The meeting that changed the course of Tom Hanks’ career: “I know what I don’t want to do”
Tom Hanks has a reputation for being incredibly nice, which sounds like damning with faint praise, but in a profession where nearly everyone oozes charisma but not necessarily warmth, being nice is a rare gift. From the beginning of his career, the actor was singled out as a decent, funny, non-threatening good egg, a persona that catapulted him to fame in movies like Splash, Big, and Turner & Hooch.
It didn’t take long for the whole thing to start getting him down, though. There are worse things than being typecast as the most loveable guy in Hollywood, but that can be a hindrance if you’re trying to show some acting range. When was the last time a benign, borderline adorable character earned an actor an Oscar? The Academy rewards sharp edges, a tragic past, and usually some form of megalomania. Meanwhile, Hanks was falling for a mermaid.
His first stab at greatness was the 1990 comedy-drama The Bonfire of the Vanities. Based on Tom Wolfe’s bestselling novel, it was meant to be a bitter takedown of New York elites. Hanks played Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street goon and self-proclaimed ‘Master of the Universe’ who hits a boy with his car while driving through Harlem with his mistress (Melanie Griffith). Directed by Brian De Palma and co-starring Bruce Willis, it seemed destined for success, but it was an infamous trainwreck, a burning rubbish pile of professional hopes and dreams.
That clearly hadn’t been the way out of Hanks’s gilded comedy cage, but he knew he didn’t want to go back to his old ways. After the Bonfire debacle, he had a meeting with the president of his talent agency, Richard Lovett, to talk about next steps. Lovett wanted to know what the young actor wanted to do. “Well, it’s not like I know what I want to do, but I sure know what I don’t want to do,” he responded. “And I don’t want to play guys anymore going, ‘Oh, I’m not in love, and I wish I was, and I’m just trying to get to work today, but my car keeps breaking down in funny ways.’”
That was a pretty accurate representation of his career up to that point, aside from Bonfire, in which his car was more of a deadly weapon than a broken-down form of transport. He was no longer going to consider such roles, he explained, because they were boring and had nothing to do with who he actually was.
It proved to be a pivotal moment. His next film, A League of Their Own, was a comedy, but instead of featuring him as the guileless hero, it put him in the role of a washed-up baseball star who reluctantly signs on to coach an all-female team in the 1940s. Finally, he was able to show some range as a performer, and not the sort of panto range of Bonfire of the Vanities.
It would be laughably inaccurate to say that he never again played a likeable character (he’s only played one or two unlikeable ones in his five-decade career), but he did prove that he could handle complexity. Shortly after that fateful conversation, movies like Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, and Cast Away turned Hanks into Hollywood’s go-to leading man.
