Kenneth Branagh EXCLUSIVE Interview on PBS “Wallander”

By Abbie Bernstein On May 9, 2016 In Actor Interviews, Science Fiction & Fantasy Actor and Author Interviews No Comments

PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre brings the U.S. “Wallander” on May 8th

In celebration, series’ star and producer, Kenneth Branagh (Harry Potter), gives us insight into the show, unexpected ties to “Thor” and why Romeo & Juliet was the perfect piece to run in his London theatre.

By Abbie Bernstein

After attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Kenneth Branagh went on to pursue a successful career in film, television, theatre, radio and audiobook narration as an actor, producer, screenwriter and director.

Kenneth Branagh is a protean figure in entertainment. As a film director/producer/adapter/star, he’s provided some of the most acclaimed screen versions of William Shakespeare’s works, including his HENRY V and MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING; his non-Shakespeare directing credits include THOR, JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT and CINDERELLA. He’s done like feats on stage, starting at an early age and continuing through the present – he now runs the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company in London.

As an actor, the Belfast, Ireland-born Branagh has twice been nominated for Oscars (Leading for HENRY V, Supporting for MY WEEK WITH MARILYN).

He’s now completed his fourth and presumably final season as star and one of the producers of WALLANDER, which premieres in the U.S. on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre on Sunday, May 8. The three episodes, adapted from the late Henning Mankell’s mystery novels and shot in Sweden, find Branagh’s Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander coping not only with crime, but with the onset of dementia.

When Branagh participates in PBS’ portion of the winter 2016 Television Critics Association press tour in support of WALLANDER, his theatre company’s production of Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET is on in London. After the main Q&A session, Branagh makes himself available for a follow-up discussion.

Having begun playing Wallander in 2008, does Branagh see the character any differently now than when he began?

Sarah Smart plays Wallander’s humourous and trustworthy co-worker, Ann-Britt Hoglund.

“I always thought, and this is either typical of me or typical of Wallander, that I didn’t see him, or feel as though I was playing him, as a depressive. He wouldn’t probably have acknowledged that, and one of the great reactions we had in the third series was when he was pulled up on this by Hoglund, his colleague played by Sarah Smart. They’re walking and he stops and he goes, ‘I think I’ve got quite a good sense of humor, haven’t I?’ And he’s very surprised that they see him as a kind of dour individual. And I never did. But he’s very focused and narrow in his range of interests and, talking about talking about detectives, it’s as if there always seems to be a price to pay if you have a brilliance, if you’re exceptional in your detective prowess, then it may be that the amount of space and time that takes just removes from you all the common appearances of cheeriness. And so it might be with Wallander.”

How is it playing a Wallander who realizes his mind is slowly failing as dementia takes hold?

“Well, it’s very sort of particular. I’m sure plenty of people in this room may have incidents close to them, or directly, or a personal [connection] to people who are having challenges with dementia of some kind. So the sad news is, you didn’t have to look very far or speak to many people to have real examples of people who had had this challenge. So it was trying to make things as specific as possible, and try and work out what would be particularly frustrating for a man like Wallander, who then has to face the fact that his own particular isolationism – he’s a rather separate kind of individual – makes things pretty tricky if you are starting to become forgetful. And if, like him, you are especially disposed to not share intimate details with your family, then I think the chance of being separate and isolated and paranoid happen very quickly in addition to the practicalities of what can happen when you are losing a sense of who you are, where you have been, and who those are around you.”

“So I think in terms of the playing of it, I was listening and talking to a lot of people specifically about the ways in which people who are dealing with dementia either hide from themselves what it is, or certainly hide from their loved ones how serious the condition may be, or how progressive it may be. And so [the WALLANDER script] was very, very beautifully written by Peter Harness and, as I say, alas, supported by lots of individual accounts of people who’d had this occur inside their families. So you try and be as honest and true and unfussy about is as someone like Kurt Wallander would be, I guess.”

When making THOR, Branagh picked his then-WALLANDER cast mate Tom Hiddleston to play Loki, which had a substantial (to put it mildly) effect on that actor’s career. Does Branagh ever think something along the lines of, ‘rats, I made Tom Hiddleston into a star and now he’s not available for this season of WALLANDER?’

Tom Hiddleston played detective Magnus Martinsson before Branagh cast him as Loki on Thor.

Branagh laughs. “Well, I do remember the difference between showing him [during the making of the second season of WALLANDER] I was working on THOR, and showing him things like the beginnings of a storyboarded animatic version of him and Chris Hemsworth [playing Thor] fighting on the Rainbow Bridge in space at the end of the first movie, and [Hiddleston’s] very youthful, wide-eyed, innocent-looking expression as he thought, ‘Really, I’m going to be doing that? Really? We’re going to be in space, and we’ll be in the middle of all that kind of action.’ And then seeing him a few years later and him being so in the middle of all that [superhero genre filmmaking] that it seemed bizarre to even think we’d been together in this little corner of Sweden. But it was a pleasure.”

“And I’m sure Tom, being who he is, if he were not the busy man that he is, probably would have been delighted to come back, especially in the last series. It would have been great to have him come in for maybe one scene or something. But I fear the world might have immediately said, ‘Look, it’s Loki, Loki’s in southern Sweden,’ and feel like it was kind of a trailer for THOR III.”

