Kenneth Branagh on his role as Boris Johnson in the UK pandemic drama ‘This England’
2022 Oscar winner Sir Kenneth Branagh (Belfast, Dunkirk) stars opposite Ophelia Lovibond (Minx) in this historical drama helmed by BAFTA winner Michael Winterbottom (The Trip, Greed, Welcome To Sarajevo).
“Splendid television, history distilled on screen… Watch it and weep” Evening Standard’s 5-star review
Now streaming on Showmax, This England stars 2022 Oscar winner Sir Kenneth Branagh (Belfast, Dunkirk) as you’ve never seen him before: as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, complete with prosthetics, a barrelling hunch and a very good, very bad hairpiece.
Co-written and directed by BAFTA winner Michael Winterbottom (The Trip, In This World), This England blends dramatisation with real documentary footage of the tumultuous first wave of Covid-19 in Britain that engulfed Johnson during his first months as Prime Minister.
Ophelia Lovibond (Minx) co-stars as Johnson’s wife Carrie Symonds, with award winner Andrew Buchan (Broadchurch, Industry, Andrew Parker Bowles in The Crown) as Matt Hancock. Also look out for Emmy nominee Charles Dance (The Crown’s Lord Mountbatten and Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones) as newspaper editor Max Hastings in episode 1.
Winterbottom approached Branagh about the project in late 2020. “I wondered whether it was too soon to be doing something like this: that it was too close to the events,” says Branagh. But, he adds, “What I was really drawn by was seeing so many different strata of society side by side, with this sense of how authentically they had researched it, particularly with people involved. It did seem to me that it was like a chronicle of our nation’s life at a moment of crisis… It seemed to me that it was important to try and capture something while it was still almost white hot.”
Despite the show’s scope, Johnson is central to the story, and it would fall to Branagh to portray this hugely divisive public figure without taking sides. As the actor himself puts it, though, “It doesn’t matter whether we do or not, because people who love or hate Boris Johnson will probably find that this corresponds to exactly what they feel about him. For some, it will glorify him; for others it will have libelled him. They’ll see what they see. But certainly, in the doing of it, the goal was decidedly not to bring any additional spin or commentary on something that was much, much bigger than Boris Johnson… certainly a zillion times bigger than any actor.”
As Branagh puts it, “In that early part of the pandemic, which was such a vulnerable moment for the world, we didn’t know quite what was coming, how fast it was coming, how deadly it was, what the real existential threat was to our lives or to our economic futures. Everyone felt that most people were doing the very best they could… Although subsequently you might argue about whether that best was good enough, against the rush of events, much of it was reactive… It was more about the cataclysmic effect of the rapidity, the ferocious rapidity at which things moved. We really weren’t ready for the volatility, for the changing information and seeing that impact across the country.”
Branagh’s physical transformation into Johnson would take a combination of acting and extensive makeup. Although they’re of similar height, the actor explains that Johnson is “a stockier individual than me, a sort of swift and, some would say, lumbering rugger forward. We all saw him take out that young schoolboy playing street rugby in Japan… That’s a sort of extreme example of a man who leans forward, who barrels rather. That’s the impression you have — he leads with the shoulders, head down. That physicality, the walk and the hurry of the walk as well, was something that came in early on. He has a slight hunch to the shoulders and there’s a sort of sense of somebody taking things on.”
In its effort to achieve a balanced view of the events and those involved, Branagh believes, “There’s a rich complexity to the way that things are presented. It doesn’t duck out of anything, but it just doesn’t quite so easily get on any kind of high horse one way or another. It feels as though the piece puts the viewer in the battlefield somehow. And sometimes, battlefield decisions are wrong.”
Branagh would also need to master Johnson’s distinctive speech rhythms. “There are many examples of the sort of rhythmic element of his speaking: the kind of charging up, the galvanising, in short, cheerleading phrases. He loves alliteration and recognises and serves up pithy phrases. So there’s a kind of physical movement and then a sort of vocal energy that are all wrapped up in the same kind of combative ‘lean in’ to the world that seems to be part of the way he goes through life.”
Then there was the daily makeup routine. “It took about three hours each day to first get into a suit that bulked up the physicality and then to wear various prosthetics,” Branagh explains. “One was like a balaclava of a neck piece and a lot of the time consumption was then just making sure that prosthetic skin pieces were blended seamlessly into my own skin so you couldn’t see the join.”
“Then we had to pull down the eyelids to have the sort of slight slope in the way the eyelids hang that is a Johnsonian family trait and then, yes, there was obviously a hairpiece to wear, skullcaps to sort out and generally from a pair of Y-fronts upwards they stuck on the bits of Boris to me. I have very thin – or some people would say I have no – lips and Boris has quite a big upper lip, so I had a new one of those. It was very brilliantly done but it meant that you were definitely a soup consuming person during the day. It was not a prosthetic that allowed you to be in a world of chewing.”
For Branagh, it was a fully immersive gig that demanded starting work earlier than everyone else, and leaving later too. “Once you started, really, it was the day spent as Boris Johnson,” he says, and, “On the whole, that’s how they treated you. Obviously, the people working on the show knew who you were. But if there were people on set who were new to the job, and you walked out of the loo and walked past them, that would suddenly remind you for a moment, as their faces hung with jaws open at the idea that the Prime Minister had just walked out of the loo. That was when you were reminded of how it worked.”
Times (UK) has already praised, “Kenneth Branagh’s barrelling, air-punching, at times uncanny Boris Johnson impression, while bloated with pouchy prosthetics and fat pads” as well as the series’ “heart-breaking authenticity.”
As Gabriel Silver, Sky’s director of drama, describes it, This England is “a broad and deep factual drama about those tasked to shepherd a nation through the crisis – exposing humanity at its most scared, neglectful, ingenious, desperate, and hopeful…”
Watch This England on Showmax.
