The pointless scene Tom Hanks refused to shoot: “That’s what pros do, baby!”
Nobody would dare call Tom Hanks‘ commitment to his craft into question, but he can be professionally unprofessional when he wants to be. As oxymoronic as it sounds, he had his reasons for exiting stage left and leaving the cast and crew to their own devices, despite his character featuring prominently in the scene.
This being ‘America’s Dad’, he didn’t vacate the area after throwing a strop, acting like a diva, or arguing with a co-star or filmmaker. Instead, he fucked off because he realised there was absolutely no point in him being there, so he opted to take the easy way out and relax while everyone else did the work.
Again, it doesn’t sound very Hanks-like, especially when he’s spent his entire career being called one of the nicest guys in Hollywood, but if it’s a toss-up between sweltering in the sun and sweating buckets or taking it easy to eat hot dogs and scratch your arse, which option would you choose?
After growing tired of playing “pussies,” his words, not ours, the soon-to-be Academy Award winner fancied a change of pace. That led him to Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own, where he played Jimmy Dugan, the hard-drinking manager of the all-female baseball team, the Rockford Peaches.
He’s since called the production “the greatest gig in the world,” so it’s clear he had a great time. However, when the script called for a scene that involved the various members of the squad to rue the fact that the crowds for their games could generously be called sparse, Hanks realised that his presence wasn’t strictly necessary.
While Dugan is a key part of the scene, there was an entire stretch where he didn’t really need to be there. “I read the pages, and I had the very first line in the scene, and I also had the very last line in the scene,” he explained to Stephen Colbert. “And I knew if I didn’t get out of that friggin’ dugout, I was going to be shooting that scene for three and a half days.”
Instead of three and a half days, he had an ingenious solution that was much closer to three and a half minutes; he delivered his first line as scripted, added a little bit of improvisation to suggest that Dugan needed to “give the line-up to the umpire,” and then buggered off to sit in the shade and relax.
“Because of where the sun was, they had to shoot that for hours, in like, three successive afternoons,” Hanks elaborated. “And you know what I was doing while they were shooting? I was playing three flies up and eating turkey franks, baby. Because I was smart enough to walk out!”
He was supposed to be there for the duration, but thanks to some quick thinking on his part, he made his excuses and ended up stuffing his face: “That’s what pros do, baby! They read the script and say, ‘I don’t think I have to be in this scene.'” He didn’t think he needed to be in it, so he took himself off the board.
