The 'Thor' director discusses his preparation for his portrayal as former British Prime Minister and reveals he decided not to meet the politician before taking on the role.
- Sep 25, 2022
AceShowbiz - Sir Kenneth Branagh needs three hours "a day" to transform himself into Boris Johnson. The 61-year-old star looks eerily similar to the former British Prime Minister in Sky's political drama "This Sceptred Isle".
However, it wasn't easy for Branagh to get himself to resemble the politician, with the actor having to don a suit to bulk him up and a number of prosthetics. "It took about three hours each day to get into a suit that bulked me up and then to wear various prosthetics," he told heat magazine.
"One was like a neck piece balaclava, and a lot of time was spent making sure the pieces were blended seamlessly into my own skin so you couldn't see the join." One of them was a "bigger upper lip," which made it impossible for Branagh to eat. He even had his eyes sloped like 58-year-old Boris.
Branagh added, "Then we had to pull down the eyelids to have the sort of slight slope that is a Johnsonian family trait - followed by a hairpiece, and a bigger upper lip ... it was very brilliantly done, but it was not a prosthetic that allowed you to be in a world of chewing - or consuming soup during the day."
The filmmaker decided he did not want to meet Boris - who was ousted as PM and replaced by Liz Truss - before taking on the role. He said, "I've never met him, and I decided not to go down that route. The job was to try and create a physical picture of the man - and then try as best you can to recreate everything in this drama that was real, that happened on particular days at particular times."
"I did a very minute study of the way he delivered his speech when he came out of hospital, when we left Europe... and hopefully you build up a kind of vocabulary of tone that allows you to maybe get somewhere near the spirit of something truthful."
