Wallander owes success to writer
Talks to Ken Branagh about the gloomy detective Kurt Wallander and his creator Henning Mankell.
Ken Branagh’s laugh is like warm whisky and honey. With it comes a gentle reassurance that, yes, it’s fine to call him Ken. No one, apart from his late father, called him Kenneth, let alone Sir Kenneth. Even Kenny is acceptable in this part of the world.
‘‘I did a job for the ABC in Australia 30 years ago and made a lot of good friends over there and to them, I’ve been Kenny ever since. So I’m Kenny to my friends in the southern hemisphere, Ken to all other friends, and Kenneth in the programmes.’’
For a knight of the realm and a Shakespearean actor regarded as the best of his generation, Branagh is surprisingly down to earth, something he carries from his working class background of Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he lived for the first nine years of his life before his family moved to England.
‘‘We were a working class protestant family with certain codes about not getting above yourself, that money couldn’t make you happy, that family was paramount . . .those things didn’t ever really go away.’’
To keep his son grounded once he started training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) Branagh’s father, William, insisted he never change his name.
‘‘He had a concern I’d change my name – he thought actors changed their names all the time – but I told him that was only because there might already be someone with your name in Actors equity and he could be assured there were no other Kenneth Branaghs in Actor’s Equity.
‘‘So said ‘Well don’t change it to Ken either’. My father would have been appalled had I changed my name or changed in attitude and character from the kid he brought over from Ireland. He knew I was going into a brash, unusual world where he couldn’t help me but he needed to know I’d be the same guy – that continuity with my background was something he felt strongly about.’’
Actually, there was one other person who called him Kenneth: Henning Mankell, the Swedish creator of the fictional detective Kurt Wallander who returns to our screens on April 11 with Branagh playing the morose, introspective, diabetic, heavydrinking sleuth for the last time (or not).
The fourth series of Wallander is based on two of Mankell’s books – The White Lioness which was originally published in 1993 – and Troubled Man, a late addition to the Wallander series which was published in 2009, a decade after the short story collection, The Pyramid.
Branagh was filming the final series of Wallander in Africa and Sweden as Mankell was dying of cancer and the actor was close to the writer over a number of years but particularly in those last months of his life.
‘‘We got on well, I liked him, he was a very passionate and charismatic fellow who always made a huge impression whenever he was in a room. Every moment you had with him was memorable.’’
Those moments included a sumptuous dinner in Denmark shortly before Mankell passed away in October 2015.
‘‘In living with cancer, from a very bleak prognosis that suggested the end was imminent he had a period of stability and his initial concerns that he would soon be dead became a more even dealing with the disease.
‘‘While there was a melancholy and sense of weight, he was living with greater hope than I thought he would be – he was surprised, frankly, to still be around and relished every moment.
‘‘Although he was honest about being scared of dying I saw him as quite fearless. He was a man of the sea and he didn’t tend to fear the cold the way some people do; he always seemed to be under-dressed and physical hardship seemed not to throw him – he had a vital, physical tenacity.’’
That tenacity was reflected in his writing – Mankell wrote whenever he could, wherever he could.
Branagh remembers him as a man ‘‘who wrote like other people drink water. He was, to me, what you’d call a real and proper writer – he had to write, he was compelled to write. Whenever I was on publicity tours with him I’d notice that if there was any delay, or if the schedule was changed, he would get very agitated if he couldn’t write.’’
And Branagh knows his success as Wallander, like his success with Shakepeare’s characters, owes everything to the writer.
‘‘As the late Alan Rickman said ‘It’s the parts that do it’ and I’ve been fortunate enough to ride on the coat-tails of great writers, particularly William Shakespeare, and with Mankell I’m the lucky recipient of being the person who plays Kurt Wallander.’’
The appeal of Wallander, he says, is the stark contrast to nearly everything else he’s done. ‘‘I always enjoy performances on film that are quiet and I enjoyed Wallander’s perfect selfcontainment and self-possession – he’s arrived at an accommodation with being introspective and it’s almost comic in a way how he doesn’t see his own gloominess.’’
Wallander, he says, is also a product of his environment, the town of Ystad, which is at the southern most tip of Sweden. ‘‘It’s a windy, flat and vast place where you kind of dig in spiritually and mentally – that’s the impression Mankell gives us of Wallander.
‘‘In the first series I felt rather sucked down into the vortex of all that and ended up with shoulders stooped … by the third series and into the fourth I found there was some way you could understand Kurt’s disposition and understand that he had his own ways of being happy, or having fun, or being funny, and they were very Wallanderian and they were very Swedish: dry and wry.’’
The final series takes a deviation in time and place away from Ystad, however, to Cape Town in South Africa for the updated version of The White Lioness, a story which had to be moved 20 years into the future from the time it was written.
‘‘I was glad we were able to do that book,’’ Branagh says, ‘‘but it had to change because the original novel was about an attempted assassination on Nelson Mandela set against a background of the new South Africa full of hope and optimism.
‘‘It was interesting to go back in the person of Wallander to see how that incredible revolutionary moment had panned out 20 years on and it remains a miracle but it also remains unsettled and volatile and I could see how important it was to Mankell to see this nation trying to cope with social equality.’’
It was Branagh’s first time in South Africa and he loved the experience of feeling the country’s ‘‘vitality, anger and agitation in relation to Mankell’s writing’’. He also felt he better understood ‘‘the spirit of Mankell, who went looking for trouble, whether it was in Gaza or southern Africa – and wanted to see what could be learned from it’’.
Mankell was an agitator for most of his life – from protesting against the Vietnam War and Apartheid to taking part in the Gaza flotilla in 2010. He was also a strong advocate for understanding the role played by Islam in Europe. In that context, how did Branagh think Mankell would have reacted to the attacks on Paris and Belgium which came in the months after he died?
‘‘He was a libertarian, a progressive, and he would have seen a real purpose as a writer in trying to both analyse what had happened and to offer some solutions and insights through his sharp point of view.
‘‘He was a provocateur but he was always a doer and always looking for answers and his answer would have been involvement, information, enlightenment, dialogue, action . . . he would have been a loud voice in what for him would not just have been a debate but a debate laced with action.
‘‘And that’s a sad thing to miss.’’