If there is anything that defines the career of actor-director Kenneth Branagh – a man who, in his day, oscillated between critically acclaimed adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays and playing the legless, racist spider robot bad guy in Wild West, to drive Thor movies, to make Artemis Fowl– is that each choice seems perfectly designed to make an external observer tilt your head to the side in bewilderment and say, “Really?” We can now add to this trend the da dot, Reported by THR this morning, that Branagh just signed a contract to play UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in an upcoming limited TV series about the COVID pandemic and, uh … Really?
Specifically, Branagh will throw a drop of sweat on the human flop Johnson in the next series by Michael Winterbottom This Sceptered Isle, which will make Winterbottom abandon its usual habits of chasing Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon whenever they get in a car together, in favor of exploring your country’s response to the global epidemic. Writing with Kieron Quirke, Winterbottom will direct all five episodes of the series, based on first-hand accounts ranging from nurses working on the frontline of the disease, to the prime minister’s office, which will again be played by Kenneth Branagh , and … Yeah, really?
Look, wwe are not trying belittle Branagh here, who can still be a great actor when he’s in the mood. It’s more that Johnson is already a caricature of a human being – reactionary, fake jovial and jester in the face of tragedy – that it’s hard not to imagine the whole performance quickly collapsing in a Jenga tower of peculiarities that added quickly. Honestly, just imagining the haircut is enough making us shudder a little.
Branagh last starred in Christopher Nolan’s Principle, in which he played both his villain and his yug dab. (Excuse.) Your last regular The TV show was the last season of the British version of the melancholy Swedish police series Wallander.