Mayday: Ryan Reynolds & Kenneth Branagh Break Down Their New Action Comedy

Published Aug 28, 2026, 12:03 PM EDT In our exclusive cover story, Mayday's cast and directing duo dive into rewriting 1980s Cold War action for Apple TV's upcoming comedy. Inside Mayday: How Ryan Reynolds & Kenneth Branagh Flip The Action-Comedy Formula Ryan Reynolds knows buddy comedies like the back of his hand. He's teamed up with narcissistic, megalomaniac bosses (The Proposal), foul-mouthed hitmen (The Hitman's Bodyguard), cantankerous (and dead) Old West lawmen (RIPD), and, of course, grumpy mutant loners who look like Hugh Jackman. In Mayday, he faces his most politically challenging alliance, with a Russian in enemy territory at the height of the Cold War. Made in the grand tradition of culture clash action comedies like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat, Mayday sees Reynolds' U.S. Navy pilot trapped behind enemy lines while on a top-secret mission in Russia. Stranded, he must team up with Kenneth Branagh's Americana-loving former-KGB agent to survive. Apple promises a buddy comedy that flips the spy thriller on its head, rewriting familiar tropes thanks to the gifted team behind Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. And talking to the principal cast and the directing team, the story is really about challenging expectations, not just thematically and generically, but also in audience expectations of the leads and even the way the action was shot. This is not your typical action comedy. For our exclusive cover story, ScreenRant's Liam Crowley interviewed Mayday stars Ryan Reynolds and Sir Kenneth Branagh, and writers and directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley to discuss what audiences can expect from the upcoming Apple comedy actioner. In addition, our cover story features exclusive stills and behind-the-scenes photos of the Mayday cast. Mayday Rewrites Cold War Action Movies (& The Ryan Reynolds Brand) You probably have entrenched ideas of what a Cold War, 1980s-set action comedy like this would be like, even down to how it's shot. But rather than simply mimicking the established brand of flag-waving bravado, Goldstein and Daley saw an opportunity to interrogate it. They have so far made two very meta movies that, in each of their own ways, acknowledge their part in a wider meta-universe, without fully winking at the camera. Mayday obviously knows it's a Cold War movie and a buddy comedy, and both affectionately plays to the tropes while also gleefully subverting them. And we can thank Tom Cruise for the whole thing, sort of. Goldstein confirms Cruise's anti-authority speed demon was part of the genesis of Mayday: "Maverick's success happened shortly before we wrote this, and it partly inspired this idea of taking some of the air out of that kind of trope of the iconic American fighter pilot." He also talks of their wariness not to make something too "heavy-handed" or making it feel like a polemic. It might be a comedy, but it's dealing with important ideas about the United States and how it's perceived in the world during the Cold War, and the contrast with the Soviet Union. To complement that conflict, the filmmakers also inverted the classic comedic roles: here, Reynolds plays the grounded, wide-eyed straight man who effectively becomes the "damsel in distress," by his own reckoning, while Branagh - so good as chilling villains in the past - brings unexpected comedic eccentricity to a deadly force of nature. Daley found the inversion intriguing: "The other thing that I think is interesting about him in this role is that he's in many respects the straight man, and Kenneth is kind of the comic relief. And that is a dynamic that you don't often see in a Ryan Reynolds movie. And I think he, to Ryan's credit, was so on board with that." Even the action feels different, thanks to how it's shot. The directors consciously made things very intimate, and pulled from their previous work for some fun shots. John Francis Daley: We always like to challenge ourselves in a way that we are trying new things without it feeling distracting to the audience. I think a thing to avoid when you're trying to be fun with your camera work is for it to feel gimmicky or unwarranted. It all had to be motivated by a specific reason. But that said, we were able to employ a lot of fun tricks, some of which we had used in the past, like the R1 arm that we did in Game Night that made the third-person driving simulator look. We were able to use that on our Russian car at one point over that montage. Also doing some fun split diopters. We were using the Sony Venice, which can have a very small camera body, which allows for, if you're putting it on a remote head, it allows for shots that would be otherwise impossible with larger cameras. It's how we were able to do a lot of the cockpit stuff, but also how we were able to do some of the more weird and interesting shots throughout, sometimes in the apartment scene. Is Mayday The Anti-Top Gun? It's Complicated Daley is careful to clarify that Cruise's Maverick isn't in the cross-hairs, and nor was turning Mayday into a wicker man for bigger ideas: "That's the biggest challenge, to make something that doesn't feel preachy, that doesn't feel like we're pushing people's