John Hannah: ‘I had therapy to cope with fame after Four Weddings and a Funeral’

“I’m a bit of a Mr Bump,” says John Hannah with a laugh, gesturing towards his black eye. “I’m probably the only actor who can injure himself while lying down, pretending to be unconscious. I was doing a Channel 5 drama I can’t tell you about yet, but I was on the ground while another actor yanked me out of his way and I just sort of banged my face on the floor. Ouch!” The 64-year-old Scot – probably best known and loved for his emotional recitation of Auden’s “Funeral Blues” in Four Weddings and a Funeral – has always been accident-prone on sets. “I don’t have good eyesight on my left-hand side, so I’m always falling that way, banging into things, coming off my bike. Peter Mensa” – his co-star in the 2010 swords and sandals drama Spartacus – “said I could injure myself doing anything.” His worst on-set injury occurred while filming the first in The Mummy trilogy, in which he brings chaotic, comedic charm to the action as Jonathan Carnahan, brother to Rachel Weisz’s character Evelyn. “Zombies were chasing us into some bushes,” he says. “Brendan [Fraser] was meant to lift a drain cover so we could disappear down a hole. But they’d wet the street. The soles of my shoes were really slippy. I fell. I got up but as I did I felt I was going to faint – I do faint quite a bit – so I grabbed Rachel’s hand so if I fell she would come with me.” A grin. “That’s the take that’s in the film too.” After the cameras stopped rolling, Hannah was taken to a clinic where he learned he had fractured his left wrist. “For the rest of the shoot, I adapted a scarf to wrap around my arm and cover the splint.” Before he began hurling himself about on the set of The Mummy, Hannah’s breakthrough in 1994’s Four Weddings led to a leading-man role opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors. The success came as a culture shock for the lad from East Kilbride. Hannah is best known and loved for his emotional recitation of Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ (Photo: Working Title Films/PolyGram Filmed Entertainment/Channel Four Films) The son of a toolmaker and a cleaner, he grew up in a home with a 1970s bar “with a pineapple on it and everything” (behind which, one Christmas, his mum hid the bike he’d yearned for). He wanted to be a footballer but trained as an electrician before a colleague encouraged him to follow his dreams and apply for a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. While there, he sold net curtains on a market stall for four years. “Most of the housing stock in the city was tenements – those buildings faced each other; people wanted to have privacy.” As Hannah honed his sales patter, “learning to tell jokes, draw the shoppers into a crowd”, he imagined himself appearing in gritty, working-class dramas: “Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, that kind of thing.” Zombie chases and red carpets hadn’t been on his bingo card. “I did some therapy to help with the fame, to sort of find my place in it,” he says. “Because I was OK about being an actor but…” His old friends changed around him? “No. I’m still pretty close with people I grew up with. It was more that I struggled with feeling watched.” Tinkering absent-mindedly with the small, gold religious icons he wears on long chains around his neck (“although I’m not religious, and I lose one occasionally when I’m swimming”), Hannah reminds me that the press was much more predatory back in the 1990s. “It was a period when newspapers were asking readers to sell stories about celebrities. You’d be self-conscious about going out, getting drunk, that sort of thing.” Not easy in the booze-driven decade. “Oh yeah – I remember people going to the pub at lunchtime while filming.” When filming finished on espionage drama Circles of Deceit in 1995, he recalls “going to the pub with Dennis Waterman after we wrapped. We’d had a couple of beers and then the assistant director came in and said they needed me to do another shot.” He pulls a face. “I thought. ‘F**king hell, I’ve had too much to drink’.” Hannah plays a former detective-turned-bar owner in ‘Benidorm is Murder’ (Photo: Juanma Bernabeu/Clapperboard/5 Broadcasting Limited) He’s clutching a pint through much of 5’s new cosy crime series, Benidorm is Murder, in which he plays former detective-turned-bar owner Dennis Crown. It’s perfect for fans of the BBC’s similarly sunny Death in Paradise, a puzzle-per-episode series that finds the grumpy old expat team up with his keen young sidekick barmaid Rosa (Carolina Bécquer) to solve holiday resort homicides and knock about winkingly cheesy one-liners. In episode one, a member of tribute band Mis-Take is found floating in a hotel pool, allowing the scriptwriters to drizzle Take That lyrics through the show. “It only takes a minute” to shove a guy off a balcony, after all. “It’s non-alcoholic beer I’m drinking in the show,” Hannah says. “Dennis often does a long pull on his pint and then a bit of a speech, which meant I struggled a bit with top-end gas. The burping often took the crew by surprise.” Hannah had been to Benidorm before – filming 2015 football movie Shooting for Socrates – and has affection for how “wacky” the expat culture is there. “I don’t know if the place attracts quirky people or if the lifestyle brings out the quirkiness in people.” But he found himself thinking that his late parents would have loved retiring there. “They obviously couldn’t afford the Caribbean or the south of France or whatever, but they loved the heat. They didn’t know any languages. It’s ideal for people who’ve had a long working life – maybe spent 40 years working in a factory or cleaning like my mum. People like that deserve a bit of sunshine at the end of it. They would have adored the beaches, full English breakfasts and £2 pints.” Although his wife of 30 years, actor Joanna Roth, enjoys a beach holiday, and the couple enjoyed taking their three children to Greece when they were younger, Hannah has always preferred a bit more action and adventure in his travels. He’s a fan of “a few nights under canvas”, and finds that though he’s not very good at mindfulness, he can feel “really present” waking up to the sounds of nature: “The other morning, about 5am, my Merlin [birdsong] app picked up the sound of a rare cirl bunting, which was lovely.” ‘It’s non-alcoholic beer I’m drinking in the show [‘Benidorm is Murder’],’ says Hannah. ‘I struggled a bit with top-end gas’ (Photo: Juanma Bernabeu Martinez/Documentales en Canarias/Zebra Producciones/5 Broadcasting Limited) But Hannah says the best holiday he ever spent was interrailing around Europe in his twenties. “I got kicked out of the really f**king dodgy station in Rome and spent two weeks sleeping in the station in Nice. I hooked up with a really funny guy who was also from East Kilbride, and three Canadians who’d been robbed so they also had no money.” He sighs. “I was keeping a journal. We were young enough to sleep on the floor, stick our stuff in the station lockers and walk down the beach to use the public showers. Amazing.” Hannah’s ability to strike up impromptu friendships has a flip side, though. “People either like me or they don’t,” he shrugs. “When I was younger, people would just pick fights with me for no reason.” He remembers being beaten up by two bouncers as a teenager “just because I was just dancing with a girl and getting on – I was being funny and stuff – and they just took against it.” His ease with the ladies led to a similar scrap in a Cannes nightclub. More recently – while filming Spartacus in New Zealand – he recalls “being out on a Saturday night with Peter Mensah and some girls asked to hang out with us”. He makes a face. “We said no because we just wanted to relax, and they went all ‘Who do you think you are?’. Then one of those Kiwi girls actually jumped on Peter’s back! Started pulling and punching this massive guy [Mensah is 6ft 2in],” he says. “We stopped going out after that.” So Hannah’s never going to run his own boozer, like his Benidorm character? “No!” He laughs. He couldn’t cope with the brawling. More seriously, he notes that he’s “never met an actor who wants to retire”. He’s loving pottering through the cosy crime world in his socks and sandals. “I’m getting great parts,” he says. “And I’ve got rid of the chip on my shoulder and the imposter syndrome.” When did he shake those? “Oh, around last week!” ‘Benidorm is Murder’ starts tonight at 9pm on 5