The movie Tom Hanks called “excruciating” to make
Time and time again, Tom Hanks has proven not only his deep talent as an actor but also his fearless commitment to his profession, which has led to some seriously memorable performances. Hanks is by no stretch of the imagination a method actor, but he’s still shown on a handful of occasions the willingness to physically transform depending on what the role requires.
It’s easy to see Hanks as the everyman American that he often plays, but in Saving Private Ryan, for example, he had gone through the labours of military boot camp in order to play Captain John Miller with an air of realism and authenticity for Steven Spielberg in his 1998 epic World War II movie.
Just a few years later, Hanks delivered perhaps his most physically challenging role in Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 survival drama Cast Away. In a genuine one-man show, Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a FedEx troubleshooter who gets stranded on a remote, uninhabited island following a plane crash in the South Pacific.
The movie charts Chuck’s battle to survive on the island on his own and find a way to return home. Cast Away was shot on Monuriki, one of the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji, which Hanks found beautiful to look at if tiring to actually make the film. “In certain ways, it was incredible, but in lots of ways, it was excruciating,” he once told The Guardian. “Most of the time, I was just exhausted.”
Hanks went on to compare the kind of performance he had to deliver in Cast Away to the previous one he had in Saving Private Ryan. “With Ryan, there had to be a familiarity with all that was required,” the actor explained. “You know, how much the equipment weighed, how it changed your body shape.”
However, for Cast Away, which was not shot chronologically, Hanks noted that for the first half of the production, he “did not do a thing except eat.” Still, the iconic actor admitted that “the physicality of the movie was back-breaking. No fun for anybody. Just arduous and difficult and backbreaking.”
Indeed, Zemeckis’ film required an awful lot of its star from a physical perspective, playing a man trapped on a desert island with little to eat apart from what he can hunt and scavenge. Most actors are concerned to a degree with what they look like on screen, but Hanks had to abandon any such anxieties in favour of letting his vision of Chuck waste away physically.
“Because you’re going to look terrible whatever you do,” he said. “You no longer have a good side. So you get past the self-consciousness and say, ‘Well, this is what I look like because this is what is called for.’” Cast Away might not be the first movie one brings to mind when thinking of Hanks, considering the many brilliant efforts he has made throughout his career, but in hindsight, it might just have been the most challenging role he ever took on.
“It’s like being squeezed through an hourglass,” the actor noted. “And you come out the other side and see this great opportunity to go and explore.” And Hanks indeed took the opportunity in his hands and ran with it, delivering a film of dramatic and existential quality, proving once again his fearless commitment to the acting craft.
