The movie Tom Hanks has avoided talking about for 40 years: “Come on, it was a long time ago!”
Even the best actors in the business have to start at the bottom and work their way up, with Tom Hanks having never been in the mood to spend too much time talking about his onscreen beginnings.
He did call his first-ever on-camera role in an episode of The Love Boat the thing he wants to be remembered for the least, but he does reflect more kindly on Bosom Buddies, the two-season sitcom that opened Hollywood’s eyes to his potential as a comedic leading man.
A guest spot in an 1982 episode of Happy Days was pivotal because it led to him being cast in co-star Ron Howard’s Splash two years later, giving him his first leading role in a feature, but there’s one credit from Hanks’ early days that he’ll do everything in his power to sweep under the rug whenever it’s brought up.
Taking a role in a low-budget horror flick has been a rite of passage for countless future superstars, and Hanks is not-so-proudly among them after making his big-screen debut in 1980’s He Knows You’re Alone. A cheap and cheerful slasher that nobody would remember if it wasn’t his debut movie, the two-time Academy Award winner would prefer if nobody remembered it at all.
In a late 1980s interview with Genesis, before Big had made him a household name, Hanks described his formative years of acting as doing “a lot of drama and comedy.” The elephant in the room was his one-and-done stint as a horror guy, and when that was brought up, he instantly went on the defensive.
“It was a hack ‘n’ slash made for about 90 bucks on Staten Island,” he scoffed. “I got the role because I walked into an audition and did a reading, and they said, ‘Oh, OK’. I didn’t know what I was doing; I just showed up and learned to hit a mark and then moved on. I mean, come on, it was a long time ago!”
At the time, Hanks was less than a decade removed from He Knows You’re Alone, but over 40 years after his surprisingly profitable cinematic introduction, he still refused to go into detail about the experience. In 2023, Howard Stern mentioned it, and the collector of vintage and antique typewriters continued his career-long trend of brushing it off.
“I was just a guy in it who went to Psychology 101 who talked about why the girl in it was having fantasies about being hounded by a serial killer,” he said. “And it turns out she was being hounded by a serial killer.” That was pretty much all he had to say on the matter, and summarising the plot hardly provided any worthy insights into the first film to star one of the most popular actors in modern Hollywood.
As far as Hanks is concerned, it’s the movie that allowed him to acquire his Screen Actors Guild membership card and nothing more. Other than relaying the basic details of the plot, that’s pretty much all he’s ever had to say about it, so it seems fair to say he doesn’t remember it too fondly.
