A Scientific List Of The Best Pirates of the Caribbean Side Characters

Captain Jack in Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man’s Chest, and At World’s End is the best character in the franchise, and Barbossa in On Stranger Tides and Dead Men Tell No Tales is the best character in those movies. But this list isn’t about them. It’s about the side characters that get caught up in our fun pirate protagonists’ wild adventures.

Fair warning: All these characters are from the first three movies because that’s where all the cool characters — except the mermaid— are found (sorry Penelope Cruz).

1. Ragetti

Pintel & Ragetti are the OG characters and the best overall. But which one’s better? My money’s on Ragetti. Pintel’s probably got more of his marbles together, he’s got both his eyes, and he’s canonically Ragetti’s uncle. But Ragetti’s younger, more impressionable, and has lost an eye to the cool-side-character gods. Ragetti forever. He’s even tried to learn to read.

2. Pintel

See above. Cool. Also knows how to say kraken the Nordic way which means he’s chased some buccaneer education of his own accord and you have to respect that.

3. The prison dog

Good boy. Keeper of the Pirate Code somehow and survivor of the Pelegostan tribes. Sea turtles, mate.

4. Tia Dalma

A Voodoo and Obeah priestess, eventually revealed to be Calypso herself. Barbossa’s resurrector, Jack the Monkey’s keeper between films, and maybe too much of a primary character in At World’s End to count but her part is Dead Man’s Chest counts so here she is.

5. Ana Maria

The start of Zoe Saldana’s slow encroachment into every blockbuster franchise on Earth, Ana Maria’s ranking on this list is more representative of that fact than anything the character does in canon. Jack also steals her boat so she has Giselle & Scarlett-style motivations.

6. Giselle & Scarlett

Frankly, Captain Jack deserved each of those slaps. Fun protagonists with no responsibilities to anyone or anything are great to watch on screen but, good lord, they make for terrible people to live any kind of actual life with. And tertiary (or whatever the level down from tertiary is) characters that have to deal with the in-universe fallout of our protagonists’ lives are always fun.

7. Cotton

Stubborn, tough, and willing to lose a tongue and keep pirating. Respect him or not, he’s more of a pirate than we’ll ever be.

8. Cotton’s parrot

“Mind the boat.”

9. James Norrington

Commodore. Mr. Unrequited Love himself. Brave — and stupid— enough to chase the Black Pearl through the hurricane. Arced well and died well but Dead Man’s Chest was not his finest hour. In a one-film franchise he’d be fourth for sure.

10. Jack the Monkey

Monkeys are a cool pirate trope for sure and undead ones are even cooler. One of the franchise’s smartest choices is that he stole a coin from the Aztec chest at the end of Curse of the Black Pearl. Fun to see him swinging about the maelstrom in At World’s End though.

11. Marty

The short dude. Easy comic relief but gets a cool line read warning everyone about the Kraken.

12. Captain Teague

Hey there Keith Richards, nice to see you in this franchise for no reason — twice???

Read a really necessary ranking of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise here.