ON MAKING HIS LATEST MOVIE
you give me a cuddle. So I look and think, ‘OK, now I know what to do’. So she knows how to live with me.”
He said Mrs McNab’s insights were invaluable in helping Hannah, who appeared in Game of Thrones and Black Mirror, nail the role.
He said: “Hannah and my wife had lots of talks, meetings and email exchanges. She plays it so well and the interactions between them are spot on.
“Like when Tom has just returned from a mission and killed a woman, and his girlfriend wants him to talk and offload, and gets p ***** off when he’s not interested. My wife says my life is on a three-hour time loop, after that I’m not interested any more because I’ve moved on to something else.”
Andy, 61, never divulges his true identity and his wife’s name is also secret. He is willing to reveal she is six years younger than him, and that she shares his love of surfing – the reason the pair moved to Cornwall after a stint living in Los Angeles. He also has a grown-up daughter who has “a boyfriend, a mortgage and a cat”.
Andy said: “She got into surfing years and years ago when we went to a mate’s wedding in Hawaii.
“She decided to give it a go, and the very first time she got on a board she
ROAD TRIP Hannah and Sam as Sophie and Tom heading for Paris caught a wave and went all the way. All the lads there were clapping. We go surfing together every day, even in the winter. But when the weather’s bad, she’s the one who has to tell me to go home because I don’t recognise the danger.”
The rest of his life remains a mystery. He hides their identity because he still gets death threats after spending a year on SAS operations in Northern Ireland.
“It’s just being sensible,” he said. “I don’t want to show my face because it puts me at risk.
“Over the years there have been lots of threats and every now and again one is credible. The last one was a couple of years ago”
Anonymity hasn’t stifled his success. Andy, who claims he was the most highly decorated serving soldier when he left the SAS in 1993, published his first book, Bravo Two Zero, the same year. It is still the bestselling military history book of all time. He then moved from memoirs to fiction and has had phenomenal success on both sides of the Atlantic, shifting tens of millions of copies and achieving eight Amazon No1s. He was made a CBE in 2017 – but his name went under his pseudonym.
He also found himself in Hollywood after Robert De Niro read his first book and asked him to be a technical adviser on his next film Heat, directed by Michael Mann, in 1995. He stayed several years in LA helping other productions. played by The Meg star Ruby Rose. Andy said: “They asked me if I wanted to help produce it.
“So I started to get involved in the process, and that was almost like graduating for me, going from the advisory role to producing the film right from its inception.
“I was helping come up with the basic ideas, working out how we were going to film them and where the money was coming from.
“It was great but made me realise how much hard work is involved.”
Andy is now gearing up for another new experience. He flies out to Mumbai this year to help with a Bollywood film.
“It’s going to be brilliant,” he said. “It’s an action drama and a love story, it’s Bollywood.
“There’ll be dancing, but you won’t catch me joining in – that’s one thing I don’t know how to do.”
SAS: Red Notice is available only on Sky Cinema from today.