Kenneth Branagh: wallowing in Wallander Vicky Frost guardian.co.uk, (GUARDIAN)

Bruised and brooding … Branagh on the Wallander set. Photograph: Laurence Cendrowicz/Left Bank

Kenneth Branagh used to find playing Wallander so grim, he went to flower shows to cheer himself up. Vicky Frost joins the newly knighted actor in Sweden to talk about the latest series – and his plans to write a drama about his Belfast childhood during the Troubles

You don't often see Kurt Wallander smiling. Frowning, yes; considering something deeply, yes; worrying away at a problem, yes – but not smiling, let alone grinning. Yet, as I watch the Swedish detective climb out of his Volvo and carry in his shopping, he is looking positively contented. Kenneth Branagh, playing the Swede, is delighted I have arrived on set in time to witness such a moment. "It's very rare!" he says after the scene has been shot. "I had to write the smile on my script so I would remember it."

The low farmhouse behind us is still being warmed by the lazy Swedish sun. This is Wallander's new home: inside are boxes full of his possessions, the detective's now-iconic leather chair, and his father's identical landscape paintings. Outside, the road stretches down to the sea, past four silhouetted trees bent almost double in the Baltic winds that whip across the landscape and cut through clothing.

Branagh is working on An Event in Autumn, based on a short story by Henning Mankell and the first of a trio of new Wallander mysteries about to air on the BBC. Wallander's fresh start in the countryside falls apart when the body of a young woman is found buried at the back of his garden. Then the remains of another young woman are washed up on the shore. Branagh and his wife are big fans of The Killing, and he recounts filming a scene at Copenhagen airport with one of its stars, Søren Malling (Lund's sidekick, Jan, from the first series). "People's faces when they saw us!" he says.

Branagh believes it is the different pacing that attracts British audiences to Scandinavian drama, "the experience of it being as much about images as about words, where part of what you're offering is the opportunity to watch other people thinking and feeling. With Sarah Lund, we spend a lot of time watching her in repose, working it out. The mood of the story, the time of day – in her case, night-time – has a weird, magnetic compulsion."


READ MORE:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/17/kenneth-branagh-wallander?newsfeed=true