Production Posse: Branagh's posse includes BRIAN BLESSED, Richard Briers, Derek Jacobi, Jimmy Yuill, Gerard Horan, and (while they were married) Emma Thompson, as well as composer Patrick Doyle and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos.His Shakespearean films often have him overacting just about every syllable in the sentence, whether they warrant it or not. Large Ham: My Week with Marilyn, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.And again as the Belgian Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express (2017).Fake Russian: As the Big Bad in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Tenet.Fake American: Fairly convincingly, in Celebrity, Warm Springs, and Dead Again somewhat less so in Wild Wild West.Fake Nationality: Plays a Third Reich German in Valkyrie and Conspiracy.The poor box office and critical reception for Love's Labours Lost was even worse, and as a result Branagh only managed to direct two low-budget indies over the next decade.But he was still easily able to get plenty of acting jobs as well as directing the indie films he usually prefers. The film was such a huge bomb it was a while before Hollywood would trust him to helm another blockbuster (and made finding funding for Hamlet difficult). Mary Shelley's Frankenstein nearly did this to Branagh's directing career.Colorblind Casting: Uses this in a lot of his projects, as described above.Chewing the Scenery: You could feed a legion of starving children with Branagh's leftover scenery, especially in his more theatre-based films.All three have been financial successes, and Cinderella in particular was a great critical success. He followed that up with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Cinderella. Career Resurrection: Thor seems to have rejuvinated his directing career.The black guard captain in Cinderella (2015) was considered by some to also be a case, though there's actually some historical justification there (at least as far as the film's time period can even be nailed down). In Much Ado About Nothing, he cast Denzel Washington as the Prince of Castile in Thor, it was Idris Elba as the Norse god Heimdall and in Hamlet, there was a black soldier in the Norwegian army. Black Vikings: Practically a trademark of his style.But then again, he already had a reputation of doing this long before Thor (see his version of Much Ado About Nothing (1993) with Denzel Washington as the brother of Keanu Reeves) Ability over Appearance: Invoked when he cast Idris Elba as Heimdall (see below).Tropes associated with Kenneth Branagh include:
#KENNETH BRANAGH HAMLET SERIES#
His television credits include an award-winning performance as Kurt Wallander in the Wallander series (2008-2012) based on the novels of Henning Mankell, as well as the TV-movie Shackleton about Ernest Shackleton and the desperate journey of the 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.