Does Branagh have a desire to return to directing the superhero genre?

“Well, no immediate plans to go back into that area, but I think a combination of just being aware of THOR, the comic, when I was growing up, particularly in Belfast, is where I first came across it, and the size, the spectacle of it, magic in it, is not something that you get intimidated by if you do a lot of Shakespeare, because he uses those kinds of devices, whether it’s epic battles, monsters, magic, all of those things are meat and drink to him. So I don’t get thrown in the comic book world by those being used in what some might regard as an extravagant way. Great storytellers use everything at their disposal.”

Were there any technical assets available to Branagh on THOR that he wishes he’d had on any of his less well-funded projects?

“The scale of resources was high, but as people say, there’s never enough time, there’s never enough money, so there are still some constraints, but I just remember when we were filming on the first day of THOR, just the numbers of cameras when we were creating the world of the Frost Giants, the fact that you could sometimes have Frost Giants who were enormous stunt guys in suits, but then if that didn’t work, you could find a way to recreate them with CGI imagery, and the limits on those shows are your imagination. But the resources, if a good idea is had, that’s what’s so amazing. In other shows with lower budgets, necessity becomes the mother of invention.”

The London production company is an obvious topic of conversation. For Branagh, ROMEO AND JULIET never gets old. For one thing, there’s the subject matter, he says:

Romeo and Juliet will be running in London 12 May, 2016 - 13 August, 2016.

“Adolescence and gangs and falling in love, and it seems like an obvious thing to say, but unleashing that. When you see that with a new audience for the first time – I remember watching it, my first theatre production of ROMEO AND JULIET, and it was wild, riotous people, shouting and responding, and then when I saw Baz Luhrmann’s film, I saw it in Boston one Friday afternoon on the first weekend, I must have been the only guy in a room full of fifteen-year-old girls, who were going mad. And it really felt like it was their first time, and it was exciting. So I hope we, with this play and those actors, we do make a difference to some people who might be coming to see the play for the first time.”

Although he’s not in the production, ROMEO AND JULIET appeals to Branagh’s performing instincts.

“Well, as an actor, it’s such a workout, because you’ve got language, which is difficult to deliver naturally, but must be, and when you do it, you get a big kick out of that, you get a big kick out of its impact, and that it’s more than just brilliant prose, it’s often poetry that seems to sing and move people in mysterious ways. And it requires you to, in this case, dance and sword fight and it becomes a complete demand, so I think actors are very, very engaged with it, and it’s not something that you get bored with easily, it’s a workout first to last.”

Branagh has brought several touring productions of Shakespeare to the U.S. in years past; he says he’d like to do it again.

“Well, it’s sort of always on my agenda, and I’ve been very encouraged recently. We did our production of Shakespeare’s THE WINTER’S TALE with Judi Dench and we had a cinema broadcast, which was the Number One movie, as it were, in the U.K. on the evening of the screening. Suddenly, we were Number One, followed by THE HUNGER GAMES and SPECTRE for one evening,” he laughs. “But it gave us an idea that there definitely is an audience out there for Shakespeare, always, Benedict [Cumberbatch] in HAMLET and everything, and our ROMEO AND JULIET will appear in the cinemas, and so it just makes me feel, yeah, given that our first one ended up here, and Masterpiece HENRY V, it would be nice to do one more.”

Watch Wallander NOW

Besides Wallander, are there any other literary detectives Branagh would like to play? Turns out, he’s already on this.

“I will be playing Hercule Poirot for a new film version of MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, so he’s a fascinating character and one I look forward to getting to grips with.”

On the panel, PBS executive Suzanne Simpson says she thinks Masterpiece is “just waiting for whatever you want to do next.”

Branagh tells her that he’s always been intrigued by the idea of adapting Thomas Hardy’s novel THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, something he’s attempted in the past.

So does Branagh thinks that will be his next project with PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre?

“Well, it would be interesting. I do believe in the sort of circular movement of things, and THE WINTER’S TALE, which we’ve just done, was something that I fell in love with when I was nineteen, didn’t know if it would ever happen, but it happened under the best possible circumstances, with Judi Dench. And I spent a lot of time working on THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, in various incarnations, and I would be delighted, and in some ways unsurprised, if it were to end up in the world of Masterpiece, but I’ve learned to some degree to just let these things go at their own pace. WINTER’S TALE took about thirty-odd years to come to fruition, and at the moment, THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE is twenty-five years ago plus, but maybe still has a chance.”

What else is Branagh likely to do soon as a filmmaker?

“I’ve been working on developing some movies based on the books featuring the character Artemis Fowl, terrific series of novels by an Irish author called Eoin Colfer, and Disney hope to produce them, and I’ve been working on those for quite some time, to direct.”

And what would Branagh most like people to know about this last season of WALLANDER?

“That it’s a sort of fitting farewell to a character that I think was a great creation of Henning Mankell. I know I’m personally proud and happy that he was very pleased and delighted by this series of finale films, so I think in that sense it has a sort of authentic connection with the creator of the character and the story, so that might be a nice thing for people to be aware of.”