faces into any kind of agenda. We really did want this to be a film for everyone in that it focuses on people and less so on where they come from. And that's the thing that both of our characters come to realize over the course of the movie. And hopefully, the audience too will feel this kind of kinship to their fellow man, whether that's here in the same country that they live or somewhere across the globe." Changing perspective is key to the movie's uneasy chemistry, and Reynolds' character, Troy, is central to challenging it. His black-and-white worldview is slowly dismantled after meeting Nikolai, and Reynolds was immediately drawn to how the script used nostalgic pop-culture anchors to gently critique the propaganda machine of the era: "I loved what it had to say. I loved that it unpacked a kind of jingoistic outlook of the United States of America during the '80s at the height of the Cold War, and how these perspectives are created. They're not naturally observed." Reynolds explains to us how Top Gun parallels Troy's perception of the Cold War, even if he's not quite as beholden to the movie as Nikolai (to him it's "just a movie," Reynolds says. Rather, it's almost like he's a victim of the movie's propaganda, "he sees the romanticism in it, which I think is what's interesting about the character because he doesn't see the sort of fallacy in the propaganda about these two countries. He really sees this America-first mentality and this idea that this sort of jingoistic idea that America is right in this instance and Russia is wrong in this instance. Very binary." The Top Gun reference point made sense to anchor the audience, offering a foundation to how Nikolai helps Troy confront his own ideas about the people across the battlefield from him. Troy's binary thinking simply can't hold when he meets Branagh's grizzled vet. "He really gets to experience a person, a Russian human being," Reynolds says. "And the dynamic kaleidoscopic feelings, opinions, and ideologies this person has while still holding America with this romantic idea of its sort of unwieldy kind of potential." He really loves America for so many reasons, but he also is fluent in the sort of international, the dearth of diplomacy and the kind of propaganda machine that sort of perpetuates this myth that one country is right and one country's wrong. Nikolai offers an epiphany: "he kind of ushers Troy into this new kind of perspective that it's far more nuanced than that. And that's very interesting. But yeah, having the Top Gun reference, it's such a great handle for the audience. They know that movie so well. Nostalgia's the greatest goddamn drug on the planet. So you get to go back and feel both of those things at once. It's pretty great." Kenneth Branagh's Unexpected Russian On paper, the idea of Branagh playing an ex-KGB agent lends itself to a very clear idea of characterization and performance. Perhaps something like a cross between Gary Oldman's Air Force One villain and Branagh's own Russian oligarch Andrei Sator from Tenet. But Nikolai is very different; more three-dimensional, let's say, and that meant reaching back into his earlier repertoire as a Shakespearean stage actor. Mayday uses action to contrast the blossoming relationship between its leads, with a purposefully visceral presentation of fight work, revealing Nikolai's lethal past. Branagh reveals that the magic of those action scenes combined specific camera work and also a desire that the actor do as much of it as they could themselves. You may not think of Hercule Poirot as a famed boxer like fellow detective icon Sherlock Holmes, but Branagh does have some fighting form: "For me, it was exciting to express on film what has often been part of my career as a theater performer who does lots of Shakespeare. There are endless fights at the end of those plays. But in approaching this, it was a dirtier kind of fighting; a more efficient, more lethal kind of fighting that was great fun to do, full of all the knocks and niggles that such things produce. With a great dance partner like Ryan, you've got a chance to have fun with it because in a really excellently penned action comedy, the action was a crucial part of telling the story." The action isn't just distraction; in Branagh's words, "it told you who the characters were. It told you in the way they fought, how they valued life, and how they valued their own personal safety. You get a sense of their history and everything. It's intuitive, but if it's thought about, and if it goes into the work to produce the action, then the audience is going to get it. So, in addition to the honor of playing comedy with this one, rolling into that action world was delightfully painful." Branagh also reveals the level of detail the directors gave him to prepare his take on his "wild" character: "He's isolating himself. You've got to remember how massive Russia is. The boys, our directors, were very specific about how far it was. I had in my room a map of how far it was to Moscow, what was the territory and landscape that you'd have to go across? What would have attracted him about that particular area? What did he have to do to constantly be on vigil in case the KGB called him back?" Branagh built what sounds like a contradiction: a wild man in