IMMACULATE PERCEPTION
ALL-SEEING, MAGNIFICENTLY MOUSTACHIOED DETECTIVE HERCULE POIROT IS BACK TO INVESTIGATE A DEATH ON THE NILE. DIRECTOR KENNETH BRANAGH AND HIS ALL-STAR CAST TELL US HOW THEY’RE HEATING UP THE MURDER-MYSTERY MOVIE
THERE’S NO GETTING around it. Even if you could get around it, it would take some time.
In her books, Agatha Christie variously described Belgian detective Hercule Poirot’s facial furniture as gigantic, amazing, and just plain enormous. In 2017’s Murder On The Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh’s debut outing as Poirot, it was overwhelming, and in sequel Death On The Nile, it is back with a vengeance. Russell Brand, who plays Dr Bessner, admired it on the set “the way one might a follicular mandala”, he tells Empire. “I don’t know how you would endeavour to construe such an extraordinary moustache. On close inspection it seems to be covering five or six mouths. It’s like an Escher drawing it’s an endless moustache, spiralling off into the infinite. An incredible thing. It’s beyond the confines of nature, certainly.”
Emma Mackey, who plays Jacqueline de Bellefort, agrees that it’s “quite a piece”, even though, she notes, Branagh “groomed it slightly for this one.” The trim is hardly noticeable. “It’s not quite as big,” confirms Branagh. “And there’s a reason for that, to be revealed during the course of the movie. Poirot’s complex love life and moustache trajectory is part of the mystery unveiled by Death On The Nile.”
By all accounts, Death On The Nile, while following a huge success — Murder On The Orient Express cost $55 million and made $353 million worldwide — is condensing things in other ways too, shrinking the (mostly new) ensemble a little, zeroing in on an emotional core. This one, says Branagh, goes to “a deeper, darker place”, in line with the novel where, he says, Christie herself “discovered something different through exploring the corrosive power of lust.” Things are about to get hairy.
DISCUSSING A SEQUEL with Branagh as they shot Orient Express, screenwriter Michael Green suggested the director re-read Death On The Nile, as it was such a personal work from Christie. Branagh, a veritable Christie scholar, knew this. “Having really enjoyed biographies of Christie that I’d read in the prep for Orient, I knew that the relationship with her first husband and the break-up of that marriage was very painful to her,” he says. She described Death On The Nile, says Branagh, “as having a feel of reality. She seems to characterise it as something that comes from a raw place.” This piqued Branagh’s interest. The first film was a story of mass revenge. This one would be personal.
Death On The Nile centres around a love triangle between Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), his former fiancée Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) and his new wife Linnet Ridgeway (Gal
Gadot). “Unquestionably, sex and death are absolutely the centre of it,” says Branagh. Indeed, aboard the luxury steamer the Karnak, murder comes quickly. These are evergreen themes. And while Branagh’s film is set in 1937, the year the book was published, he and Green have refreshed it. In the book, Russell Brand’s Dr Bessner is an Austrian physician. “I’m not Austrian in this film,” he laughs, leaning into the, well, Russell Brand of it all. “In this version, Dr Bessner becomes an Essex-born rock star. No, he’s still a doctor. But English.”
Other changes are more pronounced. Salome Otterbourne, in the book a romance novelist, is now a jazz/blues/gospel singer, played by Sophie Okonedo, with Letitia Wright as her daughter Rosalie. So they become “characters from showbiz as opposed to the fringes of romantic literature,” says Branagh. Wright dug into it. “I loved that Rosalie was just so ambitious,” she says. “And also, as a young Black woman, being able to be that ambitious in that time period — she’s making money, she’s independent, she’s really educated — it’s refreshing to play a young woman like that.”
Making that change, says Branagh, “kept us in a world that was more nightclubby, a little rough around the edges, a little more dangerous.” This speaks to his broader approach. “We stayed away from a milder, more reserved, more
WE BEGIN, OF COURSE, WITH THE MOUSTACHE.
superficially sophisticated cocktail language and music of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, and took it to a seamier and more soulful setting. For me the inspirations were noir classics, Dial M For Murder, Double Indemnity… and latter-day pictures, Body Heat, even Fatal Attraction. These hot, lusty atmospheres. People in the grip of extreme passions do do dangerous things.”
