The Many Lives of Kenneth Branagh

22 min readKenneth Branagh has lived many, many lives. And every single one has a phenomenal story behind it.The classically trained actor and filmmaker has worked as a background extra (see if you can spot him in the crowd in 1981’s Chariots of Fire,) a noir-ish leading man (see 1991’s Hitchcockian Dead Again), a purveyor of mysteries with his Agatha Christie films, a superhero storyteller with 2011’s Thor, a Christopher Nolan regular, and the man who almost singlehandedly made Shakespeare not only thrilling but sexy as hell—as proven by Henry V, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, and Othello.Along the way, he won a screenwriting Oscar for his autobiographical coming-of-age drama Dublin, transformed Robert De Niro into “The Creature” for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and he was the most vainglorious teacher to ever wave a wand in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.In his latest incarnation, Branagh is the most debonair man who will ever punch you in the face. That’s what Ryan Reynolds learns the hard way in their new buddy comedy Mayday, in which Branagh plays a Russian mountain man who rescues (or does he capture?) a downed American spyplane pilot who has crashed within the U.S.S.R. during the late 1980s tensions of the Cold War. The two bicker and pummel each other repeatedly as they flee through the Soviet landscape while trying to avoid triggering an even more catastrophic throw-down between the Soviets and the Americans.Shakespeare famously wrote about “immortal longings,” and as an actor, writer and filmmaker, Branagh has certainly accomplished his own. In this wide-ranging Q&A, he delved into some of his most memorable work—including emotional memories of working alongside legends like Robin Williams and Alan Rickman, and competing for early roles against a young Daniel Day-Lewis.Branagh spoke to me from Stratford-upon-Avon (coincidentally Shakespeare’s birthplace,) where he was appearing onstage with Bill Pullman and Helen Hunt eight times a week in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The bittersweet Russian play dovetails nicely with the resilient Russian sensibilities he tried to conjure as Nikolai Ustinov in the admittedly more lighthearted Mayday, which debuts September 4 on Apple TV.This interview has been edited for context and clarity.Courtesy of AppleRyan Reynolds as American surveillance pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly and Kenneth Branagh as former KGB agent Nikolai Ustinov in Mayday.Plummeting Into MaydayLet’s start with Mayday not just because it’s your latest film, but because a straight-up action comedy is something new for you.It definitely felt new! To be honest, in the nicest possible way when I got it, I said, “Why have they sent this to me? Zach Galifianakis should play this part.” It’s a great part for anyone. I was surprised and thrilled, and the two filmmakers, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daly, really impressed me with Game Night and also with Dungeons & Dragons. They know how to present charm on film—how to reveal it, or allow it to happen.What charmed you?The characters made me laugh. And I was flattered that Ryan, who was one of the producers as well, saw something that could be met here. It was one of the simplest yeses ever. I read it at the airport, in LAX, waiting to come home. There was a delay and I sat for three or four hours and read it from soup to nuts. Then I just rang my agent: “If they're still interested, it's yes.”Was there any part of it that intimidated you? There's a lot of action, a lot of fighting, and physical work in this.I did say, “Just double check—they know how old I am? I hope there's a really good stunt crew on this.” [Laughs.] But I knew that Ryan was a seasoned action guy, and I had been at the helm of various things that contained quite a bit of action. So, I embraced that. I got there quite a bit before we started shooting in order to really get in shape.How much training did you do?By the end, the stunt guy said that they had never had an actor with them for so long, going through the routines and practicing so much. I said, “Look, I'm here because I don't want to break anything.” I thought, well, not only will it hopefully be great action, but it will be fun to see somebody like me do that—maybe.Like seeing your Shakespeare professor throw down in a bar fight?