“He’s got nothing to learn from me”: the one actor Tom Hanks called ahead of the curve
There isn’t an actor in the industry who’d be confident – or arrogant – to such an extent that they’d fully believe they had nothing to learn about their chosen profession. Tom Hanks has always been willing to lend a hand to the next generation, but on one occasion, he was left with no choice but to hold his hands up and admit he had nothing worth passing on.
That sounds preposterous in isolation when Hanks is a two-time Academy Award-winning icon who fully earned their position as one of the modern era’s biggest, most popular, and consistent A-listers. Regardless of whether it’s prestige drama or all-out escapism, the star can always be relied upon to deliver a performance that’s watchable at the very least.
Hanks worked his way up the latter from formulaic comedies and TV guest spots to breaking out in a major way as a pratfalling lead and rom-com staple before evolving into a powerhouse dramatic performer who seamlessly segued into acclaimed fare in the early 1990s, so he’s well-placed to offer guidance to any aspiring actor who wants to try and emulate his path.
That said, he didn’t have anything to teach a fresh-faced scene partner who was less than a decade removed from their feature debut when they worked together, but there were admittedly mitigating circumstances. Namely, Leonardo DiCaprio earned his first Oscar nomination as a teenager for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and headlined the highest-grossing release in cinema history in James Cameron’s Titanic.
Between those two points, he’d shone in The Basketball Diaries, exuded star power in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and kicked off what would soon become a regular fixture of his filmography by teaming with Martin Scorsese for the first time on Gangs of New York. With that in mind, Hanks didn’t think he needed to pass anything on when they united on Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.
“Leo is so far ahead of the game,” he told Hollywood. “He’s an incredibly talented guy who’s been through wringers that I can’t even begin to comprehend, so he’s got nothing to learn from me.” That might be true in a certain sense when Hanks never experienced anything like the post-Titanic mania DiCaprio endured, but he was still the veteran.
DiCaprio has always been willing to soak up as much knowledge as possible from the litany of top-tier actors and directors he’s worked with throughout his own career, so it wasn’t as if he was letting Hanks know that he was pretty good at this whole acting thing and wasn’t willing to consider any pointers being handed his way.
Still, he’d already been earmarked as a generational talent by the time cameras even started rolling on Catch Me If You Can in February 2002, so Hanks thought it was better if he didn’t try to put a word in his ear.
