“Give me a gun”: the musical Tom Hanks said he’d rather “shoot myself in the head” than sit through
Musicals aren’t for everyone, and if you’re not really a fan of the medium, then having the plot explained often isn’t enough to change anybody’s mind. Tom Hanks was in that very boat when one of them landed on his radar, but when he got around to seeing it, his mind was changed.
Take Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, for example. It’s one of the longest-running, most lucrative, and most beloved musicals of all time, but if you don’t know a thing about it, how enticing does a tribe of Jellicles holding a ball that ends with one of them being reborn in the Heaviside Layer actually sound? Not very.
It’s the same with any art form, to be honest. Some of the greatest movies ever made hardly sound exciting on paper, but the life of a newspaper magnate, a dozen jurors debating a murder case, a prison escape decades in the making, and a silent film star plotting a comeback are all the basis of classics.
Ever since his younger days, when he believed The Dave Clark Five were better than The Beatles, Hanks has been infatuated with the music industry. He used it as the backdrop for his directorial debut, and he produced the Mamma Mia! movies, so he clearly isn’t snobbish about it, either.
However, one of the biggest musicals of the modern era completely passed him by when he first heard about it, and it wasn’t until he gave it a shot that his mind was changed. “Oh, it’s a play about Alexander Hamilton in colonial times,'” he shared. “I say, ‘Well, give me a gun so I can shoot myself in the head, because that’s just going to be homework and medicine.'”
That would, of course, be Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which launched in 2015 to widespread acclaim, winning 11 Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize, before touring the world and weaving itself into the cultural fabric. Hanks wasn’t sold, and even when he learned a little bit more about it, his mind wasn’t for changing.
“If you say, ‘No, no, it’s a hip hop version,'” the two-time Academy Award winner elaborated. “Well, tell you what, give me a gun so I can shoot myself in the head, because that just sounds downright silly.'” The first two things he learned about Hamilton made him want to eat a bullet, as hyperbolic as it sounds, but the easiest way to overcome those prejudices is to take a seat and see it for yourself.
“And then you go and see it, and it is actually so prescient,” Hanks marvelled. “Because, say what you want about the thing, but I saw it twice, and then I realised I was watching a huge African-American man playing George Washington, talking about throwing off the yoke of oppression and the need for human beings to thrive under liberty.”
Just like that, he’d gained a new perspective, with the actor discovering that “this is brand-new territory that is so salient to our lives today that I never would have been able to imagine it,” which is a long way away from asking someone to hand him a firearm so he could blow his brains out at the mere mention of Hamilton.
