The performance Tom Hanks wants to delete from history: “Oh man it was terrible”
Tom Hanks is an amiable screen presence. He doesn’t ruffle feathers or incite rage. At worst, he’s the most benign thing about a bad movie. At best, he’s one of America’s most loveable movie stars. Whether he’s doing a romantic comedy or a disaster movie, he’s Tom Hanks, and we love him for it.
How, then, could there possibly be an offensively terrible performance of his? He has a certain type of reassuring charisma that makes even his least virtuosic performances enjoyable to watch. According to the man himself, however, there was a moment early in his career that makes him cringe every time it resurfaces.
Hanks got his break with Ron Howard’s 1984 comedy Splash and officially became a movie star with Penny Marshall’s Big four years later. But even before Splash, he was a struggling actor with a young family, trying to make ends meet. He had a modest breakthrough with the sitcom Bosom Buddies in 1980, but between filming the pilot and starting the series, he made a brief guest appearance on the hit television series The Love Boat, which chronicled the comedic antics of the crew aboard the cruise ship Pacific Princess.
In season four, episode one, Hanks played Rick Martin, the former frat brother of the purser Gopher (Fred Grandy). It’s clear when he steps onto the ship that Gopher despises Rick, and when Rick starts teasing him about his poor romantic track record and flirting with cruise director Julie (Lauren Tewes), old animosities flare.
Hanks is pretty mortified about that performance. In an interview with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in 2022, the Oscar winner said, “If you just want to fall on the floor laughing uproariously, just take a look at my [appearance on] The Love Boat. I shot it in, you know, I think June of 1980 or something like that, and it’s just – I had no idea how movies were made, my teeth were in the colour of moss, my skin was bad… Oh man, it was terrible.”
Given this extremely visual description, you might assume that the performance was, in fact, terrible. However, it’s remarkable just how Hanks-like he was way back then. He was playing a cad, but the charm still comes across, and his over-the-top performance isn’t out of place in the context of the show. If you were watching it at the time, it’s unlikely that you’d come away thinking that he would someday win two Oscars and be one of Hollywood’s most beloved and powerful figureheads, but you wouldn’t necessarily turn the TV off in disgust either.
True to form, Hanks didn’t wash his hands of the performance entirely. “[It was] a wondrous adventure,” he said, adding sagely, “Even the movies that don’t work or even the movies that you just think, ‘Did I even know what I was doing?’ you learn something very prescient and important on every single one of them.”
That doesn’t mean he wants everyone to see that particular episode of The Love Boat or even that he himself can stomach watching it, but he’s able to concede that it had its place in the arc of his career, even if it didn’t make much of a difference for him in the grand scheme of things.