exile, partly because of unresolved family issues, constantly on alert, who is simultaneously committed to indulging his absolute fascination with America. Americana in Russian wilderness. Everything you learn about Nikolai sounds like he could have been the star of a completely different one-man-army action figure, removed of the comedy sensibilities, and probably not played by Branagh. But casting the legendary character actor assures you of extra depth. "I suppose really all of that is to confirm that the goal was to take it as seriously as you possibly can," he says, "Try and produce as much depth as you possibly can." And not all of his preparation is even seen on screen: "I would write the little subplots and everything and work out the history with (his on-screen daughter) Maria Bacalovla, and with Marcin, who played the KGB guy who chases the pair of us." He talks too of approaching the movie in "a sort of comedy technician's way", admitting "I found it very engrossing: someone from such a different culture in love with another culture and losing his innocence to some extent about that culture during the course of their troubled relationship, but finding something even better, which is not the America he imagined, but the American he never knew he would come to light." For Reynolds at least, seeing the fruits of that deep preparation was revelatory: "Working with Ken and seeing him just work in a space that he could just turn into unblinking violence in a moment's notice and then go back to this incredibly soft, kind, and vulnerable person. It was such a refreshing take on the action tropes that you'd normally see in these kinds of films. And you're thinking, 'I'm going to come in and with all the action films I've done over the years and blah, blah, blah.' But I'm actually the damsel in distress in this, in a sense." Shooting Mayday's Action As well as the unexpected revelation of Kenneth Branagh as an action star, Mayday has some seriously ambitious action sequences that tested the production's logistics skills. One scene required the team to drive a massive ICBM missile launcher around public squares, which came together differently from how Daley had initially envisaged it, and provided a co-star markedly less dependable than Branagh and Reynolds. "We didn't quite know what the vehicle would even be. We were talking about modifying a giant firetruck at times. Ultimately, we got an ICBM. We got the actual vehicle, and it was just billowing smoke and at any point could have broken down, but fortunately didn't. And in almost all of those shots you see it, it's there crushing cars and nearly hitting pedestrians." Even when it almost leads to squashing people, the directing duo remains committed to combining special effects work - provided for Mayday by Weta - with practical work. Daley confirms that all the F-18 flying sequences were shot in France, months before we shot Principal Photography, and also included use of a Volume stage in Montreal using a gimbal, which was "extremely challenging." And then there's the remarkable final sequence, which also almost came with some collateral damage, as Goldstein recalls "We also had to build an almost full-size airplane cabin on a rotisserie for that final sequence where they're fighting in the plane, and we needed to be able to defy gravity. And that was a complex thing. At one point, one of our stuntmen was sitting in a seat that wasn't bolted down. We weren't filming at the time. We have great video of him just falling over. He was fine, uninjured." If the seemingly very real possibilities for extras and stuntmen to be injured and the complexities of such a heavy action schedule sound overwhelming, Goldstein and Daley could at least count on the presence of another director on set. Kenneth Branagh has a wildly eclectic resumé too, having taken on Shakespeare, Jack Ryan, a live-action Walt Disney remake, and, of course, the MCU's first Thor movie, but the directors confirm he kept his director's hat on its peg. It still came in handy though, particularly when it came to understanding how certain scenes were shot: John Francis Daley: He is such an accomplished director comes through in his acting performances as well, because we had a lot of ambitious blockings in this film where, in an effort to be a little bit more efficient with our coverage, we had some blocking moments that some actors could not wrap their heads around. Not actors in this film, but just in general. Very often there are actors that have trouble with blocking that is in any way that feels unnatural to them. And to Ken's credit, he makes it natural. He understands the mission and figures out a way to do it so that it feels totally authentic. And that is a testament to someone who's also had a lot of time behind the camera. How Mayday Came Together It all sounds like a well-oiled creative machine, but Mayday wasn't all plain sailing. Ryan Reynolds was involved very early, with Goldstein and Daley confirming they wrote Troy for him after his production company came on board. But, of course, when you sign Ryan Reynolds, you have to accept that his busy schedule might complicate matters. Mayday was made before Deadpool & Wolverine was completed, and the SAG-AFTRA strike made everything more complicated. Reynolds