Talking “Marilyn” with Kenneth Branagh

Kenneth Branagh is believed by many to be one of our greatest living actors.  He’s also known for his great stage work and for directing.  He is primarily known for his roles in Shakespeare film adaptations.  He’s been nominated  for Academy Awards, for acting, writing, and directing, a rare achievement.  His long list of great performances have included roles in “Hamlet”, “Henry V”, “Dead Again”, “Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein”, “Pirate Radio” and “As You Like It.”  He stopped by the SiriusXM studios recently to talk about his latest role, portraying Sir Laurence Olivier in the film “My Week With Marilyn.”  Excerpts from that interview appear below.

Ron Bennignton: My Week With Marilyn is one of these films that just seems like a perfect storm where everythings going exactly the way you hope from the beginning.

Kenneth Branagh: Well interesting way to put it. Because when it first came along, it felt like it was a slightly dangerous thing to do.  At the center of it you’ve got two icons. Marilyn Monroe especially a global icon, Laurence Olivier, a great acting icon, at the center of something which is being reported by a 23 year old kid who writes the story 40 years later about what might have happened when he spent this week with Marilyn Monroe. We know that he definitely did get privileged access and saw these two people not get on, and it’s a fascinating story. But I’ll tell you what really did come together, and I had a sense of it on the very first morning I was in there. It sounds daft but it was the way Michelle Williams walked into the room. And she was as her…she wasn’t dressed as Marilyn, but she came in and there was a look in her eye– I could see an actor who knew she had the part for life.

Ron Bennington: What I love about her in this film, is that yes its Marilyn Monroe but it’s not just some impression. There is something about her that is the type of thing that draws men in anyway. And that kind of broken woman, that we think we can save, and it’s our destruction.

Kenneth Branagh: Oh yea, oh man, you’re making me slightly nervous. That takes me all sorts of places.

Ron Bennington: That’s the beauty of it. If you’ve lived a life, you’ve tried that before. It hasn’t worked out with everyone else, but I can help. No, you can’t.

Kenneth Branagh: No, and Marilyn couldn’t be fixed. She was not a girl who could be fixed. There’s a great shot– when she finds out her husband Arthur Miller the playwright has been writing notes about a character who is going to become based on Marilyn– she feels very betrayed. She comes outside the room, and the Colin Clark character sees her. He’s locked in the house and he sees her, so it’s a private moment he’s witnessing. Her look, her look of defeat– she couldn’t be more ravishingly, knee tremblingly beautiful at that moment. But she’s also in terrible trouble, cause you know that the marriage is over. Done. And all of that is in a look where she looks tragic, sexy, haunted, beautiful. You want to literally get on a white horse, and go up there and take her off the top of the stairs to a wonderful new life, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Ron Bennington: You play Olivier in this, who I think could have been the villain if you had played it a different way. But it comes across as, sometimes we’re like, “oh please don’t say that” but other times we feel we know exactly where he’s coming from. I mean you have to feel for the guy.

Kenneth Branagh: I think so. He met Marilyn Monroe six months before she came to do the movie in England and he just fell for her completely. Hook line and sinker. She had done all her homework. She knew everything that he had done. She said all the right things that he wanted to hear. He was just approaching fifty years old, and he wanted to be youthful and sexy and contemporary and relevant, and he also wanted to be revered and respected as a great man of theater and film. And she did all of those things. And then she arrived, and that love affair did not go on. She did not show up on time which was the fundamental problem. He couldn’t handle that at all. Sometimes as much as three days she went missing. And of course his frustration was partially that he was directing it, and he was in it, playing opposite her. And frankly I think you see it in the finished movie, The Prince and the Showgirl, you can see the moments where somehow she seems to be able to act with adoration and love, and somehow you can imagine you can feel as though he can barely contain the desire to yell at her.

Ron Bennington: Because his life got made into a hell. To be the director and the star was just to much.

