by James Mottram
When John Hannah turned 60, he told his two kids that he was finished with acting. “I was like, ‘I’m giving up. I’m done. I’m retiring.’ I joked, but what I meant was … I’m at that age where I don’t see myself being number one on the call sheet. I’m not the leading man. I’m not going to be the romantic lead. I’m going to be somebody’s dad.”
Rather than quit in a huff, the Scottish star of Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Mummy decided on taking a different stance. Or as he puts it: “Just doing what comes in that’s interesting.”
Now 64, Hannah has been doing exactly that these past years. Some were in high-profile productions – like his memorable cameo as a scientist warning viewers of an apocalyptic fungus in the opening scene of HBO’s video game adaptation The Last of Us. Others were little-seen but loveable indies like rom-com This Time Next Year. Whatever the project, Hannah is delighted by his new policy that saw him stop searching for leads and start taking on more character parts. “I got the fucking most interesting work that I’ve been doing for years!”
FilmInk is talking to Hannah at Italian Global Series, a TV festival held in the Italian seaside resorts of Rimini and Riccione. It’s the second edition – and the actor has arrived to launch the darkly comic Benidorm is Murder [pictured above]. While he’s no stranger to detective shows – he played Ian Rankin’s inspector in the show Rebus back in 2000 – this is a little different. An ex-cop, his character Dennis is a washed-up bar owner in the popular Spanish resort. “Being of a certain age, where it’s difficult to find the motivation for the next challenge, he’s kind of given up,” says Hannah.
Destined to appeal to those who love exotic mystery-of-the-week shows like Death in Paradise, the production took Hannah to Benidorm for the first time in his life. “It’s pretty lively late at night.,” he says. “I mean, sometimes we were going to work first thing in the morning, and the bars were just emptying out. People were throwing up in the streets as we were passing. But at the same time, I think my parents, if they were still alive, they would have loved it. They would have just felt right at home. They loved the sun. And the show is very working class. It’s a very blue-collar show.”
Beyond this, Hannah has continued with this ‘wait and see’ approach. Take The Incomer, a quirky, absurdist comedy. The story follows a council employee (Domhnall Gleeson), sent to a remote Scottish isle to evict two siblings (Gayle Rankin, Grant O’Rourke) who have been living an isolated existence there ever since their parents died. “I play the seal!” laughs Hannah. And – no – he’s not joking. Rankin’s Isla hallucinates talking to one of the creatures of the island, bobbing up and down in the water.
Nicknamed ‘Fin Man’ in the film, Hannah’s aquatic creature attempts to lure Isla into the water – which, to some eyes, looks freezing cold (the film, directed by Louis Paxton, was shot across the Scottish Highlands and Caithness region). “It was pretty warm,” the hardy Hannah notes. “It was a great summer. I do a bit of open water swimming anyway, so I’m not really scared of the water. I mean, the hardest thing was basically trying to hold a position because we were in that little creek. As the waves come out, you’d be moving around a lot. So then it was about getting back into place.”
If that isn’t weird enough, Hannah is also the lead in Bad Day at the Office, a Hitchcockian thriller that sees him play a man named Karl, who wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead body, unable to remember a thing. Uniquely, the film is shot using GoPro cameras, giving the look of a first-person shooter video game. “Do you know a film called Hardcore Henry? It’s like that,” says Hannah, referring to the 2015 action-sci-fi starring Sharlto Copley, as he grabs his phone and shows FilmInk a picture of him wearing the GoPro rig. “It’s really spectacular.”
Co-starring Radha Mitchell as the maid who tries to help Hannah’s Karl unpick what just happened, Bad Day at the Office is directed by British-Chinese filmmaker Chee Keong Cheung. “I was looking at this, and I was like, ‘Fuck, this is going to be hard work.’ But it was so different,” says Hannah. “I talked to Chee, and I was like, ‘Why, why, me? I’ve never done anything like this.’ And that was what he wanted. He wanted somebody who’s not … no disrespect to Jason Statham or anybody, but somebody who’s not perceived as that kind of actor.”
While Hannah has been enjoying the variety of late, he is about to return to one of his most beloved characters for the latest instalment in The Mummy franchise. Hannah featured as Jonathan, brother to Rachel Weisz’s librarian Evelyn, in 1999’s The Mummy, 2001 sequel The Mummy Returns, and 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Now the team is back together, including Brendan Fraser – as treasure hunter Rick O’Connell – for a fourth outing, to be directed by Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Ready or Not).
Hannah admits that he’s amazed how The Mummy has endured. “I did a convention last year … not reluctantly, but thinking ‘Who’s going to give a shit about a film that was out 30 years ago?’ And I was wrong – again! Because it’s become that film that people have watched with their parents, their grandparents, people who weren’t even born when it came out … it’s become their rainy day movie. It’s become their go-to happy place movie, and generations of people have seen it, and it just clicks with them.”
While he’s bound to secrecy –although the release date of May 2028 has already been set – Hannah calls it an “age-appropriate script”, suggesting that the reuniting characters are all going to be a little older, if not wiser. He also hints at a story with plenty of action, noting how Fraser has been getting himself in shape. “Brendan’s very involved physically. If he can do it himself, he’ll do it. I get thrown around a lot, because I’m his football, as it were, I mean, I keep myself pretty fit anyway with the swimming and cycling. But I don’t bounce like I used to. So, I think my stunt man will be doing more than me!”
The Incomer plays at the Melbourne International Film Festival on 15, 22 and 23 August, more details here.
