The movie Tom Hanks was convinced he was going to ruin: “I’m going to blow it”
Casting Tom Hanks in any role is one of the safest bets in cinema: his presence is often enough to convince moviegoers to part with their hard-earned cash and buy a ticket, and he also happens to be one of his generation’s best actors who’s never anything less than watchable.
Even when he’s being actively terrible, with his Razzie-winning performance in Elvis immediately coming to mind, he’s still entertaining in a strange, ‘what the hell are you doing, Tom Hanks?’ kind of way. Baz Luhrmann’s biopic was also a hit at the box office, so the point still stands.
Ever since he evolved from a comedy staple to a respected dramatic actor and into his current iteration as ‘America’s Dad’, Hanks has been one of Hollywood’s most reliable performers. If he’s part of the cast, then strong acting is the bare minimum that should be expected, but it doesn’t mean the two-time Academy Award winner can’t suffer from the occasional crisis of confidence.
People flock to see Hanks because he’s the industry’s ultimate everyman. When he plays characters – real or otherwise – who face and overcome insurmountable obstacles, audiences can’t get enough. He hasn’t played an awful lot of against-type roles, so when he was asked to play six of them in the same film, it presented a challenge so nerve-wracking that he thought he was going to crater the picture.
Hanks quickly fell in love with the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas despite struggling to get to grips with a screenplay that was so dense he found it almost impenetrable on his first read-through, but once he leapt over that hurdle, convincing himself that he wasn’t going to suck was the next obstacle.
“If you’re to read the screenplay, you would see that, just like in the film, someone walks out of the room in 1934 and walks into a room in the year 3000, and it’s all the same beat and all the same emotion and colour,” Hanks explained to Collider. “So my fear was, ‘I’ve got six characters. I’m going to choke on two of them, at least. I’m going to blow it.’ In baseball, you’re still batting four out of six. That’s pretty good.”
Hanks played 19th century English doctor Henry Goose, a balding hotel manager in the 1930s, nuclear engineer Isaac Sachs in 1973, goateed gangster and author Dermot Hoggins in 2012, an actor playing Jim Broadbent’s character Timothy Cavendish in 2144, and tribesman Zachry in 2321. He was aiming for four out of six, but it’s fair to say he did better than that.
Cloud Atlas will never be known as Hanks’ best movie, but it could definitely be considered his most ambitious. He thought he would stink up the joint, only to emerge on the other side with one of his most cherished cinematic memories.