Kenneth Branagh: And to further heap confusion on irony, she was his boss. This was being made by Marilyn Monroe Productions. She was writing the check. And although Laurence Olivier was an Oscar winning best actor winner, best director winner, best film; he was being employed by currently the biggest movie star in the world. And in the nicest possible way, with all love, adoration and respect for him, they would be going to see her, not him, and she knew it. And the terrible thing for him was, he knew it.

Ron Bennington: If you’re going to look back to the 1950s, you’ve got Brando, Dean, Monroe. Those photos still exist everywhere. But the interesting thing is, all that was almost anti-Olivier. A different style of acting was coming in, and the whole thing of, it’s time to push out the old, bring in the new, is all great until you’ve gotten really good at something and people are asking you to move away at your peak.

Kenneth Branagh: Yes, you’re absolutely right that these iconic images of Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, also, they were in the 50s and the world was kind of breaking apart from everything that Olivier had stood above. He transformed himself afterwards, but only the young could kind of lead that charge that was rock and roll, that was sex in the movies, that was overt, explicit. It was a great time to be their age and to have their grip on the popular culture. I think one of the toughest things that Olivier had to deal with face to face with Marilyn, was that he was kind of irrelevant. And I think he felt that lack of respect, of simply being ignored, being too old, being not part of that. An incredibly painful experience for him.

Ron Bennington: But he has always been beloved by actors on both sides of the ocean. And even today really remembered for most of the parts.

Kenneth Branagh: You bet. He is absolutely the marker. And also, he was, in 1939– the Golden Age of Hollywood– he was Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. And for the following three years he was the top box office star. Handsome, sexy, and starring in box office blockbusters. Then the war happened, then he starred in Shakespeare films, and then he did a lot of theater. But still in the last part of his career, he still did amazingly memorable parts like Marathon Man.

Ron Bennington: Another part of this film is, it’s very very funny and also charming because it is Colin Clark’s story, more than these two icons, it’s about the kid that gets to show up at the circus.

Kenneth Branagh: Exactly. He’s twenty three years old, he’s well connected and he has the arrogance, or the innocence or the vitality of youth, and for him it’s just a big adventure. The circus has rolled into town and he gets a ticket and it’s the golden ticket. Because, and I think this is a really incredible part of the story– is that people like Marilyn and Olivier in those kind of situations where their responsibilities are so immense that they simply don’t even take in that there’s a kid in the corner of the room. He does listen to their confessional moments. You’d be amazed, in the film business, how many make up artists, how many costume people, have listened to the most incredible confessional material from people they just met because those artists are right on the edge. And so Colin Clark, at 23, suddenly has a ringside seat to two people who kind of trust him. And I believe that part of it. It’s circumstantial, but I’ve seen it happen.

Ron Bennington: So why do they trust him? Because you’re one of us?

Kenneth Branagh: There’s definitely the implication that you can look at him in the eye and it’s like, this is a four walls conversation, it does not live here. But the other thing that happens is, frankly, there is a preoccupation, and a self centeredness where they literally don’t imagine that people in the room have a brain. They’re kind of not proper people because they’re not famous crazy artists. And I think there’s a sort of weird arrogance and ignorance that can be a part of the temporary insanity that making a movie is.

Ron Bennington: And yet, for the people thinking, “I don’t think Marilyn could ever be with this kid,” there are women who just need to make sure, oh this person fell in love with me, and when that happens, they can feel….

Kenneth Branagh: …and its very intoxicating for anybody to feel that they are adored. Especially when you’re at the lovely honeymoon stage of all of that stuff, when it’s that closeness that intimacy, that vulnerability is all wrapped up in newness and possibility and dreams like going away from all of this chaos and madness and being happy together. They see a dollhouse and say well they could be us and those little dolls could be our children. You can understand the sort of utterly silly and utterly delicious irresistible charm of that. At the same time knowing that some people are addicted to that. They need that response from that other person, and then they move on.

Ron Bennington: It is My Week with Marilyn of course, nominated, making all these top ten lists, it’s always cool when you see something come together. Thank you so much for being in Kenneth, and we’ll see you next time through.

=================================

You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Don’t have a subscription yet?  Visit their website here for a free trial.