It’s no holds Bard for Branagh when playing Shakespeare
NEW YORK — For Kenneth Branagh, William Shakespeare has always been an emotional, almost physical presence. In Friday’s “All Is True,” this knighted Irishman dons elaborate makeup to play him.
“True” is set in 1613, when fire destroyed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, prompting him to retire.
“Ben Elton, our screenwriter, created a bewildered Shakespeare,” Branagh began during a one-onone interview at the Langham Hotel, “who, after 20 years in London becoming the greatest writer of the age, returns to his home in Stratford, a place that seems very far away. Quiet. Small.
“And with a wife, Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench), and daughters who have plenty to say to him.”
Unusual for that era, “She was older. There was an eight-year age difference in this shotgun marriage. She was pregnant when he was about to leave for London.
“I had made a pilgrimage to Stratford when I was 17,” Branagh, 58, said. “I had hitchhiked — and I was quite a timid adolescent — determined to find out about Shakespeare. Did he really live in this place in the Midlands that’s still quite hard to get to? Those houses are still there.”
No one else but Dench, he confirmed, was considered for Hathaway. Their association goes back decades, onstage and films like last year’s “Murder on the Orient Express” and this summer’s “Artemis Fowl.”
“Judi is ageless and timeless. As an artist she’s pretty remarkable, and it’s not just her expertise with the language and gravitas and wit, but she lived there many years. She and her late husband referred to Shakespeare as ‘the man who was paying the rent.’ She knew every step of those streets. It was a formative part of her life to be in Stratfordupon-Avon.”
As for being unrecognizable in his Will Shakespeare face, Branagh smiled. “I’ve never immersed myself in prosthetics. Prior to this I had a chin piece to play Laurence Olivier in ‘My Week With Marilyn.’
“For this we spent many sessions to get it down to 19 minutes a day. This film was never burdensome. Filming nighttime scenes with only candles and in a period house that was there when he was alive? It was a privilege to immerse yourself in that. That’s when ‘work’ is not work.”
“This was such a personal film,” he concluded. “An extension of that original pilgrimage, which was already a thank-you to this man who had illuminated my darkness.”