Hannah loses his manners

'I'm sorry if I ranted a bit,' says John Hannah at the end of our interview. 'It's this play. It's made me very aggressive. I find myself repeating things to push home a point. I've become very...'

American? It figures: Hannah is rehearsing a new Neil LaBute play, something that would make anyone a bit emphatic. LaBute is king of the barbed one-liner, after all, a writer with a vicious grasp of language as a means of defence and attack.

The thing with Hannah is that he credits his success to nothing more than luck and chance. He took the part of Ben in LaBute's The Mercy Seat because the script turned up, 'and, well, I'd just finished a job and I thought why not?'

Having originally trained as an electrician in his native East Kilbride, he only became an actor when someone suggested he might be quite good at it. He spent ten years after drama school 'on the dole and getting drunk, doing what actors do', before being picked out of nowhere to star in Four Weddings And A Funeral.

And ask what made the biggest difference to his life, Four Weddings or The Mummy - the film that made him a big Hollywood player - and Hannah shrugs. 'They are all just steps along a path. One leads to another. There's never been any great plan.'

Either way, The Mercy Seat, set in New York on September 12, 2001, is surely a very good next step, be it luck or otherwise. What does he think of his character Ben, who realises he may be able to exploit the tragedy happening on the streets to the advantage of his adulterous affair?

'It's not for me to judge,' says Hannah. 'He's just a guy trying to muddle through. I'm really enjoying burying deep beneath his thought processes. He's doing a very male thing: trying to cause the least amount of hurt to the least amount of people.

'These days there's a tendency to think that everyone else has got it sussed,' he says, warming to his theme. 'It's the same with actors, the way we assume they have it all worked out. We assume fame is all everyone wants. Well, I don't know any actor who acts because they want to be famous. They do it because they want to express themselves. Fame is a horrible thing. Only the most shallow person would want it.'

And yet Hannah has appeared in two Hollywood blockbusters and the hit British romantic comedy, Sliding Doors, with Gwyneth Paltrow. How does he reconcile that exposure with the desire to lead a normal life and safeguard his ideals as an actor?

Hannah explodes: 'Look. It's a myth that an actor is going to turn down a big Hollywood film because they want to do some worthy play in the regions. Sometimes you do it because you are skint. And sometimes you do it because it enables you to do other things you really want to do. We are so f***ed up on the notion of success in this country.'