Opening ‘Doors’ With a Direct but Winning Style

Unlike a lot of actors, John Hannah is as interesting as the characters he plays. In “Four Weddings and a Funeral,� his breakthrough film, he was Simon Callow’s winsome lover, who memorably recites Auden at Callow’s funeral. In his new film, “Sliding Doors,� which opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival, he manages to woo the lovely, swan-like Gwyneth Paltrow with a mixture of self-deprecating humor and common decency. A potent combination.

“People like to think of me as the nice, sensible, legitimate face of the working class,� Hannah says, settling into tea at a New York hotel before heading to Park City. “The educated Scot. But what can you do?�

In fact, Hannah, who is 35, married and lives in London, is cut from the same cloth as fellow Scotsmen Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle, but instead of playing junkies, louts and other assorted losers, he has “fluked,� as he says, “into the sensitive parts. I can wear glasses and things like that and not appear to be a wimp.�

It’s easy to see why he has audiences, filmmakers, even friends fooled. His manner is moderate even when he says the most immoderate things. Take, for example, his opinion of English acting.

“I do think that British theater and therefore British acting is overly intellectual, overly academic,� he says. “Because acting has been the preserve of the middle classes, and having been to university, they like to sit down and have a nice, wee intellectual [talk] about it all. Everything is to do with the voice and the thought, and it’s just dreadful. It’s signposted, it’s patronizing. And a lot of the time the critics . . . respond to this crap because they’re full of crap as well, so what you have is this self-perpetuating crap machine.�

All of this is common knowledge, or so his mild expression would suggest.

“Luckily enough,� he continues, “I’m not subjected to that sort of English university-educated, pseudo-intellectual academic approach to being a person who meets a girl whom he falls in love with. There’s nothing to think about with that. Just do it.�

Hannah is now referring to “Sliding Doors,� which is actually a bit more complicated than boy meets girl. It has two parallel stories and cuts back and forth between them. In one, Paltrow is fired from her London job, takes the Underground (where she meets Hannah) and arrives home to find her boyfriend (John Lynch) in bed with his ex-girlfriend (Jeanne Tripplehorn). In the other, she misses the tube, takes a cab and gets home after the ex-girlfriend has left and continues to live in ignorance of her boyfriend’s duplicity.

“It’s not geared around the gimmick,� says the movie’s writer-director, Peter Howitt. “Once we introduce the premise, it’s ultimately a story about love and relationships and how you meet people and how you don’t meet people and how you stay with people or leave people and two possible strains of any one of the many lives we could have led.�

The project has a kind of “Sliding Doors� history. Originally Howitt sent Hannah the script because he thought he’d be good in the role and his name might attract financing. Howitt was right, in a way. After the financing fell through, Hannah was meeting with director-producer Sydney Pollack and his then-partner Lindsay Doran in L.A. on unrelated matters when he mentioned the script. One thing led to another, and what was once a dead-in-the-water $1-million indie project became a $10-million Intermedia-Paramount-Miramax venture.

“In many ways it was because of John that the film got made in the way it did,� Howitt says.

Although Hannah downplays his role in all of this, some part of him is amused--and bewildered--at the degree to which his fortunes have changed.

A native of a little town near Glasgow, Hannah left school at 16 and worked for four years as an electrician. He contemplated emigrating illegally to L.A. to ply his trade but instead opted for drama school in Glasgow “because you didn’t need any qualifications to get in,� he says. “You needed to play an instrument to go to music college and you needed to paint a picture to go to art school, but you just needed to b.s. to go to drama school.�

After graduation he moved to London, where he proceeded to starve for the next five years. He’s still amazed at the lift he got from “Four Weddings and a Funeral,� considering how little screen time he actually had.

“I was saying to my friends afterward, ‘It’s all right. I just read a poem in it. I’ll probably be cut. They’ll probably just call it ‘Four Weddings,’ ‘Four Weddings and a Cremation,’ ‘Four Weddings and a Lost at Sea.’ I think the reason [the poem was so successful] is the structure of the film. It’s very funny, and then all of a sudden it pulls the rug from under you. You’d have to be really bad to mess that part up. It’s not that difficult. I don’t even read poetry. It’s really funny the amount of attention you get, [people] asking you to come to poetry readings. It’s not like I’m some authority on Auden or anything.�

Hannah may not be an Auden expert, but he is thoughtful, which is rare enough. His views on L.A. are, typically, acute and acerbic, but he doesn’t let himself off the hook either.

“There’s a real paradox about L.A.,� he says. “Everything seems possible, but it’s somehow always elsewhere, just across the street, and you can never quite get there. There’s a real confidence, which is sort of intimidating. You meet some guy who’s wearing a nice suit, very comfortable, very together. And you come in with all your Celtic neuroses and your British chips on your shoulder. And ultimately this is just some guy who’s breaking himself about the fact that he might get sacked from his job, so he’s trying to b.s. somebody else.

“That’s the paradox,� he continues. “You feel intimidated by somebody who’s worried about losing their status, which is relatively nonexistent compared to the fact that you’re actually doing it, feeling happy about your work, feeling satisfied with your overall being. And yet you’ve got the wrong clothes on, you feel like a leper for having your cigarettes, you have a glass of wine at lunch and everyone thinks you need therapy.� He laughs. “But it’s cool. I like the possibilities, but I would like to be given a lot more status, and I’d like all my chips to be filled in before I have to spend any time there.�

Of course, if Hannah were as secure as that, he wouldn’t have to be there at all.