[Laughs.] That's funny. In this crazy business, any chance you get to surprise people is a real opportunity. It's sometimes hard to shift people's perspective. I kept reminding myself that they asked me to do it, so they saw something. I'm going to bet on their choice here.Courtesy of AppleBehind the scenes of Mayday, with Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh.This reminded me a little of Romancing the Stone where you are the Michael Douglas character and he's Kathleen Turner. He makes a lot of sharp observations, but he’s really reliant on you for rescue. One of the remarkable things about Ryan Reynolds is he knows how to judge things. He knew he was a straight guy to some extent in this. We were doing this as he was finishing the gargantuan work of Deadpool & Wolverine, in which he's front and center and punching and sharp and aggressive. Here, he was ready to be in a different territory.The Robin Williams ConnectionThere’s an impishness to your character in Mayday that reminded me of Robin Williams. Maybe it was your look, with that great big beard, which calls to mind Robin in Moscow on the Hudson a little. But then I remembered you knew him and worked with him in Dead Again. Is there any part of Robin Williams in Ustinov?I did worship his comic timing, and I also worshiped him. I worked with him twice because he played Osric in our film of Hamlet. And he played Cozy Carlisle in Dead Again, because he fancied the part. As you know, he was both this star—this personality, this incredible comic—whenever there were more than two people in the room. But he was also the Juilliard student who wanted to be a great classical actor, or at least to include that in his mission. There was always a tremendous tenderness I found in him, and I certainly found that in Ustinov.Courtesy of AppleKenneth Branagh keeps his flaming arm a safe distance from his beard in the action-comedy Mayday.What do you remember about your time working with Robin on those films?I was reminded of this instant switch to a kind of beautiful mania. That came from a place that is very delicate and very vulnerable. In Dead Again, even in a couple of scenes, you really get the sense that he carries this dissipated past with him. So he was somebody who, as an actor, had a depth that comedians who have often stared into dark places can bring. You feel as though he had an access to wounds and pain that come across in his performances. He had the capacity to live very openly, a very heart-on-sleeve kind of guy.These are all qualities I see in you in Mayday as this lonely but volatile hermit.A lot of the time, Nikolai Ustinov is that. And then, when necessary, he is a ruthless pragmatist who will do what he needs to survive. Robin didn't have that—but he had all the other things. There was just something about his beautiful atmosphere. It was a really special thing to watch, both the vulnerable Robin and then the wild man.What was he like away from the spotlight?He did three days on Hamlet and it was a Saturday when we finished. He rang me up maybe two hours later. He gave me a call and said, "How was it?" He was not fishing for a compliment, with actor insecurity. It was a genuine question. I was able to tell him with all sincerity that it was just beautiful. It was everything I wanted.Why do you think he called to ask that?I thought, Is he lonely? He’s in London, so I said, "Do you want to come over here?" He said, "I'd love to, but I've just booked myself into The Comedy Store. They don't know it's me. I'm just in the line to do the open mic stuff." And that was the amazing sort of dichotomy. You've just finished playing Osric, and you could come and have a quiet supper, but instead you are putting yourself out there in front of a bunch of strangers in the heart of London's Leicester Square and letting that other part of the demon out. That personality was constantly fireworking. When I think of Robin, I think about a tough guy—inasmuch as you'd have to be able to go out in front of all those people—but so bruisable, so bruisable. Like a fruit that you don't want to mishandle.Well-Known UnknownsLet’s rewind to the very beginning. You joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984, but were you acting before that?School plays from sixteen, and then I went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [RADA] to train, and I got my first theater job with Rupert Everett in a play called Another Country in 1982. I remember it being in the heart of London's West End, and in the next theater, playing with Glenda Jackson and Georgina Hale, was a young unknown guy called Gary Oldman. And then up the street in Kafka's Metamorphosis, another unknown guy was having a splash called Tim Roth.Was there camaraderie or competition?I remember at the end of our run saying to Rupert, after we did six months, "They're keeping the play on. They got a couple of guys taking over. They're having a dress rehearsal tomorrow afternoon. Do you want to go see it?" He said, "I'm not watching anybody play my part. No, no.” Well, I watched it.And …?And he of course said to me that evening, "How was it, by the way? Were they any good?" I said, "It was two guys. One was called Daniel Day-Lewis and the other one was called Colin Firth." [Laughs.] I said, "They were both really, really good actually!”Did it feel like you were part of a community?There was a little sense of, "Oh, there's a group emerging." I remember being in the queue [for an audition] in Withnail and I, and seeing at the end of the corridor Richard E. Grant going in and thinking, "I’ve got no chance. That's done now." And the same with A Room with a View and Daniel Day-Lewis.You were all chasing the same roles at the same time?Gary and Tim and all the rest of us, we would bump