“Her sexual power becomes irresistible”: the actor Tom Hanks called a “woman not to be messed with”
There’s something undeniably weird, and a little unsettling, about ‘America’s Dad’ commenting on another actor’s “sexual power,” but rest assured, Tom Hanks was saying it in typically wholesome fashion.
That does sound a touch oxymoronic, because most people would struggle to use several variations on the word “sexuality” without coming across as objectifying in the slightest, but if anyone knows how to do it, it’s the two-time Academy Award-winning bastion of clean-cut and scandal-free celebrity.
With the greatest of respect to the long-tenured A-lister, nobody really thinks about Tom Hanks as a sexual being. He’s filmed a few saucy scenes in his time because that’s the job, but he’s not the first name on anyone’s mind when the conversation turns to the onscreen embodiment of lust and passion.
To be fair, neither is Meg Ryan. She became a household name as the endearing, relatable, and immensely talented face of several timeless rom-coms, a couple of which co-starred Hanks, and when she tried to fight back against that image in Jane Campion’s In the Cut, things didn’t work out too well for her career.
While it’s admirable for any performer to try and break out of their wheelhouse and tear the box Hollywood has stuffed them in to shreds, Ryan’s comedic timing, innate likeability, and effortless charm made her one of the industry’s hottest properties, just don’t call her perky in front of one of her friends and frequent collaborators.
“Meg is not perky,” Hanks told Vanity Fair in a 1995 profile. “I always got the distinct impression that this woman is not to be messed with.” Explaining his sexual connotations, her Joe Versus the Volcano, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and Ithaca colleague said that it’s got nothing to do with salaciousness, but everything to do with confidence and appeal.
“Her sexuality is even more present in real life than it is up on the screen,” he elaborated. “Yet, ‘sexuality’ comes off as carnal somehow. It’s not so much that, as opposed to her sexualness, or her sexual power, that becomes irresistible beyond the pale of gender. She does have a definite way of just sitting around and curling up in a chair when you’re talking about stuff. She absorbs a lot.”
Hanks was being the opposite of smutty, which is perfectly on-brand, downplaying the more lascivious conclusions people would reach about him discussing Ryan’s inherent sexuality by espousing that it’s a natural extension of her personality that makes her appeal equally to men and women, which is one of the reasons why she became such a big box office commodity.
He’s a fan of the person, first and foremost, and of the actor, offering that “there is no small amount of emotional and intellectual investment concerning what the characters are going through,” which is why he believed “that perkiness thing becomes a subterfuge” for a genuinely talented dramatic actor who mastered the form of cinema Hanks called comedies that are “slightly elevated in stature.”
