Kenneth Branagh takes on Lawrence Olivier

As we sit down for our afternoon interview, Kenneth Branagh — recently nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Sir Laurence Olivier in “My Week with Marylin” — pours himself a cup of coffee and promptly apologizes. “I discovered on films that if I have too many — and it’s often bad coffee in this country, I don’t know what that is. It shouldn’t be, you do everything else so well. But I would find that four o’clock in the afternoon, I’ll be f---ing demented,” he says. “I usually just have one in the morning. But this is my deciding to be a bit fast and loose this afternoon.”

Branagh has plenty of reasons to need to keep his energy up, of course. As awards season gets underway, Branagh has been racking up accolades for his work as Olivier, including the Globe nomination as well as nominations from the Screen Actors Guild and several critics’ groups. Plus, he’s got the return of his TV series, “Wallander,” and more directing to consider, though he is decidedly not directing the sequel to “Thor,” and who is, he says, is anyone’s guess.

Taking on a role like Laurence Olivier, how did you go about making an impact with him but still presenting him as a human being?
The funny thing is that, several people have told me they know Marilyn mostly from the iconic looks — you’ll find wherever there is a montage of cinema images, your seven go-to images that say the history of cinema, and Monroe is one of them — yet they don’t necessarily know the movies, and I think that’s even more true of Olivier, where he’s a name for some. People aren’t necessarily aware of his work beyond that. So it was the image and the sort of institution that is Laurence Olivier that we had to get past with this. People have an imagined version of him and of her, and that was kind of the first thing to come to grips with, you know? It’s not just watching the movie, it’s watching the presentation of the iconic figure.

Reviews for your performance have covered a pretty wide range, from very positive to “a busy parody.” Does that maybe have to do with these preconceived notions of Olivier? Your performance might not jibe with what audiences have in mind of the man?
I don’t know if you have this experience, but sometimes there are films that you talk about — “That was my favorite” — that had an enormous impact on you the first time you watched it, so much so that you might bang onto people about it and eventually you’ll show it to them, and you’ll see it and you really can’t understand why you were so thrilled by it. And I think there is a version that people may feel about Olivier and Monroe that already is an imagined thing to which any version might not match up. Olivier and Monroe, although they’re much written about and photographed, who they are is not really fixed accurately in the public mind, so I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s legit to even make the film — to have a kind of guess, to have an imaginative exploration of how they were during this particularly important period, when he was feeling potentially a little as if he was going out of fashion, irrelevant. He was already finding it more difficult to get financing for movies that he wanted to direct than before, even though he was a Best Actor Academy Award winner and a Best Picture producer Academy Award some eight years previously. But life’s a funny thing in show business.

Speaking of directing, it seemed pretty clear during interviews for “Thor” you wouldn’t be doing the sequel, and now director Patty Jenkins has been dropped from the project by Marvel.
The truth is I don’t know [what happened]. I don’t know, so — to be political — I couldn’t possibly comment. But I don’t know. That’s literally the truth, I don’t know what happened there.

Can you talk about your own decision not to do “Thor 2”?
I was proud of [“Thor”] and it was a lot of work, and it was a big risk for everybody — for Marvel employing somebody like me, for taking that character into a major film, for everything. So I was thrilled [the sequel] was being made. But it was happening so quickly. It was straight back in, and I needed time away from it, I needed to have a think. The third series “Wallander,” the TV series I do, was already on the cards, as well as a farce called “the Painkiller,” a play I did in Belfast — my hometown, very important to me — which I was in was in September and October. These things were already lined up, and it just wasn’t going to be possible to do all of them. It was a timing thing and a creative freshness kind of thing. And I wasn’t able to go straight back in and do the job that I knew that it deserved.