was pulling double duty, editing the Marvel project all night with Shawn Levy over Zoom, and it was touch-and-go for a while. But Reynolds had his North Star, because when Branagh signed on, his interest in the script was "supercharged" and the chemistry between the two on screen was obviously the natural result of a great dynamic on set: "One thing is that when you work with the greats - the real greats, and that's a very small 'I can count on one hand' group of people - they make you so much better, and the job becomes so much easier. Kenneth is one of them. You'd have a natural instinct to believe that this is going to be harder and more challenging because you're working with somebody who's just an apex performer and storyteller. But it's just the opposite. Everything starts to flow out naturally. You come to work, your shoulders drop, and you realize, "This is a wonderful sandbox to be playing in." "I was just lucky, and I knew how lucky I was from day one when I worked with Kenneth. Because you know chemistry right away; you can't invent it. It's either there or it's not." Reynolds pulling double duty is actually underselling it: as well as producing on Deadpool & Wolverine and acting as Troy, Reynolds' production company Maximum Effort was also involved in Mayday. He's keen to downplay the need for his active involvement from the producer's office, though, categorizing Maximum Effort's focus more on promotion and marketing, and crucially, bringing together the right team: "Working with a guy like Ken and certainly working with Goldstein and Daley, they make it feel like it's plug and play, even though it is not. There is a tremendous amount of toil that goes into making every moment feel easy and locked in. And that's just people who are real experts." Despite all of that praise, Branagh's involvement wasn't quite as pre-ordained as Reynolds, whose involvement was part of the pitch to Skydance. For Nikolai, though, the directors only had an "amorphous idea of what he was that became more and more defined as we continued to write it." Daley says it's to the actor's eternal credit that he could inhabit the role - any role, in fact - even when it wasn't written in his voice the same way Troy was for Reynolds. And what of the future? Will we get to see the pair rekindle their affection for working together? And What About Mayday 2? Could it Happen? Could Mayday's charming alliance blossom into further adventures for Nikolai and Troy? Goldstein admits they've not got to that point yet: "We have not talked about a Mayday 2. We always feel it's a little presumptuous to assume there'll be any kind of follow-up, but it would be really fun to continue the adventures of Nick and Troy." Like both Crocodile Dundee II and Rush Hour 2, the natural spin would be to invert the culture swap - why not bring the American culture-loving Nikolai to America? Goldstein's had the same thought, "We were thinking it could be stateside, maybe there's something in that caper they end up in." Daley agrees there's potential for more, though he reveals the writing process built in a sort of pragmatic device should there not be a sequel. "Yeah, I mean it does sort of lend itself to a sequel, but that wasn't the intention with our sort of open-ended ending. It was more to suggest that their story will continue regardless of whether it is filmed or not." Branagh is pragmatic, too, "The audience always decides these things." But given the opportunity, he'd return to work with the directing duo he showers with praise: "John and Jonathan are such amazing writers, and they have the combination of real directorial ambition." And despite the fundamental difference between their characters, it seems there's something of a professional kinship developing between Reynolds and the lord of the realm: "What I know is the experience of encountering Ryan's professionalism. He might've been working all night, but he seemed totally invisibly energized and carrying none of that responsibility, despite the fact that it led to such an amazing success." Reynolds is clearly energized specifically by Branagh, too: "I'd do anything with this man. I would carry sandbags for him on a set. I would literally lay dolly track down if I knew how to lay dolly track down. I would make him a nice sandwich and some orange slices to rehydrate his hardworking body, whatever it takes." So that would be a yes to a possible return, then. Branagh, meanwhile, is absolutely game for a sequel, if he gets to do it again with the same team: "The process of meeting with somebody who was so professionally prepared and then in the moment playful and working in a huddle with two other guys who, in this instance, who were so serious about trying to get it right, so ambitious to make it excellent and so capable of having fun and creating joy along the way, which was part of our mission for the audience is try and deliver action, a surprise and a thrill for me to do, but comedy, which was a joy to share. If there's a chance to do that again, of course, who wouldn't? Wherever and whatever part of the forest it is." Time will tell. Mayday arrives on Apple TV on September 4. Mayday Release Date September 4, 2026 Runtime 110 minutes Cast Maria Bakalova Anna Ustinov Marcin Dorociński Alexander Volkov