Tag: TV

Every actor has a face that fits certain roles better than others. 

Kenneth Branagh is lots of things – an acclaimed Shakespearean whose film Henry V helped seal my lifelong love for the bard, a director of Marvel movies and action franchises, an Oscar-winning writer, an actor who slots nicely into big-budget productions from Oppenheimer to Harry Potter films to give them a touch of class. 

But my favourite Branagh as an actor (or Sir Kenneth, if you like) is when he’s solving a mystery or two. He’s an actor who feels born to mull over and solve crimes, to be the bloke at the end of the picture who tells the cast of characters who done it and why. 

He’s played two pretty iconic detectives – Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot in three movies, and the late Henning Mankell’s Scandi-noir police investigator Kurt Wallander in a series of excellent English-language TV adaptations. 

Heck, at the very start of his career 30+ years ago a baby-faced Branagh also served up a fine Hitchcockian noir homage with the twisty Dead Again, where he plays a detective who’s not quite what he seems. 

I enjoy watching him in all of them, for even when the material itself is a bit tatty, Branagh remains a cool, elegant centre, whether he’s the magnificently mustached Belgian Poirot or the tense, stressed Swede Wallander. Sir Kenneth excels at showing the mind at work solving whatever cases life throws at him. 

Branagh’s Agatha Christie adaptations of Murder On The Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Haunting In Venice became a bit of an unlikely low-key franchise the past few years. The star-studded let’s-solve-a-murder thrillers throw back to similar movies of the 1970s. They are more popcorn diversions than timeless classics, really, but I have fun watching every one of them. (Death On The Nile, hampered by very obvious pandemic shooting restrictions and a miscast Gal Gadot proving she really can only play Wonder Woman, is the weakest, while moody quasi-horror movie Haunting In Venice, which quietly slipped into release earlier this year, is quite solid.) Poirot is a classic character that Branagh brings a nice bit of haunted depth to, traumatised by his World War I experiences but animated by a firm sense of justice. 

The Wallander series introduced me to Mankell’s compulsively readable, dour novels, and the Swedish TV productions of them too. Set in an endlessly windswept, grim small-town Sweden, they’re dark but addictive like the best crime fiction. Branagh’s performance as the jittery Wallander, who never quite seems to get enough sleep, always holds my attention as he works his way to a haggard justice for crime’s victims. There’s a mood of exhaustion that hangs over Wallander which could be depressing, but somehow, it works for me, anchored by Branagh. 

However, for a man who’s tackled many British icons from Shakespeare on down, there’s one role I’d still love to see Sir Kenneth step into – give us a Sherlock Holmes, with, say, Alfred Molina as an excellent choice for his Watson. It doesn’t need to be some meta reinvention like Benedict Cumberbatch’s fine series.

Plonk us in Victorian England, give us a mystery or two to solve, and watch Sir Kenneth’s face go to work. As a filmmaking triple-threat, surely Sir Kenneth could write, direct and star in a Sherlock Holmes movie to add to his detective’s kit. 

Life is full of mysteries, after all, and we still need great detectives to solve it. 

I love a good character actor, and one of the best in the business is Stephen Root, who’s been kicking around for ages but really took his work to the next level with the recently completed pitch-black comedy Barry. 

For a glorious episode or two, the supporting character actually became more interesting than the show’s star. 

Root is a key “hey, I know that guy!” actor. In his career he’s racked up nearly 300 acting credits, and in many of them, he’s outright stolen the show from bigger stars. 

I first became a Root fanboy with his hilarious work on the classic ‘90s sitcom NewsRadio as arrogant, distracted millionaire station owner Jimmy James. Root was surrounded by terrific talent like Dave Foley and the late, sorely missed Phil Hartman (and another guy who obnoxiously became the most famous member of the show’s cast by hosting reactionary podcasts, but forget about him). 

Root’s James was a great comic creation, a kind of easy caricature of rich bluster animated by quirky little moments, and provided many of NewsRadio’s best scenes. I can never quite make it without laughing through the bit where Jimmy James hosts a reading from his memoirs, which were accidentally translated into Japanese and then back into English again, somewhat mangling the text:

Just listen to the perfect cadence Root gives lines like, “But Jimmy has fancy plans – and pants to match!”  

In the 1999 cult classic comedy Office Space, Root plays the opposite of Jimmy, the mumbling office drone Milton, obsessed with his red stapler, turning a pathetic geek into something indelible. 

Root has the knack for standing out even in the smallest roles, whether he’s popping up as a creepy blind predator in Get Out, on TV on Succession, Justified, The Book of Boba Fett or in one of his many Coen brothers movie roles. 

But he’s never quite been the star of the show, like most character actors. That’s why I loved so much what we saw in the final few episodes of Barry, where he played the shady mentor and handler of Bill Hader’s disturbed assassin Barry Berkman. 

In the series, Fuches is another one of Root’s great cowardly losers, always looking like he just rolled out of bed and constantly nearly getting killed. He’s a boastful manipulator who never quite rises out of the gutter, until toward the end of the series when he’s jailed and the series jumps forward in time several years.

When Fuches is thrown in prison, he demands other prisoners call him the “Raven,” another one of his bombastic fantasy projections of himself. He’s promptly beaten nearly to death, and that’s the last we see of him until the story picks up years on. 

