The one role Tom Hanks regrets never playing: “I would love to make a movie about that guy”
The way that Hollywood tends to work is that the biggest stars have the most say over the movies they do or don’t choose to make. By extension, that would place Tom Hanks firmly in control of his own destiny, seeing as he’s one of modern cinema’s most reliable presences.
The two-time Academy Award winner isn’t just one of his generation’s most talented dramatic performers; he’s also a movie star. There aren’t too many of those double threats left these days, even if it’s a position Hanks has occupied since the 1990s when he became a critical, commercial, and awards season fixture.
Cinema’s ultimate everyman, Hanks, specialises in playing real-life characters. He’s notched over a dozen of them throughout his career, ranging from Captain Phillips, Sully, and Apollo 13 to his Oscar-nominated turn in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood and Razzie-winning performance buried under prosthetics in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.
The mere existence of That Thing You Do! and Greyhound is evidence that Hanks has what it takes to get a passion project off the ground, but there’s always an exception to the rule. In his case, it was a biopic of Dean Reed, the actor and singer who became so popular in communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s that he earned the nickname ‘Red Elvis’.
Hanks optioned the film rights to Reed’s life story in the early 1990s, which set the timer running when he passed away at the age of 47. Despite his best efforts, the star eventually grew too old for the role, and it clearly continued to sting after he named the project as the one thing he’d make if he was given the leeway and creative freedom to make anything he wanted.
“Dean Reed was an incredibly handsome guy,” he told Collider. “I mean, like, a ridiculously handsome guy who also happened to be a third-rate singer and a second-rate actor who just happened to become very, very, very famous for a record in Chile. And when he went down there, he was celebrated as though he himself was Elvis Presley. And because he had these socialist inclinations, he went off and became a superstar as an American rockstar who decided to become a communist behind the Iron Curtain.”
He was far from a household name in his own country, with Reed only making the Billboard charts once in the United States when ‘The Search’ debuted in 96th position. Still, he was nothing short of a sensation on the other side of the world, and his life story was one that Hanks was desperate to tell, or as he put it: “I would love to make a movie about that guy.”
Unfortunately, it never came to pass, leaving the tale of ‘Red Elvis’ as the one that got away from ‘America’s Dad’.
