Miracle Of Deliverance

Kenneth Branagh shares his thoughts on taking on the role of Commander Bolton in Christopher Nolan’s World War II flick, Dunkirk

Branagh puts his actor’s cap back on again in the upcoming Dunkirk, which tells the tale of the famous, fierce World War II battle. Here, he reveals what it was like to work with director Christopher Nolan and how his character Commander Bolton fares among a sea of young faces.

When writer/director Christopher Nolan first approached you about Dunkirk, what attracted you more: the filmmaker or the subject matter?

It was the filmmaker. I didn’t know what the subject matter was initially. When Christopher first got in touch, he only said he wanted to chat with me about a project. Later, when he was in London, he came to see our theatre company performing Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and the next morning we were able to meet. That was when I learned he was making a film about Dunkirk.

He walked me through the story and told me he wanted to compress and condense the flavours and experiences of Dunkirk across intersecting stories set on the land, on the sea and in the air. He left me with the screenplay he’d written, which was surprisingly lean but tremendously powerful. It combined all the qualities people associate with Chris – the mathematically precise construction, the humanity and layers of meaning in the storytelling, the epic scope and driving, visceral pulse, all of it. I found it to be both a thrilling ride and a profound meditation on war and this extraordinary moment in history.