{"id":641684,"date":"2026-08-17T11:43:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T11:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/641684\/"},"modified":"2026-08-17T11:43:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T11:43:11","slug":"kenneth-branagh-on-making-the-move-from-shakespeare-to-action-comedy-in-mayday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/641684\/","title":{"rendered":"Kenneth Branagh On Making The Move From Shakespeare To Action-Comedy In \u2018Mayday\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tActor-director Kenneth Branagh<\/a> arrived in Edinburgh to accept the festival\u2019s inaugural Outstanding Contribution to Cinema award from festival director Paul Ridd and immediately joked that he would break it up into little pieces. \u201cActually, I wouldn\u2019t,\u201d he told the audience, \u201cbut if I did, I would give to you, and I\u2019m not just being sappy. Certainly, the reason why I\u2019m standing here is that because over the last number of years, so many of you have been kind enough to support the films that we do and that are celebrated here at the festival. It just wouldn\u2019t be possible to be working in this industry without appreciative audiences who take a risk and who spend their cash and invest their time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking to The Guardian\u2019s Peter Bradshaw, Branagh discussed his 40-year career in movies both as an actor and director, having screened his 1989 debut Henry V. The event began, however, with an entertaining sample of his upcoming Apple film Mayday<\/a>, an \u201880s-set action film in which he plays a disillusioned KGB agent who teams up with a US Navy pilot (Ryan Reynolds<\/a>) who is stranded behind enemy lines.<\/p>\n

\n\tBranagh was full of praise for writer-directors, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. \u201cYou may know their work from Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons,\u201d he said, \u201cboth films of deceptive ease. Really entertaining, popular movies that are very cannily done. They had planned all the action and the style sequences, so the invitation was for me to step up and enact their imagination. They\u2019re both excellent directors, but I find it terrific to be directed by two directors. They can gang up on you in a really good way, in a helpful way.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI read the script in one sitting,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI was in an airport, during a long delay in coming back home. And I remember thinking, \u2018This knows exactly what it\u2019s meant to be. It\u2019s grasp of the period and its sheer desire to entertain \u2014 but with a lot of very skillful touches \u2014 is great. Why the hell are they asking me to be in?\u2019 I thought Zach Galifianakis should play the part actually, but I was very pleased they asked me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSince the part he\u2019s playing is Russian, Bradshaw asked if he would consider playing Vladimir Putin. \u201cIt depends on the writing,\u201d said Branagh. \u201cBut it also depends on whether you feel that somehow, you can serve [the role] appropriately. But there\u2019s no question that such characters, for all the reasons we\u2019re all too familiar with, are riveting. I guess it\u2019s pretty important to analyze, investigate and understand how and why, in as much as we can draw inferences from what little we know of the inner lives and inner machinations of such regimes, how these people operate. He\u2019s a figure that dominates our experience in many ways, along with a number of other key figures. So just like Shakespeare wrote about all those people in control of the power in our lives, he\u2019s a creature that fascinates us, and from whom we might learn something in the investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBranagh went on to say that his next project was a little more traditional, given his theatrical background, being a documentary about the history of British theater in the 20th century. \u201cIt\u2019s directed by a young British actor, Freddie Fox<\/a>,\u201d he said. \u201cYou may know him from numerous pieces of work and movies, but most recently Slow Horses. He has incredible access to a number of significant people across that period. He particularly focuses on what made the impact of the theater, socially, and the change that it spoke about \u2014 whether it was to do with LGBTQ rights or the political situation in Northern Ireland, et cetera \u2014 but it also contains a really keen interest in performance.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Actor-director Kenneth Branagh arrived in Edinburgh to accept the festival\u2019s inaugural Outstanding Contribution to Cinema award from festival…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[268],"tags":[434,4031,18,117,271408,19,17,107597,154402,2277],"class_list":["post-641684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-edinburgh-film-festival","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-freddie-fox","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kenneth-branagh","tag-mayday","tag-ryan-reynolds"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117110676054231142","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}