“He thinks you have dead eyes”: how Tom Hanks single-handedly crippled an acting career
They say you should never meet your heroes, but surely the proverbial “they” were not talking about Tom Hanks. There are few actors who can simultaneously hold court as an A-list movie star and project an aura of unassailable decency and warmth. If you grew up watching his movies, Tom Hanks probably feels a bit like a surrogate dad. He’s the guy you’d want to grab a beer with, a guy who would definitely pet your dog if you saw him in the street, the Oscar winner most likely to give you a compliment and ask how your day is going.
But are we all just deluding ourselves? According to one of his would-be co-stars, Hollywood’s most decent man can be pretty cutting when it comes to hiring and firing young actors. Connor Ratliff was a student at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts in the early 2000s when he landed what would have been his big break. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks had chosen him from a crowd of hopefuls to appear in an episode of their war miniseries Band of Brothers. It was the chance of a lifetime and the moment that Ratliff believed would change his life. It did, but definitely not in the way he was hoping.
Recalling the fateful day in an interview with The Telegraph in 2022, Ratliff said, “The day before I was supposed to film, I got a call from someone in my agent’s office, saying you need to get to London right now. I said, I’m going later this afternoon, I have a train ticket. They were like, no, go to the train station. Now. Get on a train, get to London. Tom Hanks has seen your audition tape and he’s having second thoughts. He thinks you have dead eyes.”
Yep. Tom Hanks, the only man with enough social credibility to play America’s kindest television personality, Fred Rogers, thought that Ratliff had dead eyes. The young actor dragged himself to London to read his scene with Hanks again, feeling like a pariah. “I was just this, like, damaged thing, you know?” he said, “And then finally I get called into the little room. Tom Hanks is there. We do the scene. I say almost nothing in the scene. The character has almost no lines. And Tom Hanks is like, ‘Oh, is that it? Oh, I wish there were more! Ha ha ha!’”
Shortly thereafter, his agent confirmed that he no longer had the part. “They decided to go for a more military type” was the official feedback, though “Mr Hanks decided to go for someone who doesn’t have dead eyes” was probably more accurate.
For Ratliff, the experience was crushing. Having told his family and friends back home in Missouri that he’d be in Band of Brothers, a show that went on to win seven Emmys, a Golden Globe, and help shape the era of prestige television, he had to go back to them and explain that he had met Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks disliked his face so much that he fired him.
“If I’d read for a Stanley Kubrick movie, and he rejected me, I’d be like, well, he’s tough,” Ratliff said. “I’ve seen a whole documentary where he makes Shelley Duvall cry throughout the entire running time. I think I would have been able to process that. But this was such a peculiar rejection experience that it really just crushed me. It just broke me at the time, you know?”
Ratliff was eventually able to turn that crushing rejection into a hit podcast called Dead Eyes in which he ostensibly tries to solve the mystery of why Hanks fired him. He also interviews various people in the entertainment industry including Rian Johnson, Judd Apatow, and Elijah Wood. Proving himself once and for all to be the man we thought he was, Tom Hanks himself appeared on the show in the last episode of the third season to ask a question of his own: “Do you want to punch me or kiss me?”
