting career, such as it is, began as a joke that Johnny Depp made first. Depp cited Richards as an inspiration for Jack Sparrow, and the films then cast the original as the copy's father, Captain Teague, Keeper of the Pirate Code, in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) and again in On Stranger Tides (2011), where he is given a scene with his son. He plays a laconic pirate lord who strums a guitar, which is to say he plays himself with a scarf. The part asks nothing of him except to turn up and be recognised, and he does both. Richards has been plain about the arrangement: "I don't pursue it. I don't go around saying, 'Hey, I need a job as an actor.'"
Does it work? Not really, and not in a way that is his fault. A cameo that only lands if you know who is under the hat is a guest appearance, not a performance, and some critics have complained that it upsets the logic of a character whose father should not look like a rock star. We scored On Stranger Tides 45 and found a film that had stopped being strange and settled for being long. Teague passes through it without changing that, and our review did not stop to mention him, which tells you how much weight the scene carries.
We were moved by that studio scene in Gimme Shelter, more than by anything he has done with a script, and we can say why. He was not performing. He was listening, to his own record, and the camera caught a musician hearing whether the thing had come out right. Our review complained that the film otherwise treats him, Wyman and Taylor as hair and hands while it follows Jagger, and that is fair, but for one quiet minute it looked at the right man.
If you want to see what Richards does on a screen, watch him listen. The pirate films will keep.
Biography
Keith Richards is an English musician and actor. A founding member of the Rolling Stones, he has also appeared in films and on television.
He played Captain Teague in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) and reprised the role in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011). Richards has made other screen appearances, including a voice role as himself in an episode of The Simpsons (1989) and documentary contributions such as Gimme Shelter (1970) and Shine a Light (2008).
