“I’m going to steal from you”: the one actor Tom Hanks called the coolest guy in every room
He might be a two-time Academy Award winner, ‘America’s Dad’, one of his generation’s finest actors, and a staple of the A-list for almost four decades, but one thing Tom Hanks isn’t is cool.
That’s not supposed to be a slight, but nobody’s ever looked at Hanks and even contemplated mentioning him in the same breath as Steve McQueen, James Dean, Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery, or any other star of past or present who were always celebrated or recognised for their effortless coolness.
You don’t need to be cool to be popular, though, and he’s been proving it for his entire career. He’s one of the very few names in the business who’ve flirted with the elusive ‘universally beloved’ tag, and whatever he lacks in inherent cool, he more than makes up for in talent, gravitas, and reliability.
Hanks would probably be the first person to admit that he doesn’t cut the mustard on that particular front, and while he’s self-aware enough to realise that he’s edged into living legend status, he still discovered that he’d met his match when he encountered a co-star who was everything he dreamed of being.
Under most circumstances, a run-of-the-mill Ron Howard thriller doesn’t jump out as the obvious place where the Forrest Gump favourite would come face-to-face with cinema’s coolest customer, but after working with the late Irrfan Khan, he had no other choice but to admit he’d be stealing whatever he could to join him in the pantheon.
“Here’s what I hate about Irrfan Khan; I always think I’m the coolest guy in the room, and everybody’s hanging onto every word I say, and everybody’s a little intimidated to be in my presence,” Hanks said of his colleague in the Da Vinci Code sequel, Inferno. “And then Irrfan Khan walks into the room. And he’s the coolest guy in the room.”
Although he didn’t gain international recognition until the latter years of his career with roles in movies like The Darjeeling Limited, Slumdog Millionaire, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Life of Pi, to name four, anyone familiar with Khan’s work in his native India knew that he was one of the country’s best, regardless of how big or small a part he was playing, or which genre he was appearing in.
According to Hanks, he was also too cool for school, and he could barely abide it. “As soon as I walked up to him, I said, ‘Irrfan Khan, I’m going to steal from you everything I possibly can,'” he continued. “I’m going to start speaking very quietly in films. I’m going to wear very nice suits. And I will draw out the last sound of every sentence I say.”
While that’s doing a disservice to the actor’s range and versatility, and it would take a lot more than that for Hanks to emit any levels of badassery whatsoever, he knew that even ripping off Khan wouldn’t be enough: “By doing that,” he added. “I will be doing a very pale imitation of the coolest guy in the room.” His tongue was firmly in cheek when it came to plagiarism, but the Big and Philadelphia frontman wasn’t kidding when he suggested that Khan was as cool as movie stars came.
