How Michael Sarnoski Created “A Good Death” For Robin Hood
“What does this quiet death in a sunlit church bedroom between these two people look like?”
What’s the first thing one thinks about when it comes to Robin Hood? A dashing archer? A talking fox? A man in tights?
For centuries, the medieval hero was seen as just that: a hero. He was the legendary outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor — and rebelled against tyranny. He led a merry band of outlaws and had a beautiful, noble ladylove. And for years, that’s how The Death of Robin Hood writer-director Michael Sarnoski saw him, too.
“As a little kid, I was a big Robin Hood fan,” Sarnoski tells Inverse. Sarnoski credits his dad, “a very outdoorsy guy” and Eagle Scout, for sparking that love for the character by introducing him to the animated Disney Robin Hood. But when Sarnoski’s dad passed away, a neighbor gave him an old Robin Hood storybook to help him through the tough times. “He had this sort of schoolboy version of Robin Hood from the 1940s, and it felt like an ancient text. It smelled old, and it felt sacred in some way,” Sarnoski recalls. “And that was the first time I read Robin Hood’s Death.”
Robin Hood’s Death is a curious story, originating as a ballad dating back to the 17th century. It tells of Robin Hood’s unlikely demise at the hands of his cousin, a prioress, who takes too much blood during a routine bloodletting treatment. And that’s it — there’s no grand battle or swashbuckling tale of derring-do. Just a man dying quietly in his bed. That element in particular struck Sarnoski.
“You just don’t think of these mythological folklore characters as dying. And he had such a human, quiet, simple death,” Sarnoski says.
It stuck with Sarnoski for so long that the Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One director would eventually turn the story — or his interpretation of it — into a script that became the beautifully grim new thriller The Death of Robin Hood. He would change a few key things, of course, like the mysterious prioress’ motivations and the depiction of Robin himself, played by a grizzled Hugh Jackman. But he kept the core of the story — the quiet, simple death — and took it a bit further: “I really wanted to unpack it more and explore these characters as human beings,” he says.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Death of Robin Hood.
The Death of Robin Hood Ending Explained
Robin Hood finds himself at peace for the first time.
The first way that Sarnoski turns Robin Hood from a figure of legend into a human being is by making him the opposite of a hero. In The Death of Robin Hood, Jackman’s Robin is a self-described “murderous brigand,” an outlaw whose exploits were driven just as much by greed as by justice, if not more so. He and his “Merry Men” have left a trail of bodies in their wake, and it’s starting to come to roost for Robin, who has spent the better part of his twilight years paying his “blood debts,” aka vengeful family members of people he’s killed coming to return the favor.
But after his last quest to help Little John (Bill Skarsgård) take back his family and farm, Robin is mortally wounded, and Little John takes him to an isolated priory where its prioress, Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), heals all who come to her for help. It’s there that Robin finds peace for the first time, befriending Brigid and the priory’s self-appointed guardian, the Leper (Murray Bartlett). He even becomes the unlikely guardian for Little John’s daughter (Faith Delaney), who seeks Robin out after her father is murdered. It causes Robin to start to reassess his one wish for “a good death.”
Robin makes a new arrow.
“On some level, he really wants to die, but he has a certain expectation for what that death is going to be,” Sarnoski explains. “And then the movie becomes about him readjusting his understanding of what that right death might look like. And that’s why we start in this intensely violent place and then go to this kind of serene, more transcendent kind of place, because that’s sort of the transformation he’s having with his own understanding of the death that he’s seeking.”
But Robin has a few more challenges to overcome before he can get his death wish. First, the arrival of an injured young man (Noah Jupe) at the priory sparks Robin’s suspicions that the men who killed Little John are coming after his daughter. Then a few revelations from the dying Leper shake Robin’s world: The Leper is actually one of Robin’s former victims, after Robin left him with his life but took his ear. And the prioress Brigid is one too — her husband and children were brutally slaughtered when Robin and his men locked them in their burning house. The Leper begs Robin not to tell the prioress and instead to take his place as the protector of the priory, but Robin doesn’t comply. Instead, he takes the mysterious young man back to the shore — not to kill him, but to implore him to stop the cycle of violence. And when he returns to the priory, he tells Brigid the truth. Brigid is infuriated at first and nearly kills him out of revenge during a bloodletting, but changes her mind. But Robin asks her to finish the job she started, and she does, letting him bleed out as he dies in his bed.
How The Death of Robin Hood Changed The Story
Jodie Comer as the Prioress.
It seems like The Death of Robin Hood is an entirely revisionist take on the hero, but there are more loyal elements to the original than you might think: In the ballad, the prioress did take too much blood for sinister reasons, most of which are unclear — in some interpretations, she’s the lover of Robin Hood’s enemy Red Roger; in others, she’s just bad.
“In the original story, it’s very like the prioress is kind of this evil nun and Robin’s the goodly hero,” Sarnoski says. “And I was like, there’s something so intimate and beautiful about what happens between the two of them. And that characterization of them seemed sort of overly simplistic. And I wanted to unpack, who was this prioress, really?”
That’s what led Sarnoski to make the biggest change to the story (apart from making Robin Hood an aging, murderous outlaw stuck in a cycle of violence): He turned the “evil” prioress into a kindhearted healer.
But even this violent depiction of Robin Hood isn’t that far off from the original myth: “There were five early ballads of Robin, and Robin Hood’s Death was part of one of those. And those were the earliest written records of Robin, and they’re brutal. He’s chopping off people’s heads and wearing them into town as a joke. And it’s like, this is pretty rough.”
Then, finally, there’s the change to how Robin’s death comes about: a sort of assisted suicide that is carried out by the prioress. It seems like an odd ending to such a violent revisionist take on Robin Hood, but it was one that was inspired by the nature of that quiet death in the original ballad. “The idea of slowly bloodletting someone to death, that’s a very personal, intimate way to kill someone,” Sarnoski says. “And I was like, I want to explore that intimacy.”
He continues, “I liked this idea that at the end it starts as a revenge killing and then it sort of transforms into a mercy killing, assisted suicide, and it becomes like the death itself is something that the two of them discover together. That goes back to that initial thing that I found so fascinating about the story: What does this quiet death in a sunlit church bedroom between these two people look like?”
