“In a class all by himself”: the “lucky” actor Paul Newman said was out of everybody’s league
“Game recognises game,” they say, and it’s an interesting phrase to apply when you consider the acting greats of one generation, like Paul Newman, watching his successors in real time as they released movies and put in performances that elevated them alongside legends like him.
Newman died back in 2008 at the age of 83 after a career in which he took on some of the most historic roles in Hollywood, making films that stand as some of the finest ever made, like Cool Hand Luke, The Hustler, The Verdict and many more. By the time the 2000s came around, he had already been at it for six decades and was being asked about the kind of people who might take over from him.
One of the ‘journalists’ asking Newman those questions was Heather Mills, standing in for the late CNN anchor Larry King, who pushed Newman specifically on what he thought about Tom Hanks, with whom he had just starred in the Sam Mendes mob thriller Road to Perdition. Hanks was at that point the world’s foremost actor, a two-time ‘Best Actor’ Oscar winner in consecutive years thanks to Castaway and Forrest Gump, and he was seen as a natural successor to the likes of Newman.
Of Hanks, Newman said: “He’s in a class all by himself. And very deceptive, I might add… he’s very, at least in this role, he is very understated, and it was really – you had to be in close to see what was going on underneath that veil of monsterism.”
Asked by Mills whether or not Newman thought Hanks was a method actor or not, the veteran disagreed, adding, “I don’t think so. He’s lucky with his instincts.” Lucky or not, Hanks had a more than 20-year span during which he was Hollywood’s highest-grossing actor and up to this point, he has been nominated for six Academy Awards and ten Golden Globes, winning four.
2002’s Road to Perdition saw him go up against Newman, in what would prove to be his final movie, in a story of a mob enforcer and his son looking for justice in the dangerous world of 1930s Chicago. It featured a star-studded cast including Jude Law, Daniel Craig, Stanley Tucci and Jennifer Jason Leigh and was a critical and commercial success, bringing in $180million at the box office and landing six Oscar nominations, including a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ shout for Newman, a 12th and final nod for the acting great.
In fact, Newman picked up either an Oscar nomination in every decade of his career other than the 1970s, spanning 1959 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to the 2003 ceremony, with a ‘Best Actor’ win coming in 1987 for The Color of Money with Tom Cruise.
Hanks and Newman were also linked by the leading work they did in Pixar movies, Hanks for the Toy Story franchise as Woody the cowboy, and Newman voicing the ageing automobile Doc Hudson in Cars, which was released just two years before his death.
After appearing in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme last year, Hanks now turns his attention to major film sequels, with a fifth Toy Story on the way this year and a sequel to his pandemic-era WW2 drama Greyhound to follow in 2027.
