Kenneth Branagh to play Boris Johnson for Michael Winterbottom

If there’s one thing that defines the career of actor-director Kenneth Branagh – a man who in his day veered between critically acclaimed adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, to play the legless, racist, robo-spider-driving villain in Wild Wild West, to lead Thor movies do Artemis Fowl– is that each choice seems designed, to perfection, to make an outside observer tilt your head to the side in a puzzled manner and say, “Really?” We can now add to this trend the reat one point, reported by THR this morning, who Branagh has just signed to play UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in an upcoming limited television series about the COVID pandemic, and, uh… Really?

Specifically, Branagh will play sweat droplets on the human flop. Johnson in Michael Winterbottom’s upcoming series This scepter island, who will see Winterbottom give up his usual habits of track down Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon every time they get in a car with each other, in favor of exploring his country’s response to the global epidemic. Writing with Kieron Quirke, Winterbottom will direct all five episodes of the series, drawing on firsthand accounts ranging from nurses working on the front lines of the disease, to the Prime Minister’s office, which, again, will be be played by Kenneth Branagh, and… ANDeh, really?

Look, wwe are not trying to denigrate Branagh here, who can still be a good actor when the mood takes him. It’s more that Johnson is already such a caricature of a human being – reactionary, false jovial and buffoon in the face of tragedy – that it’s hard not to imagine the whole performance quickly collapsing into a Jenga tower of fast aggregating oddities. Honestly, imagining the haircut is already making us shake a little.

Branagh last appeared in Christopher Nolan’s Principle, in which he played both his villain and his yug touch. (Sorry.) His last regular The TV concert was the final season of the UK version of the gloomy Swedish crime drama Wallander.