Age: 65
male
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh (born 10 December 1960) is a Northern Irish actor and filmmaker. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Reading, Berkshire, Branagh trained at RADA in London and served as its president from 2015 to 2024. His accolades include an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Olivier Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 2012 and was given Freedom of the City in his native Belfast in 2018. In 2020, he was ranked in 20th place on The Irish Times's list of Ireland's greatest film actors. Branagh has directed and starred in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays, including Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello (1995), Hamlet (1996), and As You Like It (2006). He was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Director for Henry V and Best Adapted Screenplay for Hamlet. He directed Swan Song (1992), which earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. He also directed Peter's Friends (1992), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), Thor (2011), and Cinderella (2015). For his semi-autobiographical film Belfast (2021), he was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Director and won Best Original Screenplay. Branagh directed and starred as Hercule Poirot in the Hercule Poirot film series (2017–present). He has also acted in Celebrity (1998), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), and Valkyrie (2008). His portrayal of Laurence Olivier in My Week with Marilyn (2011) earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He played supporting roles in Christopher Nolan's films Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020), and Oppenheimer (2023). Branagh has starred in the BBC1 series Fortunes of War (1987), the Channel 4 series Shackleton (2002), the television film Warm Springs (2005), and the BBC One series Wallander (2008–2016). He received a Primetime Emmy Award and an International Emmy Award for Best Actor for portraying SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in the HBO film Conspiracy (2001).
Kenneth Branagh
Nikolai Tolstói
for Nikolai Tolstói in THE ARCHIVE OF THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Suggested by gustavocalado
In 1954, a man arrived at Tokyo airport carrying a perfectly legitimate passport from a country that did not exist. He claimed to be from Taured, a small nation between France and Spain, and was genuinely confused when authorities told him that, in their world, the territory belonged to another country. Hours later, while under custody, he vanished from a locked room without a trace. Seventy-two years later, Brazilian historian Tomás Valença receives an anonymous envelope containing an old photograph, a document from 1954, and a disturbing message: his own name is connected to the disappearance of the man from Taured. Convinced that the documents are an elaborate forgery, Tomás begins investigating and discovers that the Taured incident is only one of countless unexplained events scattered throughout history. People who appear without a past, places that vanish from maps, objects found centuries before they could have existed, and witnesses who remember events that never happened all seem to point toward the same hidden mystery. His search leads him to a secret organization that has spent decades investigating what it calls “historical anomalies”, phenomena that appear to violate not only history, but the laws of reality itself. As Tomás uncovers connections between ancient monuments, Cold War experiments, unexplained disappearances, and forgotten historical records, he realizes that someone has been deliberately hiding the truth for centuries. Beyond the world we know lies another reality, separated from ours by a mysterious boundary that is beginning to weaken. And somehow, Tomás’s name has been written into its history long before he was born. The deeper he goes, the more disturbing the question becomes: What if humanity's greatest mysteries were never meant to be solved? What if they were warnings?
