The performance Tom Hanks prepared for by eating at Burger King and Dairy Queen
Throughout his career of genuine excellence, Tom Hanks has played a wide range of different characters. Whether a determined US Army Captain in Saving Private Ryan, a stranded European tourist in The Terminal or a gay AIDS-suffering lawyer in Philadelphia, Hanks has always proven his worth in front of the camera.
As such, Hanks has been afforded a position of cemented cultural status and has adopted a kind of “America’s dad” persona, standing proudly in front of cinema fans as an everyman, a person representative of us all on screen.
With such varied roles across such a long period of time, Hanks has naturally had to alter his appearances throughout his career. While we think of the many different haircuts and facial hair lengths he has had over the years, the fact also stands that Hanks has had to change his diet in order to fit into a role more suitably.
Sure, Hanks hasn’t quite gone to the lengths of, say, Christian Bale in The Machinist and The Dark Knight, but he has still had his fair share of physically demanding roles. Fortunately for Hanks, one of those roles required him to gorge on fatty food for an entire summer so that he could put more than a few pounds of chub on his gut.
The role in question came in the 1992 sports comedy drama film A League of Their Own, directed by Penny Marshall and also starring Geena Davis, Madonna, Bill Pullman and Lori Petty. The film tells a fictionalised version of the story of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, with Hanks playing the manager of the Rockford Peaches, former baseball star Jimmy Duggan.
Speaking with The Bill Simmons Podcast, Hanks said that A League of Their Own was the most fun that he had making a movie, noting, “Number one would be A League of Their Own because all I did all summer was play baseball. I shagged fly [balls], ate turkey dogs, and took infield with Robin Knight and a ton of other people.”
Playing baseball all summer in Indiana might have made Hanks slim down a little, but he was expected to put on a few pounds to play the manager character. With his family beside him, Hanks set about enjoying his summer in the Midwest, and the actor explained, “We lived in a house in the middle of cornfields. We went to Burger King at night and Dairy Queen in the afternoon. It was a great summer. And my entire family still speaks about it.”
Around ten years later, Hanks would have to lose all those Burger Kings, Dairy Queens and turkey dogs when he appeared in Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away. In playing a man stranded on a desert island, Hanks slimmed right down and it was another instance of him going an extra step in order to give his performances an added edge of authenticity.
Back in 2013, Hanks had spoken of his physical commitment to some of his most famous roles. In telling The Guardian that he has diabetes, Hanks dismissed the rumours that he had developed the disease after changing his eating habits so often. “I’m sure there’s going to be some media scandal now, saying I got it because I gained and lost weight for movie parts or something,” the actor said, “but I doubt that.”