In that time, Fuches has actually transformed himself into The Raven, a tattooed mob boss terror with his own gang of cutthroats. Released into the world, The Raven is suddenly a real threat instead of the bumbling poser Fuches was. The small, dumpy guy everyone has underestimated is now the most dangerous man in the room.

Barry was a fascinating series – sometimes its reach exceeded its grasp, I felt – but the few episodes where Root flies as the Raven are among the series’ peaks. Everything about The Raven is different from Fuches – his body language, his swaggering self-assurance, the murderous glint in his eye. 

After years of side roles and small parts, it’s a damned pleasure to see Stephen Root suddenly take the centre stage. It’s kind of like watching a wallflower turn into the life of the party, to see the skill he’s built up as a character actor over the years turned outwards. 

The Raven felt like the apotheosis of Stephen Root to date, a high point in a career filled with vivid sketches and gags. Take a moment to appreciate the little guy, the battler who in the end takes control of his own story. You never know when they might spread their wings … or stick a knife in your back. 

The joke in 1982’s Airplane II: The Sequel flashes by briefly in a movie crammed full of them. There’s a scene early on with Sonny Bono in an airport terminal shop. In the background, you’ll get a brief glimpse of a movie poster – an aging bald man slumped in a poster advertising Rocky XXXVIII. 

At the time, Rocky III had just come out and the idea that Sylvester Stallone’s boxer would be punching away for years to come seemed hiiiiii-larious. 

That joke was made four decades ago, and there hasn’t been another Airplane movie since. But the butt of the joke, Sylvester Stallone, is still sneering and punching across the screens, in Rocky movies and more, with his latest project the enjoyably retro gangster TV series Tulsa King. 

It’s weird to say that one of the biggest movie stars of all time is underrated, but that’s how I’ve always felt about Stallone. Stallone has been a little bit of a joke in many circles. He’s easy to parody. Who hasn’t imitated a punch-drunk boxer yelling “Yo, Adrian” or Rambo’s monosyllabic grunts? 

But he’s also been a massive success, and despite how uncool it sometimes felt to admit, I can’t help but like the guy. 

I grew up as part of the Rocky III generation – the first of the franchise I ever saw and the one where it exploded into true ’80s excess. I got the wits scared out of me by Mr. T’s Clubber Lang, felt sad for Mickey, and pumped my pubescent fists along with Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” which 40 years on I still listen to whenever I want a jolt of pop-tastic rock anthem inspiration. 

I’ve always been more of a Rocky man than a Rambo man – while in the right mood I dig the heaving gung-ho machismo of John Rambo, his movies always felt a little more tangled up in right-wing politics and America-first jingoism. Few of Stallone’s movies are really subtle, of course. (The man did make an action movie about arm-wrestling called Over The Top, after all). 

Rocky, though, I’ll go to the grave defending, even Rocky IV, one of the most gloriously absurd ‘80s action movies. The series went from gritty uplifting realism with the first movie to steroid-pumped cheese and right back to some combination of the two with the excellent Creed sequels. Rocky, it turns out, contains multitudes. There’s a reason Airplane II made a joke about Rocky XXXVIII and not, say, Conan The Barbarian Part 33. Sometimes it seems he’d go on forever.

Of that ‘80s action hero pantheon of Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and the like, Stallone is the only one who’s been nominated for Academy Awards.  His acting isn’t broad in scope, but darned if it isn’t effective when he works at it, such as his terrific performance in 1997’s Cop Land or the Oscar-nominated return of Rocky Balboa in Creed.

Looking back now at Rocky winning Best Picture over Network, Taxi Driver and All The Presidents’ Men in 1977, it perhaps wasn’t the most durable choice – I admit the other three are all objectively better movies – but still, I kind of love the underdog glory of Stallone winning Oscars for Rocky, a character who’d slowly move from realistic to cartoon and then back again. 

He’s also made a lot of terrible movies – Stallone’s worst movies are pretty darned bad, but often oddly fun to watch. The 1986 franchise non-starter Cobra (which originally began life as Beverly Hills Cop starring Stallone, of all things) is like a template for all the over-the-top bad-assery one things of when they think ‘80s action movies. A cascade of one-word thrillers starring Stallone dot the 1990s – Daylight, Cliffhanger, Assassins, The Specialist. They blur together, and many are dire, but then you get a gem like Demolition Man or the blunt, testosterone-filled throwback fun of the recent Expendables series. Still, whoever thought of casting Stallone as Judge Dredd is hopefully working at an IHOP today.  

Decades into his durable career, Stallone knows his strengths. In Tulsa King, his first TV series, the 76-year-old Italian stallion still dominates the screen, looking more and more like some kind of ancient Greek statue come back to life, or a still-hulking figure carved out of ancient oak. This antihero drama from the creators of Yellowstone is not groundbreaking television but it is a hell of a lot of fun watching Stallone’s take on a classic fish-out-of-water tale as an aging ex-con Mafioso from New York starts over again in Oklahoma.

There’s something curiously life-affirming about a senior citizen Stallone, beating the crap out of anyone who gives him lip, gurgling lines in a voice now so deep and craggy that it seems to emanate from the bottom of the sea.  

The joke was that Rocky 38 would feature a withered old Stallone gamely defending his title one more time, tapped out and pathetic. The reality is that in the end he’s just about the last man standing of those ‘80s action icons. Stallone at 76 could still kick my ass and most people I know, drop a cheesy one-liner about it and probably go another five rounds. Long live the Italian stallion.