into each other out in casting rooms. And there was a sense of quite a lot of camaraderie. Of course, there was rivalry, but it was actually a generation of folks who got on pretty well. And still do.The Chariots of Fire “Cameo”Your filmography on the internet movie database lists Chariots of Fire as an uncredited role. Is that accurate? Were you in Chariots of Fire?This afternoon I signed six Chariots of Fire posters for a real devotee of that movie! I said, "You know I'm only in this for twenty seconds." It’s before the first race, there's a test out in the college quad.How did you get pulled into the crowd scene?At RADA that summer they said, "You want to do two days of filming? It's ten pounds a day to go down to Eton College and be a student in this film." So I went down there and you can see me, there's one shot as the race is about to begin where they look up to the clock. And looking down is, let us say, a fresh-faced youngster. There I was, I definitely did my two days, I did make an onscreen appearance, and people to this day are asking me to sign posters. So there I was this afternoon, signing and feeling something of a fraud. I guess I was in it—and wasn't overpaid!Are you aware of any actors who became prominent later that you placed in a small role?Ten years ago we did a season of Shakespeare plays at the Garrick Theatre in London. She had worked for a bit, but we cast a relatively unknown gal to be Perdita in A Winter's Tale. Her name was Jessie Buckley. We were just part of her, to my eyes, absolutely certain and assured rise to prominence.What was the breakthrough role for you? It seems like D.H. Lawrence was a very important part of making your name. You played one of his characters in 1984’s The Boy in the Bush, and then a year later starred as the author himself in Coming Through alongside Helen Mirren.Well, listen, if you were on screen with Helen Mirren, I consider that a breakthrough. And yeah, I did that miniseries in Australia, The Boy in the Bush, based on his work. And as a librarian at RADA in the summer holidays, I'd read the volumes of his letters that were published. I found him a fascinating creature because he was a working-class or lower-middle-class boy who made it into the arts, the world of literature. That was very inspiring.The Old West and Henry V Skipping ahead to 1989, Henry V is another major level up for you. You’re the lead, of course, but this is also your first film as a director. How did you approach it?In Laurence Olivier's lauded film from 1944, the camera always moves away from him as Henry V does the famous set pieces. He felt Shakespeare was too thick, too rich, too dense in its climactic passages to be closer. And we did the exact opposite. All of the set pieces start wide and move in.Why did you decide to shoot it that way?It was what [theater and film director] Peter Brook calls “the uninformed hunch." Remember, I wasn't brought up going to the theater—I was brought up watching film and television. So my idea of storytelling was very much influenced by what I'd seen in pictures, particularly by what I'd seen in American pictures.What were some of your influences?Great American TV that we watched through the '60s might be The Virginian, or The Man From U.N.C.L.E., or any number of other popular things. Film and TV vocabulary was in my mind much more than my theatrical knowledge. But I did have this unique combination because when I came to do that film, I'd played Henry V 150 times onstage.What did you learn from inhabiting the role for so long?The inner life of Henry V is a much more doubt-filled, guilt-filled individual than the pageant of the surface of the play suggests.I’m surprised by this notion that your Henry V was inspired by American storytelling and westerns.Definitely westerns. I'm a big, big fan of westerns. They were always unafraid of the epic and the mythic. What we did in the film and subsequent [Shakespeare] films was try and capture that cinematic capacity to reveal the individual within.Do you have a favorite western?A film that has always been important to me—and to a gazillion other people—is John Ford's The Searchers. That was an enormous influence when we made Thor. The way the shots were composed, the graphic element of it, the primary colors of it, the sky in that film and the colors in the costumes.Your Henry V revived the St. Crispin’s Day speech in the zeitgeist and created a number of pop-culture imitators. In fact, this relates to your co-star in The Cherry Orchard. Bill Pullman's rousing speech in Independence Day wouldn't be in there if you hadn't repopularized that monologue.I'm touched that you would say it in that way. Dear Bill, absolutely knocked that one out of the park. Around that time [of Henry V,] I got to meet some of the Kennedys at a charity event, and I remember one of them saying [the St. Crispin’s scene] was a speech that JFK was very aware of. Around the Cuban Missile Crisis, this was something that he was heard to quote in terms of being aware that he was in a moment of national crisis where there needed to be a sense of unity. The