The movie that got Tom Hanks married to Rita Wilson: “She get’s it”
There’s a phrase creeping into the dating game: non-negotiables. On the evidence of awful reality shows, these are things like ‘they must have a good job’ or they ‘must be ambitious’. But in the real world, they’re more commonly things like, ‘They must like The Beatles and the Tom Hanks movie Big’.
The star of the latter is equally keen on this concept. Culture means a great deal to Hanks, and it always has. The watershed moment of his life occurred while watching the title sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey backed by the iconic orchestral overture of Richard Strauss’ ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’.
Before that, Hank’s childhood was nomadic and unsettled, and suddenly, the cinema offered a chance for spiritual stability – new horizons literally presenting themselves with the most dramatic backing music ever imagined. As he told Desert Island Discs’, Kirsty Young, “This was the ‘wow’ moment of my life going from a kid trying to figure out what’s interesting in this life to a young man yearning to be an artist”.
From that moment on, culture held a premium space in his life. That would prove even more important as he trudged through the early stages of his career, encountering an unfortunate divorce by the age of 27. So, when he was lining up his irdt date with his long-term partner Rita Wilson, it was rather imperative that they saw eye to eye when it came to art.
So, on their very first date, Hanks chanced his hand. He took Wilson to see the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. It’s a masterpiece of the highest order, the greatest of its kind, but given the strange anomaly that the Talking Heads’ entire discography sales were eclipsed by the Footloose soundtrack, as hard as it is for fans to fathom, the group, and by extension the greatest concert film of all time, aren’t for everyone.
Luckily, they were for Rita, and Hanks was cockahoop. “You end up meeting that other person that you’re like, ‘She gets it’. I don’t think I’ll ever be lonely any more, that’s how I felt when I met my wife”. From that moment on, he not only fell in love with his wife to be, but eternally felt indebted to one of his favourite bands.
These days. ‘Once In a Lifetime’ remains a song that he couldn’t live without, a touchstone to a concert film that ensured he was compatible with the woman he has been married to since 1988.
A little further down the line, he would become even more indebted to Stop Making Sense, when its director, Jonathan Demme, cast him as Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia. A role which would land the star his first Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ in 1994. Can a date go better than that?
