“It’s a huge risk”: the ambitious 2000’s movie Tom Hanks compared to a “Hail Mary pass”
Early in his career, Tom Hanks rubbed elbows with Dan Aykroyd and Bruce Willis, before supporting the likes of Austin Butler and Emma Watson in his later years.
Then, when he started appearing in Wes Anderson’s movies, his roster of famous friends increased exponentially, but one of his best-ever movies barely featured any human co-stars.
Released in 2000, Cast Away saw Hanks play Chuck Noland, a FedEx worker stranded alone on a desert island following a plane crash, with no hope of rescue, who must fend for himself and learn to survive in his new, hostile environment. It marked the second time ‘America’s Dad’ teamed up with Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis, and let’s be honest, it’s the last time they made anything great together.
Hanks dedicated himself wholeheartedly to playing Noland, often at the expense of his own mental health. He is onscreen for most of the 143-minute runtime, and he put on 50lbs to shoot the scenes before the plane crash and then lost it all again for the scenes on the island, which really made it look like he’d been stranded there for years. While it’s easy to look back now and respect Hanks’ dedication, even he wasn’t sure it would be worth it.
”It’s all a Hail Mary pass,” Hanks explained to Entertainment Weekly ahead of the film’s release, ”It’s a huge risk. And part of it is, ‘Well, why do it if it’s not a huge risk? Why go through all this stuff?’ The whole movie itself is, I think, bodaciously treading new territory.”
However, the entire project was almost derailed by a very unlikely challenger; earlier that year, CBS premiered a new reality TV show, Survivor, that would still be running over a quarter of a century later, which pitted a group of contestants against the elements on a remote desert island, putting them in situations not unlike those that Noland faced.
Early screenings of the Cast Away trailer were met with cries of “vote him off” by audience members trying to be funny. “I always felt we didn’t have a trivial film,” Hanks said with regards to Survivor comparisons, ”Good or bad, we always had something that was much more substantial than what is essentially a game show that is a television phenomenon.”
Thankfully, people quickly stopped making jokes about Cast Away once they saw it, which garnered rave reviews across the board, and it was a box office smash, raking in the best part of half a million dollars. Hanks received an Oscar nomination for his monumental effort, and Wilson the volleyball became an instant hit. The movie’s success also spawned another hit TV show, as it helped form the basis for the creation of Lost.
In a filmography brimming with legendary characters and performances, Cast Away stands out as one of Hanks’ greatest triumphs, which just goes to show that if you have faith in yourself and your inflatable best friend, not even the most popular reality TV show can stand in your way.
