The 1995 movie Tom Hanks struggled to make: “The hardest physical work I’ve ever done”
Unlike many of his A-list contemporaries, Tom Hanks has never shown much interest in trying his hand at becoming an action hero, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t tackled a number of physically demanding and ultimately exhausting roles.
Whether it was losing a dramatic amount of weight for Cast Away – which saw him injure his leg and end up with a staph infection that almost killed him – or meticulously researching the number of real-life figures he’s played in order to do them proper justice on-screen, Hanks will never give anything less than 100%.
That commitment has become one of the defining characteristics of Hanks’ career. Whether tackling comedy, drama or animation, he has consistently approached every role with the same level of dedication.
While the actor hasn’t done much in the way of running away from explosions, jumping through the air, or being strapped into a wire rig and tossed around with reckless abandon, the two-time Academy Award winner has nonetheless experienced plenty of physical hardship during his decades in the spotlight.
And yet, the production that he called the most difficult he’s ever had to endure didn’t require him to spend so much as a single minute on set because there weren’t any. In most cases, it would be reasonable to expect voiceover work to be a relatively cushy number for any performer, but Toy Story ended up pushing Hanks to the brink.
Bringing Woody to life required far more than simply reading lines from a script. Every emotion, reaction and moment of excitement had to be conveyed using only his voice. The revelation is particularly surprising given the number of physically demanding productions he has completed throughout his career. Yet Hanks has repeatedly pointed to voice acting as a uniquely difficult craft.
In an interview with Graham Bensinger, Hanks admitted, “the hardest physical work I’ve ever done as an actor has been recording those movies”. On the surface, standing in a booth and reciting lines of dialogue into a microphone hardly sounds like the most taxing undertaking for a talent of Hanks’ magnitude, but the opposite proved to be true.
“You cannot move. You have no costume to hide in. You have no motion in order to animate the emotion, you don’t get to do that,” he continued, “You have to stay locked in place, on microphone, and only use your imagination and your voice in order to go there”. Even though he’d “probably recorded half of all the Toy Story movies with my eyes closed”, the physicality remains permanently etched in his mind.
Considering the raft of acclaimed performances Hanks has given, many of which required physical transformations and months of preparation, it’s surprising to discover Toy Story being singled out as the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. Standing still with his eyes shut and reading the script seems straightforward, if not entirely easy, on paper, but that didn’t quite turn out to be the case.
Not that it prevented him from doing it four times over, though, with Disney’s announcement of Toy Story 5 indicating that he’s going to have to do it at least one more time. Maybe he’ll have learned from his experiences and take it a little easier the fifth time around, but then again, that’s never been how Hanks has tended to operate.
If his previous performances are any indication, audiences can expect the same level of commitment from him once again. Regardless of the medium, Hanks has always approached acting as a craft that demands total investment.
