The characters Tom Hanks refuses to play: “It worked for me for a while”
Every actor wants to avoid the threat of typecasting, something Tom Hanks has been cognisant of throughout his career. He could have coasted by on his early success as an affable comedy star, but he knew that it was never going to guarantee longevity.
It didn’t happen overnight, though, with the star’s first major dramatically-inclined role coming years before he truly announced himself as one of his generation’s best after winning the first of his two consecutive Academy Awards for ‘Best Actor’ in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia.
Of course, Hanks was a known commodity long before then and had already made the Oscars shortlist for Penny Marshall’s Big, but it was still a comedy. He couldn’t be the guy from Splash, Bachelor Party, The Money Pit, and The ‘Burbs forever, even if Hollywood was still trying to push him into a box.
Hanks turned the everyman into an art form, making him one of the industry’s most popular and relatable stars. In many of his most successful films, he played a character stumbling through life and somehow conspiring to rise upwards, whether in their career or in love.
These protagonists were largely unassuming, borderline bumbling, and decidedly non-confrontational people who didn’t have a bad bone in their bodies and refused to get suckered into the more scheming, malevolent, or conspiratorial aspects of society, which admittedly isn’t the word Hanks used to describe them.
“There was this archetype in entertainment for a while of the pussy, the guy who gets into something and can’t figure something out and yet still finds true love almost by accident,” he told Men’s Journal. “It was a plug-in for all sorts of movies and television shows. It had some success, and it just kind of fed on itself. And it worked for me for a while because I could actually project some of myself into what the situation was.”
He was never going to be taken seriously if he continued embodying wet blankets with puppy dog eyes and a deep yearning for love that could only be remedied by meet-cutes and important lessons being learned along the way before everybody gets a happy ending by the time the credits rolled, and he knew it.
“But after a while, look, you’re just not 26 anymore, and by the time I got to the point where I had kids myself, and I got divorced, then fell in love with the love of my life, you get to the point where you say, ‘I don’t want to play these pussies anymore. I can’t relate to what they’re going through’, you know?” he ranted. “We always think, ‘Well, gee, if I were put to the test, what would I do?’ That’s the question that I ask with every job now, ‘What would I do in that circumstance?'”
It’s maybe not the best word choice to convey his dissatisfaction with fielding offers for parts he was no longer interested in, regardless of how handy they came in when he was making his way up the ladder. Still, don’t expect Hanks to play anything other than men of upstanding moral character who’ve become vastly experienced in the great game of life.
