BBC star Tom Hollander refuses to open his letters – as he fears he could be targeted by deranged Vladimir Putin or his henchmen.

Tom, 55, who starred in the BBC Rev and The Night Manager, is now playing a Putin rival in a London play scrutinising Mad Vlad’s regime and his rise to power.

The actor says production is ‘anti-Putin’ and told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg it could have dire consequences for him.

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And The White Lotus star fears it could lead him to being a target for the tyrant and his supporters who have attacked ex spies in the UK before.

Tom, 55, told the BBC: “What has happened is now that we are at war, I am more cautious about opening any post that comes from Russia. We are quite visibly doing a play that is broadly speaking Anti-Putin.

In his latest play Patriots, The White Lotus actor stars as Boris Berezovsky a Russian oligarch who bitterly fell out with Vladimir Putin.

Kuenssberg seem shocked when Tom outlined his concerns.

He added: “We are not doing a sweet Checkhov play. we are doing something about living figures who are in embattled with the West. So it’s just a reason for not opening everything that comes in the post.”

Putin’s henchmen have alleged to have already carried out fatal attacks in the UK against his critics.

Mad Vlad was accused of sending spies to attack a former Russian intelligence officer in Salisbury in 2017.

Former Russian intelligence officerSergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury city centre.

They had been targeted with the deadly nerve agent novichok in an assassination attempt, which Western officials have since claimed leads all the way back to the Kremlin.

Though the pair survived the attack, Dawn Sturgess, a mother-of-three who came into contact with the nerve agent from a discarded perfume bottle – thought to have been used by the assassins to administer to the door handle of the Skripals’ home – later died from her exposure to the chemical.

The incident sparked a huge diplomatic row between the UK and Russia, which denied any involvement in the incident.

Before this former spy Alexander Litvinenko was killed in November 2006.

He was killed by radioactive polonium-210, believed to have been administered in a cup of tea.

A public inquiry into the killing concluded that President Putin probably approved his assassination.