On set of the Karnak in October 2019, Empire sits in an elaborate drawing room to discuss such matters with Hammer and Gadot, both sickeningly glamorous, dressed to party like it’s, well, 1937. Hammer, not breaking his character’s upper-class English accent throughout our chat, describes Simon as a “sugar baby”. His new wife Linnet, a wealthy socialite, is “entitled and paranoid”, says Gadot. Despite the era, what they’re exploring, she explains, is as contemporary as ever: “Love, envy, jealousy. Passion. Lust. Greed.” Hammer nods. “All the fun seven deadly sins,” he smiles.
Emma Mackey, meanwhile, says she and Branagh worked intensely to make Jackie, Simon’s slighted ex, fully rounded. “We wanted to play with her sensuality, play with her wit and her darkness, without making her this hysterical English rose who’s sad all the time. Jackie is vulnerable and confused, and extremely lonely. It was important to do all of that and make her strong and not just passive.”
Even Bouc, Poirot’s trusty assistant, has more to explore. Bouc gets involved with Rosalie, but the story also investigates more platonic endeavours. “The film’s about the different forms of love, and the friendship being love as well,” says Tom Bateman, reprising the role of Bouc. “Poirot and Bouc love each other very much. And the film takes Poirot’s backstory further. What is the cost of being this great detective, who’s outside of the world? Do you ever get to love, do you get to have a life? It really mines that.”
Indeed, Death On The Nile will unpack Poirot. And there’s a lot of baggage.
THE DIRECTOR OF 2011’s Thor has been, it appears, keeping a keen eye on the MCU, for in Death On The Nile we go back to World War I, on the bridges and in the trenches, meeting
a much younger Poirot — played by a 22-year-old actor named Kenneth Branagh. “The miracles of modern VFX have worked their magic,” he grins of the de-ageing this August, the film almost finished. For reference, the crew looked at some TV films in which a smouldering Branagh starred in 1983: To The Lighthouse and The Boy In The Bush. “There was a whole series of things I’d forgotten I had, like cheekbones,” he laughs, looking back. “They went missing a short while after that. A few pies later, they were gone.”
In Death On The Nile, then, we meet Poirot as a soldier. “We get a chance to see not only what forged Poirot in the roughty-toughty world that people might not imagine him to have engaged with, that is action, and guns, and fighting and all of that, but also in the affairs of the heart,” says Branagh. Murder On The Orient Express hinted at a seismic romance he had in the past, and Nile’s flashback delves deeper, enhancing his emotional empathy with what’s occurring in Egypt.
The film also continues to explore Poirot’s “OCD obsessions, which really do go to an extreme place,” says Branagh, who seems to have a particular affinity with him there. Branagh tasked his actors with different levels of research. Gadot was given some books detailing how 1930s society women carried themselves. “Did you read them?” asks Hammer on set. “I… I…” she stumbles. He cracks up. “I scrolled through,” she says.
“I conducted some very minor surgeries,” says Russell Brand, prepping to play a doctor. “Some cardiovascular work. I did some dialysis.” He jests. He did, though, look “at the precursors of Médecins Sans Frontières. I made sure
I knew what I was talking about for the stuff that was gonna be on camera. I’m very confident that I will come up with a vaccine for Covid, is the short answer.”
Emma Mackey, though, had to undertake a more exacting process. “Ken wrote this 100-question questionnaire for my character, that I had to answer,” she says. “About her, and her feelings and what she spent her days doing when she’s in Egypt, and how she had the money to get there. The preparation is rigorous. He’s a perfectionist.” Branagh did that with “a number of people”, he says, mostly to overcome any over-familiarity they might have had with the Christie environs: “a certain kind of English convention”, which is not what he wanted. He put himself through the same process, and wrote letters from Poirot, none of which would appear in the film at all.
So there is more than a whiff of Poirot about Branagh’s approach. Indeed, on set, the boundaries could blur. “Poirot is watching us at all times,” says Bateman, “and everyone’s
aware that they’re being watched by him, and we’re trying to please him. That works with him being the director, too: you’ll be doing a scene with him and you’ll be thinking, ‘God, what’s he thinking?’”
