John Hannah has been in enough things that people keep confusing him with other people. He's fine with this. When fans mistake him for James Nesbitt, he swears at them and lets Jimmy take the blame. This is the disposition of a man who spent decades treating each job as a rung to the next one, then turned 60 and decided: bollocks to that. The Q&A format suits him. He's a good interview subject in the way actors rarely are — he doesn't manage his image, he just answers. Asked about the WH Auden poem from Four Weddings and a Funeral, he tries it from memory and lands somewhere around 'Something, something … let the mourners come,' then calls it terrible. He doesn't pretend it isn't. The best exchange in the piece is the one about his parents. Asked who he'd create a Life Model Decoy of (an Agents of SHIELD reference only maybe 40 people sent in), he says his dad, then his mum, both dead. He talks about leaving home at 16 and calling them once a month from a phone box with a handful of coins, and how he wishes he'd known them better. No performance in it. Just a man in his sixties working out what he'd do differently. The rest is good fun. He confirms he stole an Egyptian dog head from The Mummy set and put it in his garden until Brendan Fraser wouldn't stop teasing him about it. He notes that Richard E Grant and Alan Cumming are also light-fingered on sets. He describes delivering dialogue in Spartacus while 'pretending to be fellated' and observes, with perfect timing, that if he had to live in Roman times he'd want to be upstairs. On the Eminem connection — the theory that Hannah's role in Sliding Doors introduced Eminem to Dido's Thank You, which became the sample in Stan — he says the story he heard was that Eminem was 'so sickened by the sweetness that he decided to counterpoint it with an obsessed fan trying to murder his girlfriend.' He then claims the title of 'Scottish Eminem' on the basis that he can rhyme 'good' with 'food' for Co-op voiceovers. This is a reasonable claim. What the piece captures, quietly, is an actor who never had the career he wanted and made peace with that in a useful way. He says turning 60 meant he stopped trying to have a career and started doing 'stuff that I like, that's filming somewhere nice, or is especially well paid.' The punchline is that he's never been busier. Bad Day at the Office — described as 'ridiculous, strange and experimental' — opens in UK and Irish cinemas on 30 October. At 64, he couldn't have imagined it. That's a better trajectory than most.
