Kenneth Branagh: What If Poirot Finds the Killer—and Questions Justice?

Kenneth Branagh knows that many viewers already know who committed the murder. For his new Orient Express, the more troubling question is what justice should look like once the mystery is solved.

Hercule Poirot likes the world divided neatly into right and wrong. A murder on a snowbound train is about to make that certainty much harder to maintain.

In Kenneth Branagh’s new version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, the British actor and director takes the role of the famous Belgian detective himself. His journey begins in Jerusalem, before an urgent message calls him back to London. Boarding the Orient Express in Istanbul, he encounters Ratchett, a wealthy American who claims his life is in danger and asks for protection. Poirot declines.

When Ratchett is found dead, the detective must investigate a carriage full of strangers. The train cannot move, and its passengers cannot escape his questions. But the deeper he looks into the crime, the less comfortably the answer fits his understanding of the law.

A detective with a wounded heart

Poirot has been played by an extraordinary succession of actors, including Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet. When I speak to Branagh, however, he tells me that he went back to Christie’s writing rather than building his performance around those earlier portrayals.

“When Christie was asked what she liked about the character, she would say his compassion, his ability to understand human frailty, and his kindness,” he says. “That was the starting point for me.”

His Poirot is intended to be less vain and more romantic, a man who may have suffered a broken heart somewhere in his past. The detective’s obsessive habits remain, as does his confidence in his own moral judgement. At the beginning, Branagh explains, Poirot sees only right and wrong, with nothing between them. By the end, grief and loss force him to consider the possibility of another kind of justice.

“What should he do as a man of justice?” Branagh asks. “That is a very interesting question.”

Ratchett’s past turns the investigation into something more than a puzzle. He was responsible for the kidnapping and death of a small child, a crime whose consequences devastated a family. As Poirot discovers connections between that family and the passengers, the question becomes whether an act of revenge can be understood without being excused.

Branagh is interested both in what violent bereavement does to people and in what happens when they act together. The film tests Poirot’s certainty against pain that the ordinary machinery of justice has failed to resolve.

A carriage full of stars—and suspects

Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench, Daisy Ridley and Penélope Cruz are among the stars surrounding Branagh. Directing such a cast while also playing the investigator might seem an intimidating task. For him, the strength of the ensemble was essential to keeping the mystery alive.

“If you want to keep the audience guessing who the murderer is throughout the film, you need actors who can keep you intrigued,” he says.

Sidney Lumet took a similarly lavish approach in his celebrated 1974 adaptation, assembling a cast that included Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman. Branagh’s version also uses the audience’s familiarity with its stars to keep attention moving around the compartment: everyone has a presence, and everyone may be concealing something.

But this is not an exact reconstruction of the earlier film’s cast of characters. Branagh changes the backgrounds of several passengers, bringing a wider range of identities into Christie’s world. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo plays the Cuban Biniamino Marquez; Cruz plays Pilar Estravados; and Leslie Odom Jr. takes the role of Dr Arbuthnot. Dutch-Tunisian actor Marwan Kenzari plays the conductor, Pierre Michel.

“I wanted to reflect the diversity of contemporary society,” Branagh explains.

He points to the opening in Jerusalem, where a Black police officer occupies a position of authority, and to Poirot’s warm greeting to his friend Mohammed. The detective’s response to a racist passenger is another expression of the same principle: a person’s origins are not evidence of guilt.

Why tell a story whose ending we know?

The central plot remains familiar. Christie’s novel has already travelled through cinema, television, radio and theatre, and Lumet’s film remains an imposing predecessor. Why return to it?

For Branagh, the answer lies in what an audience brings to a story, as much as in the story itself. A mystery does not exhaust its possibilities simply because the solution is known. Its emotional undercurrents can become more important with each retelling.

“When we discover who did it, how and why, in this version we also ask: what do we do now? What does justice mean?” he says.

Those questions sound different to viewers living in a different world. Branagh describes himself as coming from the age before the digital revolution. The habits and expectations of audiences who watched the 1974 film are far removed from those of audiences now. A new beginning, a new ending and altered characters can bring other dimensions of the same material into focus.

Returning to classics has been a defining feature of his career. From Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing to Hamlet, he has repeatedly approached familiar writing as something to perform anew, rather than preserve under glass.

There is also a practical reason for the persistence of familiar titles. Viewers have limited time, divided attention and a growing number of ways to find entertainment. A new work has to explain itself: what is it, who is in it, and why should anyone watch? A recognised story begins with some of those questions already answered.

That is not, Branagh stresses, an argument against making new work. He continues to seek new material. But he compares the classics to music he first heard at fifteen and still listens to at fifty-six: familiarity does not prevent him from hearing something fresh.

From Hamlet’s grief to Poirot’s dilemma

Despite his film career, Branagh remains committed to the theatre. His theatre company has staged Shakespeare and other classics, and he recently directed Tom Hiddleston in Hamlet at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

That production, performed in modern clothes without technological spectacle, brought the play’s grief sharply into view. For Branagh, its concern with loss and the poison of deep sorrow connects it to Murder on the Orient Express.

The medium changes the experience. In an intimate theatre, an actor may stand scarcely farther from the audience than Branagh sits from me during our conversation. A great text, delivered at that distance, can have an extraordinary hold over its listeners. Cinema finds other ways to draw them in.

The task, he says, is to follow an artistic instinct towards the setting in which a work can have its strongest effect. A familiar story may become a different experience when its emphasis, performers and audience change.

His Orient Express offers elegant images and a distinguished ensemble, but its strongest reason for returning to Christie is the discomfort beneath the detective’s polished certainty. Knowing who did it does not settle what should happen next.