Captain John Miller: the role Tom Hanks didn’t think he could do justice
Even the best actors in the business can be prone to moments of self-doubt, with Tom Hanks thoroughly unconvinced that he was the right guy to play one of the most memorable roles of an iconic career.
With back-to-back Academy Award wins for ‘Best Actor’ in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, a further three nominations, seven Primetime Emmy wins, and five Golden Globe victories among his lengthy list of honours, Hanks should be well past the point of questioning his abilities.
His talents have been undeniable since the 1980s when he first evolved from a cherubic comedy star into a dramatic powerhouse, but that still didn’t erase the lingering doubts in his mind. Hanks openly questioned why Clint Eastwood wanted to cast him as Chesley Sullenberger in Sully, which makes some degree of sense when the actor and subject looked absolutely nothing alike.
No offence to Eastwood’s efficient and economical true-life drama, but nobody would call it one of Hanks’ most iconic turns. On the other hand, his work as the stoic and quietly traumatised John Miller in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan definitely is, even though he was unsure if he wanted to do it.
“I still have moments when I think, ‘They want me to play this role? They want me to be Captain John Miller?'” he admitted to Oprah Winfrey. “Never in my wildest scenarios would I have thought I would be able to have enough of somebody’s confidence to do such a thing.”
Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson were also in the mix for the part, but they would have brought an entirely different type of Miller to the table. It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing, though, with Spielberg reluctant to hand all-American everyman Hanks a machine gun and have him mow down Nazis before being convinced otherwise, and the star eventually found his way into the character’s mindset.
“The first time I read about Captain John Miller, here’s what I got: he’s scared,” Hanks explained. “And he’s afraid in the same way that I would be in his circumstances. His fear is the reason for everything he does. And all the questions that are answered in the movie come back to that core thing.”
Armed with that knowledge, Hanks was much more comfortable embodying a role that came with plenty of pressure attached, especially for a studious World War II obsessive like him. He’s the emotional core of Saving Private Ryan, and it wasn’t an easy task to toe the line between an endearing surrogate father figure to his squad and a battle-hardened soldier.
An Oscar nod for ‘Best Actor’ was a deserved reward for a subtly understated yet undeniably affecting performance, with Hanks making a mockery of his own self-created notion that he didn’t have what was required to pull it off.
