‘Succession’s Hiam Abbass Shines In ‘Atonement’ With Kenneth Branagh

Succession star Hiam Abbass says that it’s impossible to remain “silent” about “the suffering of innocent people,” whether it be in Gaza or Kyiv “or wherever,” because she was born that way.

Abbass is one of eight sisters and two brothers, born in Nazareth. Laughing, she tells us that she’s the fifth child, “the middle one. I made the revolution.”

The four siblings before her “kind of went through with life as it was offered, and the others after me were just like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to change the world.’”

The celebrated screen and theater actor stars with Kenneth Branagh and an extraordinary Boyd Holbrook (Narcos) in director Reed Van Dyk’s riveting movie Atonement, which is playing at TIFF.

Abbass, who quietly steals the movie, asserts: “I think I’m a person by my origins, by who I am, that is very, very aware to the suffering of people, and I cannot stand it. I cannot just be silent about it. And fortunately enough, I do a job that permits me to express my feelings as a person into the feelings of different characters to serve characters that have been going through injustice. To be able to tell their stories and to be able to tell their suffering and to be able to make people aware of their stories is something that I feel it’s almost like a a duty.”

Van Dyk’s film is set against the backdrop of U.S. forces in Baghdad in 2003 and is inspired by a dispatch from war correspondent Dexter Filkins when he was with The New York Times that was headlined, “For a Family in Iraq, 3 Deaths In a Moment of Confusion.” It then flashes forward to dramatize a follow-up article Filkins penned for The New Yorker in 2012 about how the Marine regiment machinegunner involved sought to find the family who lost loved ones in that aforementioned moment of confusion, and apologize to them.

The family in question, the Kachadoorians, whose surname is amended to Khachaturian in the film, were members of Iraq’s Armenian Christian minority. Abbass plays Mariam, the matriarch who cries out, “We are the peace people! We are the peace people!” when her husband and two sons — innocent civilians — perished in the incident.

The film premiered at Cannes — still kicking myself for not seeing it there — but I saw it more than once in July, and it resonates so powerfully because the world is still at war.

Branagh plays Michael Reid, a newsman based on Filkins, and Holbrook stars as the Marine sharpshooter suffering from post traumatic stress disorder who believes that now that he’s back on U.S. soil, meeting Mariam and her family will help him heal.

Abbass says that “the bullet,” when it’s fired, “it goes both ways. Yes, think of Mariam’s suffering, but at the same time, think of what’s happening psychologically to this guy who shot her menfolk and to his suffering, because he just shot under orders, not knowing what he’s shooting at until he understood.

“So it’s just like this both ways sort of treatment of humanity,” she notes.

“Some people,” Abbass suggests, might argue “it doesn’t work that way. We have to be only with the people that are suffering. Yeah, but suffering exists both ways, and I really acknowledge that fact.”

Abbass had no exchange with the Kachadoorians “whatsoever,” she says, because ”I just thought I’d respect the intimacy of those people. … And I thought that sometimes it’s very confusing as well when you meet the real family, you want to become very loyal [to them], and I thought it would disturb my own understanding of the character based on the script and conversations with Reed.”

Although in ordinary circumstances, Abbass explains, she “would have loved to meet them because their story is such an incredible, strong, universal suffering story.”

But she decided against it, because not meeting them “would give me more space for imagination, and it would give me more because finally, if we tell these stories, it’s because we want them to become universal, because we want them to work universally. So I thought I would stay more in a universal language, if I stay away from the mimetism trying to be who I would never be, because I would never be that mum in so much pain through such tragic loss,” she says.

“But I will lend myself and my machine, my working machine,” she states, “in order at least to be just to what they felt.”

The situation also left Abbass free to simply react to what she saw in Holbrook’s eyes. “I just let it be,” she shrugs.

The few scenes that Abbass shares with Holbrook have stayed with me because they’re so sublimely underplayed. “I never knew what would happen there,” the actor says of those moments.

“I mean, I see the words, I read them as dialogue. I see the explanation of, ‘she stays still’ or ‘she looks at him’ or ‘she judges him’ or whatever is there, it’s only words. It becomes true the moment you do it,” she adds.

Abbass says that she and Holbrook “were partners, and it’s important not to forget as well how great he was then.”

As we get into the weeds of her stunning performance, Abbass points out that during the scenes with Holbrook she was watching him, looking into his eyes “as Hiam,” but she was emotionally attuned to him as Mariam, her character.

The act of acting, she observes, is basically “that awareness of who you are as a person and who you’re serving as a character, and you cannot get lost between both.

“It’s just you are both at the same time. But what we see of you is the character, not yourself, “she suggests.

And the filmmaker and “the camera” are there to ensure you don’t get stuck in the middle, she continues. “There’s a lot of things that are happening, so it’s an ensemble of the technicality of the filming and the work of your partners.”

And working with actor-knight Branagh was like being “with the friend on whom I can count.”

Then she adds “But this is Mariam thinking, not me thinking.”

But “as Hiam,” she says, ”there was really a real encounter,” working with Branagh. They spent much of their time talking about the stage. Abbass reveals that she would not hesitate to perform opposite Branagh on the London stage.

RELATED: Kenneth Branagh Hosts Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen, Gary Oldman & Helen Mirren In Telluride-Bound Doc ‘Into The Breach’

For his part, when we spoke with Branagh, he says that there was a “real meeting of minds” between them.

Just as there was between her and Brian Cox when they shot Succession. They have remained firm friends, she says. ”He’s a great supporter of who I am and what I am. We love each other and keep in touch all the time.”

For a while, Abbass, who played Marcia Roy, the wife Cox’s Logan Roy, stayed in contact with other Succession cast members via a WhatsApp group, but now they liaise individually. “Yes, we keep taking. We just like to take some news from time to time from different people,” she adds.

Although there are no concrete plans, Abbass says that she and Sarah Snook, her Succession stepdaughter Shiv Roy, once had “an idea of a movie that we might do together, but you know how things come up,and then they just kind of stay on the side for a while and then they come back again.”

Next up, Abbass hopes to shoot French Family for producer Alexandre Gavras (No Other Choice, Blaise), filming on locations in France and Algeria.

“But first, I want people to know about Atonement,“ she says with justifiable pride about this gem of a film.