Wit & Attitude Quote by Kenneth Branagh

Branagh is doing something actors rarely get credit for: admitting the vanity without pretending it’s a special kind of nobility. “Self obsessed and mad and stupid” lands like a confession and a roast in the same breath, and the dash-work matters. He insults “we” first, then immediately widens the frame - “not that other people can’t be the same way” - as if to preempt the predictable backlash: actors aren’t uniquely broken, just more publicly, professionally so.

The real tell is his defense of “extremes.” In a culture that prizes the sane, the optimized, the well-adjusted, Branagh argues that intensity can be a form of truth. Not moral truth, not accuracy, but emotional honesty: the willingness to feel too much, to perform too much, to risk looking ridiculous. That’s an actor’s job description and, implicitly, the reason audiences keep paying for it. We don’t go to the movies to watch reasonable people make reasonable choices; we go to watch people blow up in ways we recognize but suppress.

Contextually, this tracks with Branagh’s own career: a performer-director drawn to Shakespearean excess, operatic emotion, and big, engineered feeling. His line reads like an affectionate diagnosis of the troupe. The final pivot - “Anyway, I like them” - isn’t a retreat; it’s the point. He’s granting permission to enjoy the messy ones, including himself, because art often comes from the very traits polite society tells you to edit out.