John Hannah, Not James Nesbitt, Called Himself “the Scottish Eminem.” Here Is What He Actually Said About Stan.

A Guardian Q&A produced a genuinely fun Eminem tangent this week. It also got misattributed to the wrong Scottish actor by at least one outlet. Here is who actually said it, and the real story behind the joke.

On Thursday, September 24, The Guardian ran one of its reader-submitted Q&A interviews, this one with actor John Hannah, "as told to" Rich Pelley. Buried in a piece mostly about stolen film props and getting lost on his own travels, Hannah made a throwaway joke about being "the Scottish Eminem." It is a good line, tied to a real piece of Eminem trivia involving Sliding Doors, the 1998 film Hannah actually starred in. Somewhere in the retelling, competitor site eminem.news published the story under the headline "James Nesbitt Calls Himself the Scottish Eminem," crediting the quotes to the wrong actor entirely. Nesbitt had nothing to do with the interview or the film. We went to the Guardian syndication directly to sort out who actually said it.

"Stan," the song at the center of Hannah's joke, built entirely around a Dido sample that traces back to the film he is actually in.

Who actually said it

Hannah, 64, is best known for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sliding Doors, The Mummy, Spartacus and, more recently, HBO's The Last of Us. Asked in the Q&A about doing voiceover work for Co-op, where his Scottish accent happens to rhyme "good" with "food," he leaned into it:

John Hannah: "I don't think they realised that it could possibly rhyme. It's like when Eminem rhymes all these things with 'orange.' I'm the Scottish Eminem!"

That quote, word for word, appears in two independent syndications of the same Guardian piece, one via AOL UK and one via Brit Brief, both crediting Rich Pelley and dating the interview to the week of September 24 to 25. Neither mentions James Nesbitt anywhere in the text. Nesbitt was not in Sliding Doors; the two leads were Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah. Eminem.news appears to have simply grabbed the wrong Scottish actor. It happens, but it is worth fixing before it calcifies into one of those "facts" that gets repeated for years.

The actual Eminem connection, which is a better story than the joke

The interview's other Eminem mention is the more interesting one, and it is about how Sliding Doors indirectly produced one of Eminem's biggest songs. Hannah, reflecting on the film's reach, said:

John Hannah: "It's strange how Sliding Doors and Four Weddings have travelled the world. It's certainly cool to think that somebody as far out of left field as Eminem has actually even seen something you've done. Although, the story I heard was that he was so sickened by the sweetness that he decided to counterpoint it with an obsessed fan trying to murder his girlfriend."

The chain of events Hannah is nodding to, and gets broadly right, runs like this: Dido's "Thank You" first surfaced on the 1998 Sliding Doors soundtrack, the same film that put Hannah opposite Paltrow. Producer 45 King later built a beat around the "Thank You" sample, and Eminem wrote "Stan" over it, the 2000 single that turned an obsessed-fan narrative into a Top 10 hit in the U.S. and a number one in the U.K. and Australia. It also gave the English language the word "stan." Hannah's version, that Eminem heard the song's warmth and decided to write something darker as a counterpoint, is the kind of secondhand telling that has floated around for years and is close enough to the spirit of it that we are not going to pretend to correct a joke in a Q&A. The song's own history, and the fandom the term eventually described, has been picked apart in more detail than one actor's aside needs to carry.

Why the mix-up is an easy one to make

Hannah and Nesbitt are both Northern Irish and Scottish-adjacent leading men of a similar vintage who have spent careers being mistaken for each other by casual readers, which probably did not help whoever first typed the wrong name. But the interview itself is unambiguous. It also has nothing to do with Nesbitt's own filmography, which does not include Sliding Doors, the film the whole joke depends on. If a story's premise cannot survive a quick check against the film's actual cast list, it is worth going back to the source before running it, which is the same standard we would want applied to a piece about The Marshall Mathers LP itself getting a fact wrong.

The rest of Hannah's Guardian Q&A is unrelated to Eminem but worth a mention for context: he talked about swiping a fibreglass Egyptian dog head from the set of The Mummy, getting lost on his own commute ("I get lost going to the bathroom"), and deciding at 60 to only take jobs that film somewhere nice or pay especially well. None of it involves Marshall Mathers. The "Scottish Eminem" line is a one-off joke about a supermarket ad campaign, not a statement of any real connection between the two men beyond the coincidence Hannah is riffing on.

The correction, plainly stated

To recap the two things worth getting straight: the actor who called himself "the Scottish Eminem" over a Co-op rhyme is John Hannah, not James Nesbitt, and the Eminem trivia underneath the joke is real, just secondhand, tracing "Stan" back to the Dido sample that started life on the Sliding Doors soundtrack Hannah actually appeared in. For anyone building out their own list of Eminem facts worth knowing, that soundtrack-to-sample pipeline is a cleaner one than "an actor once compared himself to Eminem," and it happens to be true.

Header image: Still from the official "Stan" music video. Credit: EminemMusic / Interscope.