Branagh is an actor who wants every line to arrive, and will give it a shove if it has not. That eagerness makes his Shakespeare clear and his comedy strenuous; he is at his best when someone, usually Emma Thompson, makes him ease off.
Fi1m perspective
Watch his Hamlet in the middle of a long speech. The thought arrives, we have it, and then Branagh finishes it with an extra push, as if he did not quite trust us to catch it. That is him in one gesture: forceful, eager, unwilling to let a word go unnoticed. It is why the full text of Hamlet (1996) can be followed for 242 minutes without effort, which is a rarer gift than it sounds. It is also why he so seldom does less than he could.
The career divides fairly neatly. After Henry V (1989), which he directed and starred in, came a run of films with Emma Thompson: Dead Again (1991), Peter's Friends (1992) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993), with Hamlet (1996) as the summit. Then Hollywood, first as a villain in Wild Wild West (1999), later as director of Thor (2011) and of three Poirot films between 2017 and 2023 in which he also wore the moustache. Alongside those, he has become a reliable supporting presence in other people's large films: Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020), Oppenheimer (2023) and The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026).
Thompson is the key. In Much Ado her Beatrice answers back so quickly that Branagh's Benedick has to listen, and when they stop working at the comedy the affection between them is persuasive. In Dead Again the two of them have enough warmth to carry a plot about hypnosis and reincarnation that would otherwise be a dry puzzle. Denzel Washington, in Much Ado, shows the other route: he does almost nothing and the film gains weight around him, which tells you what Branagh's flourishes cost. And yet in Hamlet we felt the prince's frustration as our own, all that energy in the speaking and no decision at the end of it, and for once the pushing was the point.
The pushing is the problem elsewhere, and critics have been saying so for years, usually with the word ham. His Loveless in Wild Wild West is broad enough to belong in that overbuilt film, and occasionally supplies the silliness the leads cannot. The first two Poirots were long, crowded and lit like adverts, and the performance matched them. A Haunting in Venice (2023) trimmed the moustache and the acting with it: this Poirot is tired and quiet, and for once the accent is not the loudest thing in the film. It is the best of the three, and it is the one in which he does least.
The supporting parts in Dunkirk and Oppenheimer did not need singling out in our reviews, and that is a compliment: he fits the frame and leaves it to Nolan. In The Devil Wears Prada 2 he is given less to do than his billing suggests. Start with Hamlet, then Much Ado and Dead Again for the Thompson years, and the Venice Poirot for the quieter man he can be when he chooses. Somebody should ask him to choose it more often.
Biography
Kenneth Branagh is a British actor and filmmaker. Born in Belfast on 10 December 1960 and raised in Reading, Berkshire, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
He is known for directing and starring in film adaptations of Shakespeare plays, including Henry V (1989) and Hamlet (1996), as well as the Hercule Poirot series beginning with Murder on the Orient Express (2017). He directed and starred as Poirot in A Haunting in Venice (2023), appeared as Niels Bohr in Oppenheimer (2023) and as Sator in Tenet (2020), and is set to appear in The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026).
Branagh received an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Belfast (2021). He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 2012.
