Sir Kenneth Branagh is a Northern Irish actor and director whose career spans Shakespearean stage classics and major modern franchises alike. He played the vain, fraudulent celebrity wizard Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and stepped behind the camera to direct Marvel’s Thor in 2011, bringing his classical theatrical sensibility to bear on the character’s Shakespearean family drama and helping launch one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most enduring franchises.
Branagh has more recently reinvented Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot for a new generation, directing and starring in Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and A Haunting in Venice, the last of which received the strongest reviews of the trilogy. He earned an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Belfast, his semi-autobiographical 2021 drama, and played physicist Niels Bohr in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Branagh remains one of very few people nominated for Academy Awards in seven different categories across acting, writing, and directing. Currently starring in Paramount+’s Laird and the Ryan Reynolds comedy Mayday, and having publicly expressed interest in directing another Thor film, Branagh’s rare combination of classical pedigree and franchise versatility has made him one of the most respected multi-hyphenate talents in the industry.