John Hannah: 'I play a devious, lying, cheating, ambitious mother******. It's great!'The actor, who stars in Spartacus, 'the most explicit, violent series' ever made, says his only concern was the languageby Kira Cochrane
Sunday 16 May 2010
John Hannah as Batiatus in Spartacus: 'You can kill and decapitate as many people as you like, but language is a bit of a risk' Photograph: Kirsty Griffin/Starz Original
Three minutes into my interview with actor John Hannah, and he is crouching in front of me – half-hovering, half-kneeling – mimicking a sex act. Actually, he is mimicking the mimicking of a sex act. I'm trying to look at him head on, without laughing nervously or grimacing, but my hands keep rising, involuntarily, to cover my eyes.
Hannah's mime is not entirely inappropriate. Actually, in any other circumstance, it would be utterly, bizarrely inappropriate – but in discussing his new TV drama, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, it's pretty much par for the course. The show arrives on Bravo later this month, amid a fanfare of hype and controversy – it was originally commissioned and shown by the US cable network Starz, and has been called "the most explicit, violent series" ever made.
The Boston Herald said that it "fetishises violence even more than it depicts sex and nudity, which is often"; the LA Times noted that "bodies are stabbed, slashed, sledge-hammered and variously dismembered"; and the Washington Post said, quite approvingly, that it's "just about the grimiest, nastiest, bloodiest thing you could hope to find on TV". Mediawatch UK, the conservative pressure group first set up by Mary Whitehouse, has already expressed its deep concern.
Set in Rome in 73BC – in a world where women are preposterously nubile, and men are preposterously muscle-bound – the show is, indeed, unlike anything we have seen before. When the Thracian slave Spartacus fights in the arena, vast crowns of blood fan suddenly from head wounds, arms are scythed off, a man bereft of legs is pitchforked in the back, and blood spots spatter the camera lens. It looks like a computer game crossed with a cartoon and littered with full-frontal nudity and extended sex scenes.
At its heart is Hannah, who plays gladiator-owner Lentulus Batiatus – a role that won Peter Ustinov an Oscar in the 1960 film version of the story. It is unlikely to bring such plaudits this time; Hannah is grappling with some rough material. "That man has fingers in all the proper arseholes," his character says of one of his rivals. "He wiggles them and everyone shits gold." Lovely. The show has many qualities. Subtlety is not uppermost.
Not that Hannah seems bothered. In fact, he's boisterously, puppyishly enthusiastic about the show. I ask whether he had any sense of what it was going to be like when he signed up, and he shrugs: "Not really. We only had the first script, and in terms of the look, the graphic nature, that was up in the air." He describes his character as a "devious, lying, cheating, ambitious motherfucker – it's great!"
Did he balk at any of the nude scenes? It was "miserable being in makeup every day," he says. "I was the oldest guy there." He's 48. "I was the fattest, oldest, grumpiest, most grizzled, lined, miserable, with bad teeth because I'm Scottish, and I'm in there with all these people who are babes – fit and gorgeous – and that's just the guys."
What about the sex scenes? "The funny thing is, you've got your choreography, because that's all it is – a dance. A bit of titillation. A wee bit of boob, a wee bit of bum." He starts talking about a startling scene in the second episode, in which a slave girl prepares him, orally, to have sex with his wife, played by Xena Warrior Princess actor, Lucy Lawless.
"I don't how you're going to do this with words," he says disarmingly, "but we were setting up the framing, and so the girl comes over and kneels in front of me." He lunges into a half-crouch, as my eyes goggle. He's wearing a cycling outfit – tight shorts and top – which somehow makes this more alarming. "And she just kneels there, and they get the composition, and that's fine. Then we did the take, and she went like that!" He goes to sit down, while holding out both hands, cupped as if gripping, well . . . the PR guy interjects, for accuracy. "As though she was holding an imaginary penis?" "Yeah!" says Hannah. "But with both hands!" My palms rise to cover my eyes.
Is he worried about people calling it soft porn? "I don't think it's anything like that . . . There's nudity and sex, because it deals in a fully grown-up way with that debauched and immoral world. When these kinds of people want things, they kill people and they fuck them. In metaphorical and literal ways." Usually literal. "Yeah."
What about kids seeing it? "It's on a cable package, it's pin-protected, it's on after 10 o'clock at night. I think at times you have to turn around and say, 'Your kids shouldn't be fucking watching that!'" he shouts. "If you've got six-year-old children [as he does], they shouldn't be watching that. At 10pm, they should be in their beds. Honestly, sometimes I could get so reactionary. People have to have a licence for a dog, but anybody can have children! I mean, please. You should have to sit a test, or something. I don't mean that, but I could get going on it."
The only area, Hannah says, that slightly concerned him was the language, which he "censored at times ... I mean, you can kill and decapitate as many people as you like, and kebab as many slaves as you like, but language is a bit of a risk, isn't it?"
I blink confusedly through much of this conversation. Hannah is not what I expected. He has been a successful, working actor for two decades, and through the jobs he has taken – the brooding forensic pathologist in McCallum, the grumpy police detective in Rebus, the twittish Egyptologist in The Mummy film franchise – I'd developed a sense of him as quiet, self-contained, perhaps a tiny bit surly. Yet here he is: loud, lively, intense and, I should make this clear, genuinely good natured – but also ever so slightly unsettling. He bounces between talking excitedly about the show and devotedly about his home life with wife Joanna Roth, a fellow actor, and their twins, Astrid and Gabriel. One minute we're talking toplessness on set ("there's only so long you can stare at breasts – in my case about 80 years!"), the next he's showing me a picture of his new puppy, a bichon frise, who is actually waving at the camera, as if mugging for the caption "Cutest. Dog. Ever".
