“His celebrity has corrupted his art form”: Justin Theroux’s bizarre hatred for a classic Tom Hanks movie
During the 1990s, it seemed like no one could get enough of Tom Hanks, and whether it was a war movie or an animated kids’ film, every big blockbuster seemed to feature the actor almost always as the lead.
Something about the actor seemed to bewitch general audiences, and he became one of Hollywood’s most beloved figures, even winning two Oscars across consecutive years, first for his role as a man with Aids in Philadelphia, then for his performance as the mentally disabled protagonist in Forrest Gump.
While he has given some pretty memorable performances over the years, his warm and familiar voice serving his role in the Toy Story franchise well, he has become so famous that it’s hard to see him as anyone other than ‘Tom Hanks’ sometimes.
That’s the case for Justin Theroux, who finds that the best actors are the ones who aren’t so in-your-face famous. In fact, he thinks that celebrity culture actively damages the art of acting, and Hanks is a prime example of that. “It’s like, once you’ve seen Tom Hanks win the Golden Globes, the Oscars, you’ve seen his wife, what kind of car he drives, when you watch his movies, you can’t fully get really lost in them,” he said.
“I watched the movie Cast Away. It’s a perfectly fine movie. But you can never fully believe that movie. How can we believe this man is being cast away?” Theroux elucidated, “We know it’s Tom Hanks and we know the colour of his couch in his house in LA because we saw a picture of it in People magazine. His celebrity has corrupted his art form.”
Is it hypocritical for Theroux to say such a thing when he is a celebrity, too? The actor has never given as much away about himself as Hanks, but can’t we look at Theroux on screen and say, ‘That’s the guy who used to be married to Jennifer Aniston and whose cousin is Louis Theroux’? The reality is, once you become a successful actor, fame is unavoidable, and it often clouds our vision of a movie if a certain star just doesn’t have the knack to be completely convincing in a role.
The problem with Hanks is that he has established a pretty safe, accessible version of himself in the mainstream, and he never dips his toes into projects that are very radical or transgressive. He preserves an image of himself that is typically quite lovable and charming, and in doing so, he is always, to some degree, just playing ‘Tom Hanks’.
As a result, you always feel aware of his presence, his stardom, that you’re watching someone ‘big’. When he tried to appear as someone unrecognisable, like when he donned prosthetics for Elvis, it didn’t work because his star power is so large that he just appeared as a weird, uncanny version of himself, and his performance was panned.
The best actors, then, are the ones who haven’t been afraid to fully melt into a character from the very beginning of their careers, allowing themselves to look messy, ugly, and completely different. Hanks has always maintained enough recognisability, giving too much away on the outside, and that has been his fatal flaw.