St. Crispin’s Day speech spectacularly captures that: ”We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”Dead Again’s “Disaster” Test ScreeningsWe touched upon Dead Again, but I’d love to revisit it some more. You and Emma Thompson are so wonderful in that movie. Many people consider it an homage to Hitchcock. Did you see it that way?Yeah, this is the world of Spellbound and Notorious.A little bit of Vertigo too, right?Yes, the atmosphere of unsettled weirdness, slightly icky, the controlling influence, the obsessive nature of his relationship to her. It was a real pleasure, and I remained friends with Scott Frank, the screenwriter who now is famous for a gazillion things from his Get Shorty script and The Queen's Gambit and Dept. Q. He directed several wonderful films. A favorite of mine is A Walk Among the Tombstones with Liam Neeson.How did you get involved as the director?When I picked that script up, there were a million [filmmaker] fingerprints on it. It appealed to everyone, but the richness of the tone, the ludicrous nature of a reincarnation thriller, was not something people felt they could find the right way to deliver. But Scott really understood what he was after.Did you also have a clear idea how to make it?It was a film we previewed for a long time. We did maybe six, seven previews, and it was a disaster for seven of them. And then on the eighth one, we found the way to tell that story so the audience got it and enjoyed it. It went through the roof in terms of the scores at the previews.What was the crucial change?It was the constant evolution for clarity of a relatively complicated plot. And then, in a way that seemed so simple and so obvious, the scenes in the past were played in black and white, and they hadn’t been before. It was what Scott had originally written, but the studio was too nervous about.What made them relent on the black and white flashbacks?By the time we got to preview seven and we were dying, they said, “Christ, well, whatever you want, anything that gets us out of the hole on this.” So we made that change.And what was the audience feedback that time?We were in Sherman Oaks, one weekday night in Los Angeles, and Arthur Cohen, who was the head of marketing at Paramount, enfolded me in a hug. He said, "Look at the numbers. This is bigger than Fatal!” Fatal Attraction is what he meant. He said, "You're not going to do that business, mind you, but we're saved. We're saved!"Shakespeare and Agatha ChristieShakespeare film adaptations seem to be a lifelong project. You played Iago opposite Laurence Fishburne in 1995’s Othello, and in addition to Henry V and Hamlet, you directed and starred in Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing. Was this always something you personally wanted to do—or had you inadvertently become the Shakespeare whisperer to Hollywood? ‘Shakespeare arrived in my life surprisingly, given my [working-class Belfast] background. And when it did, it changed my life because words and plays and stories that seemed not destined to move me did the opposite. They thrilled and changed me. To give an example, with Much Ado About Nothing, that play contains so much contemporary-sounding prose. And its central relationship is two people who really love each other—but pretend to hate each other. That’s a universal and recognizable centerpiece for a romantic comedy.Were you really raised to be averse to it?Without being grand about it, I came from a family background that would've poo-pooed the idea of watching Shakespeare, or felt that they didn't know it well enough. I wanted to break through and present Shakespeare in a way that would allow people to make their own minds up about it, not give it to them as cultural medicine.It’s interesting that you found a way to make it relatable rather than out of reach.You suddenly realize, “My God, if we could get Denzel Washington to be Don Pedro [in Much Ado,] if you could have his faultless instinct for the truth at work in that, if you could have a man listening in the brave and brilliant way he can, that’s a conduit for the audience. There's no reason why they shouldn't understand.Even Shakespeare was making his plays for a mass audience in his day.Boy meets girl, boy rejects girl, girl rejects boy. It all goes to pot for a while and then they get together at the end and there's a wedding and a dance and a song! What's not to like? And along the way, you have a writer who is throwing casually profound insights the way of the viewer. But when you hit, you hit bullseye—and when you miss, you miss by a million miles. And when people don't get it or don't want it, it can feel like paint drying.How do you manage to avoid that?The goal was always: how do we find a way to do this most naturally, most directly into the human hearts and minds of the audience?We talk sometimes about artists and painters going through phases. Do you have your Shakespeare period, your Agatha Christie period? There is something you get out of continued and close practice. Working with Michael Green, who did the screenplays for the Poirot films. We were really working on how