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).
Gil Townsend is one of Hollywood's most trusted script doctors — whenever a film is in trouble, he's brought in to bring it back into solid shape, very quickly and for a handsome paycheck. His most recent gig is punching up a high-budget, high-concept thriller at the behest of abusive penny-pinching studio chairman Tom Weinberg, drug-abusing swinging-dick producer Jon Simmonds, egomaniacal method actor Jared Marston, and terminally online replacement director Bretton Russo. But what his friends and peers working within the industry — including his on-again off-again girlfriend (and fellow screenwriter) Ellie Brayer, his high-powered agent Susan Traeger, his editor friend Martha Schulman, and his go-to director (and mentor) Anthony Ripley — are blissfully unaware of is that Gil also works as a different kind of fixer: carrying out illegal and often murderous assignments for the town's most feared kingpins, especially the notorious Jimmy Gallo. But after an assignment gone brutally wrong, Gil finds himself rethinking the double life he's been leading all these years. Slowly but surely, it takes a devastating toll on him physically, psychologically, and professionally, and the complications from trying to keep up the charade ultimately drive him to rage and ruin.