Branagh is not unaware of the overlap. “I basically believe that the greatest art is provided by the accumulation and practice of the greatest amount of technique, in order to leap into the greatest level of spontaneity and inspiration you can,” he says, batting it off somewhat. But not entirely. “My experience is that you want your 10,000 flying hours acquired so that there might be some perfect flight ahead of you, but it’s one in which you don’t think about any of that experience. So my Poirotian delving into preparation and detail is because I wanna try and fly.”
Or, at least, sail. And to further ensure his cast felt like they were on a luxury steamer, he built one.
“DON’T TOUCH THE nuts,” says Branagh. “They’ve been there for weeks.”
Back in October 2019, on set of the Karnak, Empire and Branagh sit in plush armchairs, beside a beautiful backgammon table and indeed a dish of nuts, which we do not touch. It’s 22 days into a 57-day shoot, which has been happening here on this real but fake boat in Longcross Studios, Chertsey (near Thorpe Park, if that helps). It’s an incredible creation, 227 feet long, every one of those feet looking authentic, if you ignore the blinding bright blue screen that surrounds it. Branagh filmed the cast as they saw the boat for the first time, all agape.
“The first time you see this boat you’re like, ‘What the fuck?’” says Hammer. “It’s really dope,” says Wright. “I came onto the boat and I said, ‘Wow, Ken. It’s actually a boat.’ And he was just like, ‘I said a boat. You have a boat.’” Filming everybody’s reactions that day was “the smartest thing we ever did,” says Branagh. “That’s all in the movie, and it’s really touching.” Annette Bening, who plays Bouc’s mother Euphemia — “a bohemian, aristocratic woman with a troubled romantic past”, created specifically for this film — can’t get over it. “This is by far the most elegant, detailed set that I’ve ever been on,” she says. “It’s like going to a cocktail party every day, except
very early in the morning and without alcohol.”
Empire is given the tour. Simon and Linnet’s exquisite honeymoon suite with its Art Deco skylight. Poirot’s cabin, where suitcases are piled up in order of size, and socks are lined up immaculately. The paddle wheel, where, we’re told, a corpse is found. Which is nice. We watch some filming, which involves Mackey’s Jackie provoking her ex-fiancé’s new wife. “We’ve already made love twice,” says Gadot’s Linnet in response. “Three,” mouths Hammer’s Simon.
It certainly feels like the action on this steamer will be… well, yes, steamier than the shenanigans of Murder On The Orient Express. “That film, everyone was strangers,” says Bateman. “This is more complicated. It’s moving in a different direction. It’s got more passion.”
Branagh, meanwhile, has his own stakes. Very much not on a boat this August, he is gearing up for the film’s release. Much has changed since
Murder On The Orient Express. Yes, there’s been a global pandemic, but more importantly, Knives Out was released. There, Rian Johnson, another Agatha Christie stan, turned the whodunnit on its head while very much honouring the form.
Death On The Nile had just finished filming when
Knives Out arrived last November, enjoying similar box-office success. Branagh, unprompted, brings it up, calling it a “brilliant picture”.
How did he feel about the way Knives Out moved things on? “It was so much its own thing, so beautifully integrated into its own style,” he says, clearly not viewing it as direct competition. “It had a different way of treating the format that was delicious and often very funny and often cynical, but also had its own heart. I felt that it allowed us to be a little more serious, dare I say it. Although I hope we deliver fun and humour.”
Meanwhile, he is following his own film, this summer’s fantasy adventure Artemis Fowl, which fell, well, foul of Covid and landed on Disney+, to mixed responses. He was sanguine about it, not least because Death On The Nile was on the way. “It’s always nice to know that life is ongoing and you don’t bank on anything particularly,” he says. “I’ve found that with pictures that appear not to have worked, or have worked, there’s a beautiful inconsistency. Time tells, and the success of a picture can arrive in a different kind of form. So you roll with the punches, you roll with successes. Keeping on keeping on is one key to it.”
He does seem, though, enormously invested in Death On The Nile. Christie’s personal story chimes for him too. “You can’t work in material like this where you don’t, just as a matter of course, draw on the way in which the heart is battered, or the way in which the soul is betrayed by the lusts of the body,” he says. “Or on mistakes made in the grip of passion, or what you might come to regard as mistakes, but at the time seemed to be the natural expression of some intense feeling. That is territory that everyone with a beating heart has been down. Stories like this express that moment of understanding: ‘There for the grace of God go I.’”
It may not be attempting to subvert the form, but Death On The Nile could be quite the trip.