you tell those stories. How many suspects is enough? How many is too many? What did Agatha Christie capture in the public imagination that makes people want to see them again and again? And how can we do something new? It's great, great to be able to concentrate for a while on a certain kind of genre and a certain kind of storytelling.One of my favorite things about Belfast are the references throughout that are things that become important in your life later. The Thor comic book, for example. And keen-eyed viewers would've seen the you had plans to adapt Agatha Christie’s The Halloween Party a few years before you actually did it.Yeah, it was a pleasure to be able to do that, and to acknowledge things like High Noon that had a big impact on me—daft things that had a big impact on me like One Million Years B.C. and Raquel Welch. To be able to touch those in Belfast was really a big thank you. That film was something where I really was unfiltered and unbridled in my embracing of all the things that had helped make me.Christopher Nolan: The Time ManipulatorYou've also had a strong Christopher Nolan era, with memorable roles in Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer. What can you tell me about your relationship with him?Something people don't know about him is how funny he is. How quick-witted. He has the capacity for the silly that I enjoy a lot, but I also really respect and enjoy the deep seriousness of his work. He's always there. He's there at the costume fitting. He's there the first time you go through makeup. He's not telling people what to do, but just being vigilant about what he imagined, and what you might bring to it. So his attention to detail is amazing. He was absolutely encyclopedically detailed when he came to see me [in the 2015 London stage production of] Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, which of course is a play which amongst other things deals with time. There's even a character called “Time” in it, and Judi Dench played that in our production. There's a sixteen-year gap between what happens at the end of the third act.Do you think that had an influence on him?It did have whiffs of The Odyssey because it travels across various parts of the Mediterranean. But he was so moved and so brilliant in his perception of what Shakespeare was trying to do with memory, with time. [It’s about] people's lives in the moment when they may be driven to try and right wrongs, and somehow settle life before it all goes away from them. He was so sensitive to that.Universal PicturesBranagh has starred in three Christopher Nolan films, most recently as Niels Bohr in Oppenheimer.What did Nolan say to you about that?It was the morning after he came to see the play. I would say it was a debate, but basically Chris did about forty minutes of a monologue on Shakespeare's Winter’s Tale where he was very moved and very involved, but also analytically sharp as he is about time and how it is very useful in story structures. He was about to hand me the script, of course, in his secret source formula that could never be photocopied or whatever.Which script was this? Dunkirk—which of course has this multi-layered time framework in which it tells its story. So for me, it was fascinating to see him consumed by his interest in what Shakespeare did there. He had an awe, but also the calculation of a really practiced and detailed and formidable storyteller.What’s it like working with him on one of his own films?The other thing in relation to time that I've always admired about him is that if you're an actor on one of his sets, despite the fact that they're often immense and full of moving parts—in Dunkirk, it was the boats, the planes, the trucks, the automobiles—somehow when you come to do the scene, it's as if all of the outside noise just ratchets down. And he can create; I see it in great sportsmen. I love football, and I see people who seem to slow the game down. They seem to be able to work in some parallel time continuum.And Nolan operates like that?He could be amid the chaos, and he will concentrate only on what's required from you in that scene and give you enough time to do it. As focused and prepared as he is, he seems uniquely open to what you might bring to it, even though it might appear to cost him time and organization and some diversion from what he had originally organized. That is an artist at the height of their powers. They have the capacity to organize the circus of making a film on a larger scale, and then to retain the right to work like a miniaturist at the center of it. It feels, from a creative point of view, like a magical capability with time. He makes it stand still in order to create.Harry Potter and FrankensteinYou only spent one film in the wizarding world in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but your role is certainly a vivid one. What are your reflections from your time in that universe?Playing Gilderoy Lockhart was a memorable experience. It was a character of delicious comic complexity for audience and actor. The most indelible memory, however, was listening to the late