I ask why his career has been so varied – in the late 90s, when he starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the film Sliding Doors, he seemed destined for romantic leads. "It's random," he says. "Most actors don't live in this ideal world where we have a whole pile of scripts to look through ... [The actor] David Threlfall once said this brilliant thing: 'You can only exercise choice over what you're offered.'"
Hannah didn't start out with a clear career plan. Growing up in East Kilbride with two older sisters, a father who worked as a toolmaker, and a mother who worked as a cleaner, he had no ambition to act, instead focusing on football. East Kilbride, he says, "was a new town, part of that whole social engineering experiment of the late 50s and 60s. It was fun, almost Enid Blyton-y – for a Glasgow council estate."
He played football for a youth team, "with some people that were really good. I was a contemporary of Ally McCoist, so a lot of the guys went on to sign professionally. I didn't," he says, very deliberately. Was that a disappointment? "At the time, yeah. I was 14, 15, and I went off the rails a wee bit. Girls. I discovered girls."
Hannah never "really showed any aptitude at school", and left at 16 as what he calls "perfect factory fodder ... I do think there's a sense in these social engineering towns that they build factories around them, and industrial estates, and they have to have people to go and work there – so they don't want to educate them too much. Otherwise they're going to get really bored, join the union, go on strike, and ask for better conditions."
But he says he wasn't aware he was political, "until I met people who weren't. And then I went, 'Of course you're fucking political!' I work, I know about tax, and the conditions on building sites, and I know what they're doing to people's benefits and rights. You can't not be political." He describes his outlook as "classically, standard, old-school Labour". So do you feel ... "Yep!" he says, before I've finished the question. A bit disappointed? "Totally. Completely."
After landing an electrician's apprenticeship, he spent a few years living at the YMCA, and was not "overly happy," he says, in what seems an understatement. An older colleague, "a little bit of a rebel", recognised this malaise, and "had this idea that I become an actor. I was totally ignorant. I honestly thought, well, there can't be that many people in Glasgow that want to be an actor this year, so I'll probably get in." He applied to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, having never even been to see a play. His only acting experience was Joseph in the Nativity, aged five. He was accepted.
Hannah still didn't particularly want to be an actor – but he loved being a student. "We didn't start until 10. All the guys were on the building site at eight in the morning, sucking in dust and asbestos, and I was in a pair of tights, lying on the floor, breathing through my diaphragm. I thought: unemployment, I love yer!" Then "one great, buzzy day", he was improvising with his classmates and "something happened. I thought, I have something to offer, and that something is the truth of who I am".
Hannah landed an agent, had a good couple of years after leaving college, but then struggled. "There wasn't really a British film industry, apart from Merchant Ivory, who were doing the kind of dramas that I wouldn't be in. I could have played a groundskeeper, I suppose, with a rake in the background, while Rupert and Julian or whoever were prancing around up front." He wanted to work for Ken Loach, then "out of the blue" came the polar opposite project: Four Weddings and a Funeral.
His quiet, careful turn as Matthew, partner of the more rambunctious Gareth (Simon Callow), won him both male and female admirers. His dignified reading of WH Auden's poem Funeral Blues ("Stop all the clocks ...") established it as a fixture at crematoriums up and down the country. And, at a time when he was being offered more work than ever, he became depressed.
His newfound fame seems to have brought with it a sudden, gutting revelation of how superficial and unfair people can be. "There was interesting work being offered that I wasn't offered before, and that had its downsides," he says. "You feel like you're being treated like a commodity. I didn't feel any different from the actor I'd been before, but all of a sudden people were interested. That was difficult."
Hannah had counselling, and once said he had taken "happy pills" ("they stopped me from being depressed, but they stopped me from being everything else too"). Today, the lows seem distant. "I get mood swings," he says, "I think we all do if we're in touch with it. Sometimes you just have to realise that you're feeling really down, shitty and grumpy, and you'll come out of it. I think with age, you realise it's part of the natural rhythms of life. I'm quite an up person, and people are always surprised by that side of me. Anybody who doesn't have that, well," he pauses, "I don't know how they live."
Hannah took a year off when the twins were born, and "it was fucking exhausting," he says. "I couldn't wait to get back to work ... But, you know, the pregnancy – when we were making our wee nest – it was the most beautiful, beautiful time."
His wife is working in Glasgow at the moment, so he is looking after the twins: "I'm going to go in and cook with them at school in a couple of weeks, which Gabriel is really excited about, because none of the other Dads has ever come in and done that. And I took the dog in the other day for 'show and tell'."
Our conversation seems to move from sex jokes to sweetness in an instant. I ask what's next, and he says he's preparing for the second series of Spartacus in New Zealand. This had to be put on hold when the lead actor, Andy Whitfield, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Hannah says he is now in remission.
The show will probably prompt some complaints here, but it is difficult to get riled up about it really. Yes, it's ridiculously violent, ridiculously sex-fuelled. It's packed with naked women – which could seem supremely sexist – but also with naked men. It's an equal opportunity offender, and getting angry about it would be exhausting, like getting angry about South Park each week.
The show has certainly been a success in the United States, and Hannah is clearly pleased. "For all the hypocrisy, and all the people saying, 'Oh, it's very violent' or 'Oh, it's very sexy' ..." he pauses, "they're all sitting glued to it, aren't they?"
Source:
The Observer UK.
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