John Hannah: ,Most Actors Are Easily Hurt,

The Scottish actor opens up about his serendipitous rise to fame, the perils of fatherhood in the 21st century, and his latest sci-fi film, Genesis

- Anna Walker

“ I kind of felt like the nuclear war would be a better option.”

John Hannah, 56, shudders as he recounts the cold days he recently spent crammed in a nuclear bunker in Essex. He was shooting for his latest project, apocalyptic sci-fi flick Genesis, in which he plays the charismatic Paul Brooks, leader of an increasingly desperate group of nuclear war survivors.

“The location had an effect on everyone. The shelter was operational until the mid-Nineties and it still had a lot of the original artefacts. It’s open to the public now;boy scouts go and spend the night in the bunks. It’s all very depressing, to be honest…”

THAT TRADEMARK SCOTTISH lilt trails off. John is clearly an actor who takes his work home with him.

After his break-out role as the grieving, WH Auden-poetry-reading Matthew in 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, John Hannah’s rise through Hollywood was fast. It was perhaps his turn as romantic lead opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors four years later, however, that really propelled him to global fame. In Sliding Doors, two parallel realities unfold in tandem, to show how a minute decision altered the path of the heroine’s life. John’s own Sliding Doors moment was the very thing that launched his career.

“I wanted to go to college because I was a bit lost. I didn’t know what to do and the day of the audition [for the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama] I happened to be off work. So, I decided I would go in and do it and I was accepted. I wasn’t trying to be an actor, I thought I’d be a student for a while and work out what I wanted to do while I was there. I suppose that was one of those moments. I could have walked into the audition, or I could have said, ‘Ah, nah, forget it.’ It changed my life.”