Alan Rickman and Richard Harris tell theatrical war stories and share their experiences so generously with me. That was like a return to drama school with two wonderful new teachers.I’d love to talk with you about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from 1994. Tell me about working with Robert De Niro to bringing to life this iconic creature, while both playing his creator and directing the film.It was a Rolls-Royce experience because Francis Ford Coppola was the producer and he was active on it. When I had my first meeting with the pair of them, I really felt in a heady place. They were both very sleeves-up about it. I was very rigorously auditioned by Robert.The actor auditioned the filmmaker?Well, I'll put it this way. He saw all the films, and he watched them with me, and he had questions about choices that I'd made. He had also just finished directing his first movie, A Bronx Tale, which he was very passionate about, and we talked a lot about that. So he was very sensitive and helpful about the business of acting in something as well as directing.What suggestions did he make?He was very sensible and helped me understand what an actor like in a part like that might require, like the number of cameras that might be useful if you're doing something difficult, if you got up at two o'clock in the morning to be in full-body makeup, et cetera. He was very clear about what might get the best out of him. It was not just a series of demands from him; it was a proper conversation.What do you remember about shooting those scenes with him as the creature?One day I remember being on set and two people had to come into the scene and had to be breathless. He saw them off set doing press-ups and jumping up and down. And he said, "What are they doing?" I said, "Well, they're trying to get the breathlessness to come onto the set with." He said, "But they won't need that until we say action. That's all wasted effort." I said, "But that's you, Bob. That is your influence! Anybody in a film with you is going to think that that's the least they'll be doing." And he said, "Well, you only need it when they say ‘turnover’ [when cameras start rolling]" I said, "Well, you might've explained that to us before we all decided we had to put on 400 pounds if we played a larger person!”Of course. The method acting of Raging Bull did set a bar for other performers.Or New York, New York where he learned to play the saxophone.Was he immersive like that about playing the creature?We spent one whole day finding out what would be the kind of shoe that would make his gait uneven. So across a day, like a catwalk model, he tried on ice skates, baseball shoes, blocked-up shoes, and then he would try a smaller one on the left foot and then right foot. Then he would try a different combination of those things. We were filming it all to work out, to play a monster that is made up of different body parts from other people, where the legs are going to be uneven.What did you make of that?It was just like somebody carving away at a sculpture or something. The guy that [the doctor] bases the body on has got one leg, so let's work out what that does when you put together the other leg as you are assembling a person. That's the kind of thing we'd do. I was very intimidated going in and very instantly and immediately relieved to find he was a collaborator. I enjoyed it.Have you encountered each other since then?We hadn't seen each other in a long time, and we bumped into each other on a chat show not so long ago. It was really a lovely, lovely moment. We both realized we had a lovely time. We often went out to dinner, just the pair of us, after that show. We just put the world to rights, as it were. It was something so fantastically normal for a guy who, in my view, remains a living legend.Branagh’s Personal FavoriteIs there a film that we haven't talked about that might not be one of your better known films, but is special to you?All Is True is a film that I made in 2017. It's about Shakespeare and the end of Shakespeare's life. It was made swiftly and it has Judi Dench and Ian McKellen. There's a scene in it with myself and Ian McKellen where the Earl of Southampton, played by McKellen, and Shakespeare are talking about their lives where we each recite the same Shakespearean sonnet. We do it one after the other. McKellen does it after me. It was a lifetime thrill to be in a scene with him like that. I remember at the premiere, Ian said to me, "I thought you were going to cut that once you got into the edit. You'd think, well, your version's better and you're not going to repeat the sonnet." He said, “I was very touched you kept it.” The one I thought about cutting was me.Why else does that movie mean something to you?It has a melancholy, and it's trying to understand a bit of what we were talking about with Nolan. It's trying to understand what it takes to be an artist, as grubby as it can be sometimes, as valuable as it can be sometimes, as normal, mundane, prosaic as it can be sometimes—all of which, in the hands of people like Shakespeare, can be transmuted into real gold.