Kenneth Branagh comes clean on the torment of doubt as an actor

Once dubbed ‘the new Olivier’, the Northern Irish stage and screen actor and director says he rediscovered the joy of his craft by playing the eponymous Swedish detective on BBC TV’s Wallander

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Kenneth Branagh returns in the fourth series of crime drama Wallander.

Published: 5:01pm, 10 May 2016Updated: 5:00pm, 10 May 2016

Though Kenneth Branagh is perched at the top of his game – both in directing and acting, 10 years ago he had serious doubts.

The star of such films as My Week with Marilyn and Hamlet, and the director of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Cinderella and Thor, Branagh could paper his house with accolades, throw in a knighthood, a theatre company, and a panoply of memorable performances.

But he says, “I found in my 40s a time when I found acting extremely difficult and very pressurised. And I didn’t want to quit, but I had to get over the hump of it. It began when I was playing in Conspiracy for HBO.”

Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in Henry V. The 1989 film was Branagh’s first as director.

Conspiracy was about the meeting of Nazi officials held to determine the “final solution for the Jewish question”. Branagh played SS general Reinhard Heydrich, the leader of the conference.

“It lasted for quite a few years where it was much harder to lose yourself in a character,” he says, seated at a linen-clad table in a hotel room in Pasadena, California.

“It started there because I didn’t want to be part of that man’s psyche, and it felt like one became rather self-conscious about what one was doing. And really, where I rediscovered joy with acting was when Wallander began.”