The first movie Tom Hanks made because he could: “This is the type of artist who I want to be”
It’s hard to imagine now, but Tom Hanks wasn’t always the universally adored Hollywood leading man he is today. During the 1980s, he shot to fame with a string of successful comedies and romcoms, but by the decade’s end, he recognised the risk of being pigeonholed as a “comedy guy”.
Determined to shift perceptions, Hanks embarked on a calculated reinvention in the early 1990s—and it paid off spectacularly. Within a few short years, he had become one of the biggest names in the industry, with the power to choose roles that aligned with his artistic vision. Notably, he saw his first passion project during this period as a reflection of the kind of actor he aspired to be for the rest of his career.
When Hanks figured out that his run of hits like The Money Pit, Big, and Splash had brought him fame and fortune but limited the parts casting agents would consider him for, he knew something had to be done. He told his agent that he wanted to pursue more dramatic roles and prepared himself for a period of holding out for the right thing to come along.
Indeed, as he put it in an interview with The New York Times, “I had done enough romantic leads in enough movies and had experienced enough compromise to say, ‘I’m not even going to read those scripts anymore.'”
Hanks was right to hold out because Penny Marshall soon approached the young star with a script called A League of Their Own about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League of the 1940s. She wanted him to play Jimmy Dugan, a washed-up alcoholic who is roped into coaching a woman’s team. This role became the transitional part that began to alter Hanks’ status, and he followed it up with back-to-back Oscar wins for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump.
Suddenly, Hanks was in the rarified air of being able to call his own shots – and he knew exactly what he wanted to do next. When he sat down to chat with Richard Lovett, the head of his talent agency CAA, Hanks said, “I’d like to make a movie about Apollo 13”.
Since childhood, Hanks had been fascinated by outer space and NASA, and the story of the agency’s ill-fated fifth trip to the Moon held particular allure to him. By telling the powers-that-be in Hollywood that a docudrama about a real-life disaster was what he had his sights set on, Hanks felt, “That was the first time where I was saying, ‘This is the type of artist who I want to be’.”
Interestingly, Hanks had actually put the feelers out about making an Apollo 13 film as far back as ’91, but when Jim Lovell’s book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 hit shelves in ’94, he finally had a way in. Lovell was the head astronaut on that ill-fated mission, and his book thrillingly revealed how his two-man crew and NASA put their heads together to improvise mechanical and scientific solutions to get them home safely.
Hanks spent four days with Lovell at his Texas home to research the part in the movie, which wound up being directed by Ron Howard. Spending time with a genuine hero like Lovell was a dream come true for a space nerd like Hanks. Amusingly, he told the famed astronaut, “Well, for good or bad, Jim, I’m going to be you. I’m going to be the Jim Lovell of record, and that will haunt you for the rest of your days.”
Thankfully, the film turned out to be one of the greatest ever made and was nominated for nine Oscars. Hanks did Lovell – and his own artistic ambitions – proud.
