The character Tom Hanks has always wanted to play: “That would be fun”
In his incredible career, Tom Hanks has played all sorts of characters. He’s played soldiers, an FBI agent, a gangster, a western outlaw, a toy, a washed-up baseball player, a stranded FedEx troubleshooter, and an intellectually challenged guy whose life story parallels a trip through modern American history. There are plenty of characters Hanks hasn’t had the chance to play yet, though, and as a voracious reader, one that he’s always had on his wish list is an enduring literary creation. However, it’s a more obscure one than you may think Hanks would be interested in.
Ever since his creation in 1887, Sherlock Holmes has enjoyed cultural icon status. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s greatest creation was first adapted for the screen in a 1900 film entitled Sherlock Holmes Baffled. It was shown on a Mutoscope device, an early gizmo that didn’t project the film on a screen but instead showed it to one person who watched through a single lens in the coin-operated machine. By 1921, the sleuth had made it to the world of silent movies, and from then on, there has rarely been a year that has gone by without a version of Holmes solving mysteries on film and television. In fact, Holmes holds the Guinness World Record as the most portrayed literary human character in screen history.
Interestingly, though, the object of Hanks’ literary affection isn’t Holmes himself but rather a supporting character from 13 of his most famous stories. Detective Inspector G Lestrade appeared in the first Holmes story, ‘A Study in Scarlet,’ which established him as the most prominent law enforcement character in the Holmes tales. Lestrade became a foil for Holmes at all times – a determined Scotland Yard detective whose conventional methods often made him appear lacklustre and unimaginative next to the astonishing deductive powers of Holmes.
Over the years, Lestrade was featured in many screen adaptations of Holmes’ world, including 26 television series and 25 feature films. Some depictions of the character show that he is a good detective in his own right, just not a crime-solving savant-like Holmes, while others portray him as a clueless idiot who needs Holmes to solve the case for him. The character appealed to Hanks precisely because of his ordinariness, and he once told Front Row Features, “I always wanted to play Lestrade of Scotland Yard, just because he’s kind of a buffoon that gets to wear a uniform, and I thought, ‘Well, that would be fun.'”
To date, Hanks has never donned a Scotland Yard uniform and tried to engage Holmes in a battle of wits, but he would have had opportunities to seek the role out, especially in the last 16 years. After all, in 2009, Robert Downey Jr starred in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, a blockbuster updating of the character for the modern era. Esteemed British character actor Eddie Marsan played Lestrade in that movie and returned for the 2011 sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
Holmes also got a new lease of life on television around this time when Benedict Cumberbatch played a modern-day updating of the character in an uber-successful BBC show. The Madness of King George star Rupert Graves played Lestrade, here addressed dismissively as “Greg” by Cumberbatch’s snarky sleuth.
These weren’t the only times Hanks could have stepped into Lestrade’s shoes, though, if he’d really wanted to. In 2018, Rob Brydon played the character in the dreadful Will Ferrell/John C Reilly comedy Holmes & Watson – although it’s easy to see why Hanks may have avoided that one – while Adeel Akhtar portrayed him in Netflix’s Enola Holmes movies. In addition, gravelly-voiced Masterchef narrator Sean Pertwee was Lestrade in Jonny Lee Miller’s Elementary in 2013, and Aidan McArdle took up the mantle in Netflix’s short-lived The Irregulars in 2021.
The opportunities were there, Hanks. That’s all we’re saying.
