I don't mean that, but I could get going on it."
You should have to sit a test, or something. People have to have a licence for a dog, but anybody can have children! I mean, please. Honestly, sometimes I could get so reactionary. "If you've got six-year-old children, they shouldn't be watching that. I think at times you have to turn around and say, 'Your kids shouldn't be fucking watching that!'" he shouts. What about kids seeing it? "It's on a cable package, it's pin-protected, it's on after 10 o'clock at night. In metaphorical and literal ways." Usually literal. When these kinds of people want things, they kill people and they fuck them. There's nudity and sex, because it deals in a fully grown-up way with that debauched and immoral world. Is he worried about people calling it soft porn? "I don't think it's anything like that. "But with both hands!" My palms rise to cover my eyes. "As though she was holding an imaginary penis?" "Yeah!" says Hannah. Then we did the take, and she went like that!" He goes to sit down, while holding out both hands, cupped as if gripping, well. "And she just kneels there, and they get the composition, and that's fine. He's wearing a cycling outfit – tight shorts and top – which somehow makes this more alarming. "I don't how you're going to do this with words," he says disarmingly, "but we were setting up the framing, and so the girl comes over and kneels in front of me." He lunges into a half-crouch, as my eyes goggle. A wee bit of boob, a wee bit of bum." He starts talking about a startling scene in the second episode, in which a slave girl prepares him, orally, to have sex with his wife, played by Xena Warrior Princess actor, Lucy Lawless. What about the sex scenes? "The funny thing is, you've got your choreography, because that's all it is – a dance. "I was the fattest, oldest, grumpiest, most grizzled, lined, miserable, with bad teeth because I'm Scottish, and I'm in there with all these people who are babes – fit and gorgeous – and that's just the guys." We only had the first script, and in terms of the look, the graphic nature, that was up in the air." He describes his character as a "devious, lying, cheating, ambitious motherfucker – it's great!"ĭid he balk at any of the nude scenes? It was "miserable being in makeup every day," he says. I ask whether he had any sense of what it was going to be like when he signed up, and he shrugs: "Not really. In fact, he's boisterously, puppyishly enthusiastic about the show. "He wiggles them and everyone shits gold." Lovely.
"That man has fingers in all the proper arseholes," his character says of one of his rivals. It is unlikely to bring such plaudits this time Hannah is grappling with some rough material. It looks like a computer game crossed with a cartoon and littered with full-frontal nudity and extended sex scenes.Īt its heart is Hannah, who plays gladiator-owner Lentulus Batiatus – a role that won Peter Ustinov an Oscar in the 1960 film version of the story. When the Thracian slave Spartacus fights in the arena, vast crowns of blood fan suddenly from head wounds, arms are scythed off, a man bereft of legs is pitchforked in the back, and blood spots spatter the camera lens. Set in Rome in 73BC – in a world where women are preposterously nubile, and men are preposterously muscle-bound – the show is, indeed, unlike anything we have seen before. Mediawatch UK, the conservative pressure group first set up by Mary Whitehouse, has already expressed its deep concern. The Boston Herald said that it "fetishises violence even more than it depicts sex and nudity, which is often" the LA Times noted that "bodies are stabbed, slashed, sledge-hammered and variously dismembered" and the Washington Post said, quite approvingly, that it's "just about the grimiest, nastiest, bloodiest thing you could hope to find on TV". The show arrives on Bravo later this month, amid a fanfare of hype and controversy – it was originally commissioned and shown by the US cable network Starz, and has been called "the most explicit, violent series" ever made.
Spartacus sex tv#
Actually, in any other circumstance, it would be utterly, bizarrely inappropriate – but in discussing his new TV drama, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, it's pretty much par for the course. Hannah's mime is not entirely inappropriate. I'm trying to look at him head on, without laughing nervously or grimacing, but my hands keep rising, involuntarily, to cover my eyes. Actually, he is mimicking the mimicking of a sex act. T hree minutes into my interview with actor John Hannah, and he is crouching in front of me – half-hovering, half- kneeling – mimicking a sex act.