“It’s the epitome of sink or swim”: the style of acting Tom Hanks hates
Being one of the best actors in the business generally tends to mean there’s nothing the thespian in question can’t do, which has unsurprisingly been proven true countless times over throughout the career of Tom Hanks.
If there’s one glaring omission from his filmography, it’s that he’s never played a major role in an effects-heavy action blockbuster, making him one of the scant few A-listers who’ve never taken that plunge. The Da Vinci Code and its two sequels came closest, but Hanks careening around the continent in search of blasphemous revelations could hardly be called edge-of-the-seat stuff.
He’s squeezed himself into a motion capture leotard for Robert Zemeckis, almost killed himself for the very same director on Cast Away, played a shellshocked soldier for Steven Spielberg, and voiced a living cowboy doll in the Toy Story franchise. He even won a Golden Raspberry Award for being caked in prosthetics and hamming it up in Elvis.
The two-time Academy Award winner has seen and done almost everything the profession has to offer, then, which makes him supremely qualified to pass judgement on the style that’s been the biggest pain in his arse. Like many future stars, Hanks made his film debut in a low-rent slasher flick, but that wasn’t how he became a star.
Instead, the affable chap became a comedic heavyweight by starring in Splash, Bachelor Party, The Money Pit, Dragnet, Joe Versus the Volcano, and Big, among others, the latter of which earned him his first Oscar nomination and catapulted him onto the A-list.
He made it look easy, but as Hanks explained to Bafta, trying to pull off a comedy while having no idea how the audience is going to react is far from straightforward. Describing the process as “such a bitch,” the star elaborated on the difficulties that come with trying to tickle funny bones everywhere.
“You know it is either funny or it’s not, so it’s the epitome of sink or swim,” he offered. “The first job I ever got was because I was loud and funny, louder and funnier, or maybe just louder than the other people that were up for the same role. And it can’t be faked, there’s no theory to it, it simply is. It is either funny or it’s not.”
Hanks additionally pointed to the “danger” of being on set “with almost anybody who has no sense of humour,” which could drastically alter the rhythm and flow of certain scenes in post-production. Not that it did a thing to stop him from becoming one of the industry’s most popular comic actors, though, before he made his masterful segue into dramatic fare by winning a pair of Oscars back-to-back as he continued exerting his dominion over the art form.
