Parenting & Family Quote by Kenneth Branagh

Branagh is smuggling a serious craft note inside a word most adults are trained to distrust: silliness. In actor-speak, “childlike” isn’t about being cute or naive; it’s about staying permeable. A child can commit completely to a game without winking at it, without protecting their dignity. That’s the ingredient Branagh is praising: the capacity to drop the self-monitoring that clogs performance with irony, vanity, or “good taste.”

The key phrase is “ability to lose themselves.” It frames acting less as control than as surrender. For a profession often mythologized as charisma or technique, Branagh points to a different engine: absorption. Great acting, in this view, isn’t the actor showing you how much they feel; it’s the actor disappearing so the audience can project, empathize, and forget the machinery.

The subtext also reads like a quiet rebuttal to prestige culture. Branagh’s career spans Shakespearean gravitas and broad entertainment, and he’s arguing that the highest art still needs permission to be foolish. “Some silliness” is a defense of play as a disciplined practice, not a lack of seriousness. It suggests that the best performers retain access to embarrassment-free experimentation, the willingness to try something that might look ridiculous on the way to something truthful.

Contextually, it lands in an era where celebrities are trained to curate an unbreakable brand. Branagh is advocating the opposite: remain porous, risk looking dumb, and you might earn the rarest effect on screen or stage - believability.