The one actor Tom Hanks hated being compared to: “I decided to disregard that concern”
Comparing a fast-rising star to a predecessor with whom they share a couple of common traits is one of Hollywood’s easiest and laziest fallback options. Some people take it on the chin and acknowledge the comparisons; others bristle at the mere mention. Tom Hanks fell somewhere in the middle, at least for a while, before he became his own man.
It’s been the way of the business for decades, and it’s not going to change. If a performer who marries brooding intensity with naturalism emerges, then Marlon Brando is invoked. If a comedian bursts onto the scene and develops a habit of playing multiple characters, then the shadow of Peter Sellers isn’t far behind.
Every actor wants to be unique, and being heralded as the second coming of anyone, regardless of whether they’re an actor, writer, director, or anything else, can be a blessing and a curse. There’s only one Tom Hanks, but he was a long way into his career before he finally outran the spectre that’d been looming in the background.
One of the things that made Hanks a household name was his affability. He started his career in comedy before moving into more dramatic roles, and he’s always been a great actor, but the characters he played transformed him into his generation’s ultimate everyman, the sort of guy you’d happily hang out with.
Of course, nobody has ever embodied that archetype better than James Stewart, and Hanks knew it. It was almost inevitable that the latter’s signature brand of easygoing charm and laconic dramatism would draw comparisons to the latter, especially when he virtually stepped into his shoes.
Nora Ephron’s 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail was sold and marketed on the back of Hanks and Meg Ryan reuniting to lean into their Sleepless in Seattle baggage. However, the film was also a loose reinterpretation of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 classic The Shop Around the Corner, which starred Stewart opposite Margaret Sullivan.
For someone who’d grown weary of Stewart being mentioned in conjunction with his own career since the 1980s, it was a strange move for Hanks to remake one of his best-known pictures a decade later when he was a two-time Academy Award winner who’d finally distanced himself from those correlations.
Hanks admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he initially wasn’t too keen to follow in Stewart’s footsteps for those very reasons before he was eventually won over. “I decided to disregard that concern,” he said. “I mean, you’ll never see me remake Mr Smith Goes to Washington or It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The actor was adamant that “Shop Around the Corner is very different” to the typical Stewart shtick, which assuaged his concerns. “This is a very young Jimmy Stewart,” he explained. “This is Jimmy Stewart before Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart.”
With that in mind, if anyone asks for a brief rundown of Hanks’ Joe Fox in You’ve Got Mail, tell them that it’s an actor who’d been relentlessly compared to Jimmy Stewart remaking a Jimmy Stewart movie that Jimmy Stewart made before Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart, which rolls off the tongue.
