While he may not be known as an action star, Kenneth Branagh absolutely wanted to give it a go for “Mayday,” his upcoming Apple TV Cold War action-comedy in which he co-stars with Ryan Reynolds. He just needed to find out how best to get involved.
“I asked the directors, ‘What’s the way to do it if you’re a man of a certain age and it’s not your natural genre?’” Branagh said, speaking at the Variety Lounge at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Their answer: “Get here early.”
So he did, to, as he explained, “start making the body a bit more flexible,” adding that he wanted to at least give the impression that his character was a “former lethal KGB operative” and “possible assassin, when necessary.” Branagh said it ended up being “very, very interesting and fun to be involved in the advanced choreography,” and that getting there early did indeed make a difference. “The stunt guy said: ‘We’ve never had an actor for this long.’ I said, ‘I’m that scared.’”
“Mayday,” being released by Apple TV on Sept. 4, is set in the Soviet Union in 1987 and follows Reynolds’ crashed U.S. Air Force Pilot as he teams with Branagh’s former ex-KGB man — someone he describes as a “‘Top Gun’-loving exile in the forest of Siberia” — to escape.
While not throwing themselves around the snow in Canada, where the film mostly shot, Branagh and Reynolds bonded over a love of soccer, with Branagh being an avid lifetime supporter of Tottenham Hotspur and Reynolds as co-owner of Wrexham alongside Rob McElhenney.
“That was a source of, for me, fascination, at how they were living the dream,” said Branagh, who recalls the very first press conference when the new Wrexham co-owners said that they hoped to take the club from non-division football to the Premier League. “The snorts of derision were involuntary and fun, but now here they are in the Championship [the second tier below the Premier League]. Come on, this is quite something. So yes, we can be pretty nerdish about the beautiful game.”
Branagh was in Edinburgh as the recipient of the festival’s inaugural outstanding contribution to cinema award, but also for the 30th anniversary screening of his 1996 adaptation of “Hamlet,” being shown in its full, unbridged four-hour version (with an interval).
“Hamlet” famously starred a 20-year-old, pre-fame Kate Winslet, who Branagh said he’d auditioned for his 1994 film, “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” but at just 17 she was too young. “She, perhaps uniquely, is the person who walked into the room and brought with them a sense of self possession, not arrogance, but just sort of being fully present,” he said. “She seemed to have a maturity beyond her years.”
It was while working on “Hamlet,” on a day that Winslet was shooting a “mad scene,” that the career-changing call came through from James Cameron to say she would star alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic.” It’s a moment Branagh said he remembers vividly.
“There was a lot of talk about this enormous film that was going to happen, and we were all big fans of Cameron’s. And you felt, we’re at a little pivotal moment,” he said. “There was a smell about ‘Titanic’ that — aside from its name, its director and the subject — it would be very special. The casting search had already been something that had become a sort of legend in its own terms.”
Branagh recalled taking Winslet aside following the “Titanic” call and saying: “Enjoy every moment up until the premiere of that movie, because your life will change after it.”
As he added to Variety: “I hope it wasn’t a depressing thing to hear!”
