Kenneth Branagh is not an action star. He knows it. So when he was cast as a former KGB operative in Mayday, he asked the directors what his best approach would be.
Their answer, according to Variety, was simple: get there early.
"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. He showed up ahead of schedule to begin physical preparation, wanting to at least give the impression that his character was a "former lethal KGB operative" and "possible assassin, when necessary."
The early commitment paid off. "The stunt guy said: 'We've never had an actor for this long.' I said, 'I'm that scared.'"
Branagh said the work ended up being "very, very interesting and fun to be involved in the advanced choreography."
Mayday is set in the Soviet Union in 1987. Ryan Reynolds plays a crashed U.S. Air Force pilot who teams up with Branagh's ex-KGB man to escape. Branagh describes his character as a "Top Gun-loving exile in the forest of Siberia." The film releases on Apple TV on September 4. Most of the film was shot in Canada.
When not doing stunt work in the snow, Branagh and Reynolds bonded over soccer. Branagh is a longtime supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. Reynolds is co-owner of Wrexham alongside Rob McElhenney, a club that has climbed from non-league football to the Championship, the second tier below the Premier League.
"That was a source of, for me, fascination, at how they were living the dream," Branagh said, recalling the skepticism that greeted Reynolds and McElhenney's early ambitions for the club. "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 to receive the festival's inaugural outstanding contribution to cinema award. He also attended a 30th anniversary screening of his 1996 adaptation of Hamlet, shown in its full, unabridged four-hour version.
The screening brought back memories of Kate Winslet, who was 20 when she appeared in Hamlet. Branagh had first considered her for his 1994 film Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but she was only 17 at the time. "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 during the Hamlet shoot, on a day Winslet was filming a scene, that the call came through from director James Cameron offering her the lead in Titanic alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.
