Content area
Full Text
It's hard to think of another actor who can so effectively convince laymen of the joys of his profession as Kenneth Branagh. He waxes lyrical about acting and actors, the process of putting on a show or rehearsing a film. There's a boyish enthusiasm about him when he talks this way. Here's an actor, it seems, who never encountered a role he didn't like.
Until now, that is. In the chilling new HBO drama "Conspiracy," which airs Saturday night at 9, Branagh plays Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler's most trusted lieutenants in the Third Reich; it was his job to set in motion the Final Solution, the extermination of millions of Jews across Europe in World War II.
To effect these plans, Heydrich convened a top-secret meeting of 14 high-ranking Nazi officers in a mansion at Wannsee, in Berlin's suburbs, in January 1942. "Conspiracy" is a dramatization of that meeting. Some officers around the table are uneasy when mass extermination enters the agenda, and voice objections. But as the meeting proceeds, it becomes clear that the Final Solution is not up for discussion. It is a policy approved at the highest level, and the task of the eerily persuasive Heydrich is to find a consensus among the group about its implementation.
"I found it disturbing to [portray] the man," confided Branagh, over afternoon tea at a large central London hotel. "There's a spiritual revulsion against playing him. You don't want to be saying the things he was saying, or be part of his psyche. I found it got under the skin in an invasive way."
Still, Branagh plays Heydrich with verve. His hair dyed blond and swept back sleekly, he is the last person to arrive at Wannsee and makes a flamboyant entrance, immediately demonstrating his superiority. He goes on to run the meeting like the chairman of a corporation, sometimes showing deference and courtesy to other points of view, and frequently calling breaks for drinks and lunch to defuse tension, but ruthlessly proceeding toward a point where his 14 colleagues agree to genocide.
Most of the Nazi officers who attended Wannsee were obscure names- -the exception being Adolf Eichmann, who was tried and executed for his war crimes in Jerusalem in 1961. He...