Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh team up for buddy comedy Mayday

Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh teaming up for a buddy action comedy likely wasn’t something movie fans had on their 2026 bingo cards.

And yet the Canadian box office star and the iconic British thespian are at the centre of a new Apple TV+ film called Mayday.

Premièring Sept. 4 on the streamer, Mayday is set at the height of the American/Soviet Union Cold War. It’s an action-packed adventure comedy that follows Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Reynolds), a U.S. Navy Top Gun pilot who crashes in Soviet territory, and is rescued by ex-KGB agent Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh).

“I have a vision board, and stuff on the vision board happens,” said Reynolds joking about the genesis of the unusual pairing for the film that’s co-directed and co-written by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (the guys behind Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves).

Reynolds went on to say that the idea of working with Branagh backed up his belief of what makes an entertaining onscreen comedy pairing.

“Buddy comedies. I love them,” said Reynolds. “There’s a real art to them. I’m talking all the way back to Laurel and Hardy, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello doing what they do. I really just feel like they work best when they’re unexpected, and this was unexpected.”

Unexpected is one thing, but an Odd Couple type pairing isn’t necessarily going to guarantee a win.

“These kinds of movies live and die on chemistry,” said Reynolds. “What’s scary about that is it’s not really something you can invent. It’s either there or it’s not.

“I think of it as sort of kelp underwater, kind of moving together in this really wonderful way. Nobody is trying to win a scene. You’re trying to grow a scene. In good buddy comedies you’re really trying to help each other — pass the ball to the other person and watch him knock it out of the park or put it through the back of the goal.”

Branagh, who has won three BAFTAs and an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Belfast, says no one was more surprised than he to receive the script for Mayday, which he said he found “really surprisingly funny.”

“I also knew from Ryan’s filmography that when he takes on these kinds of things, which, as he says so, depend on the chemistry of the two people, that he’s incredibly generous,” said Branagh. “I felt like, well, we have a chance here, because he shares the screen with people. He acts with people, not against people. I genuinely have admired what he’s done so much across a whole range of things.”

In the film, Reynolds’ Assassin — there’s a joke later in the film about his decidedly not Top Gun cool need-for-speed nickname — gets chosen to co-pilot a top-secret reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union. The plane is shot down by Soviet fighter jets, and Assassin is forced to eject. After landing hard in enemy territory he wakes up in a rustic cabin where the first thing he sees is a movie poster for Tom Cruise’s iconic 1986 film Top Gun.

Top Gun, it turns out, is the template for Nikolai’s view of America.

“I think I wore out the VHS tape I had of it,” said Vancouver native Reynolds, about the Cruise blockbuster. “It was just so innovative. You felt like you were in those planes. I watched it probably two dozen times.”

Branagh, who was 26 at the time of Top Gun’s release and in the Royal Shakespeare Company, didn’t have the same fanboy experience as Reynolds, but he does understand how it could work its way into the psyche of a Canadian kid and even a middle aged, disillusioned KGB agent.

“Whatever you thought of the messages behind it, it was sort of screaming at a real big movie experience, which I think, even though (Nikolai) sees it on a little tape, is one of the reasons why the Nikolai character gets caught up with it,” said Branagh.

While the jokes are fast and furious — it’s Reynolds, after all — the film is equally action packed. And Branagh came ready to play and ready to put his theatre school stage craft training to work kicking some bad guy butt.

“At drama school, we did it all the time. It was taken very, very seriously,” said Branagh about stage fighting, adding that an exhausting four acts of delivering Shakespeare’s words usually ended with a “huge bloody fight.”

He said being able to rise to the raucous occasion of a good old-fashioned bar fight was not a surprise to him, but he admits he did enjoy surprising others with his pugilistic skills.

“I enjoyed being kind-of ready for it,” said Branagh. “I know it’s a choreography, and you have to have a great dance partner. I knew that Ryan was unbelievably skilled at this and that it would maybe give people a kick to see somebody like me do something like this. It certainly gave me a kick. I can tell you that in the literal sense as well the metaphoric sense.”

While Branagh, who became Sir Kenneth Branagh in 2012, gave Reynolds his action props, Reynolds was also quick to bow to Branagh’s skills.

“I was blown away watching him,” said Reynolds. “He’s this physical revelation … It was wild to watch this man kind of tear through these bar fights and these different things and just look so kind of at peace doing it, and then balancing it out with this character choice to just be so vulnerable and sweet. It was like the kindest man you’d ever meet on screen, yet he was this physical specimen of life-ending misery, if need be. It was wild to watch.”

The film’s Cold War setting comes at an interesting time, especially as brand America has taken a few major hits on the geopolitical scene as of late.

“I thought (what) was really beautiful, was that Nikolai holds in high esteem both the light of America and the dark,” said Reynolds. “He really understands both. And that was, I thought, an interesting choice, whereas Troy doesn’t really understand the nuance of the Soviet Union, or, you know, anything Russian really. He really just has a kind of very jingoistic sort of outlook on it, and it’s through Kenneth’s character that he’s changed a bit.”

Branagh sees the relationship between Troy and Nikolai as an example of how learning about someone else and their struggles decidedly diminishes the fear of others.

“You got to look at the individuals. You got to listen. You got to take in the detail of the human life,” said Branagh. “So something about that, I think, (speaks) loudly, regardless of the period setting.”

Dgee@postmedia.com