Final Days of Planet Earth

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A conversation with “Final Days of Planet Earth” star Daryl Hannah

      If Daryl Hannah, the star of the Hallmark Channel movie event “Final Days of Planet Earth,” a three-hour science fiction thriller, premiering Saturday, October 14 (8/7c), had her way, she would thrive as an “anonymous” movie star.  “But that’s not the way this business works,” she laments.

          Hannah first made a “Splash” in 1984 as the mermaid who won Tom Hanks’ heart.  Moviegoers were captivated -– and a reluctant Hollywood icon was born.

          “I love movies,” she says.  “I love the process of making them.  It’s a beautiful form of expression.  It’s like making dreams visceral.  But I’m not at all comfortable with attention being focused directly at me.”

          Tellingly, when she reflects on a 25-year career, the roles Hannah singles out as favorites tend to have an incognito quality.

          In “Blade Runner,” Hannah was transformed into an apocalyptic-punk android, almost unrecognizable beneath the garish makeup and fright-wig hair; in “Steel Magnolias” she dressed down – way down – to portray a gawky, geeky hairdresser; in the “Kill Bill” movies, she was a foul-mouthed, one-eyed assassin.  “I was somebody else, somewhere else, in another reality,” she says.

In “Final Days of Planet Earth,” a sci-fi adventure costarring Gil Bellows and Campbell Scott, Hannah is definitely someone else in another reality.  In a tale that involves a race of alien insects harvesting human bodies, Hannah plays the alien queen intent on world domination.

Hannah still has the grace and good looks that made filmmakers try to pigeonhole her 20 years ago as the naïve blonde, the supportive girlfriend, the angelic object of desire.  Early in her career, she went along with such casting.  But after a time, she began to wonder, “Is that all there is for me?”  That’s why taking villainous turns like in “Final Days” appeals to her.

 “It’s the closest to what I always hoped moviemaking would be,” she says.  “I can go to work and I’m completely transported to another world.”

          Even as a child, Hannah knew the world of movies was where she wanted to be.

“It started with me as soon as I realized what a movie was,” she recalls.  “When I was a kid, I just thought somebody was filming other people as they were living their lives.  I mean it.  I didn’t realize they were acting out a made-up story.  But once I put two and two together, as I soon as I realized that it was a job that you could have, I went, ‘Cool, I want to do that!’  I was only 11 when that happened.”

It’s what she has been doing all her adult life.  In recent years, though, she has started to move behind the camera as director or producer, which might be better suited for her, given the desire to avoid spotlight.

          “Before ‘Splash,’ I had done quite a few movies that never got much of a release,” Hannah recalls.  “In many ways, that was the greatest time for me.  Because I was enjoying making the movies and getting to play the parts.  But I wasn’t concerned about anyone actually SEEING them.  That was great, but movies are made so people will see them.  I just have to accept that as part of the deal.”

-- HALLMARK CHANNEL --