The one actor who gave Tom Hanks impostor syndrome: “It took a bit for me to make peace with that”
By the time Tom Hanks found himself shooting a scene opposite a bona fide screen legend on the set of one of his most thought-provoking movies in the early 2000s, he was already a screen legend himself.
During this period, Hanks was a multiple Oscar winner and one of America’s most reliable box office draws. Despite this lofty status, though, he admitted to feeling like an impostor when compared to someone he had grown up idolising.
The path to Hanks’ crisis of confidence in the face of a true Hollywood icon began while he was shooting Cast Away. While deeply immersed in that seminal Robert Zemeckis survival drama, Hanks was sent a pulpy, violent graphic novel by his Saving Private Ryan director, Steven Spielberg, who had optioned the book for his production company, DreamWorks. Hanks was too busy to pay much attention to the black and white gangster tale, but when David Self’s screenplay adaptation arrived a few months later, he was finally in the headspace to give it due consideration.
To Spielberg’s delight, Hanks loved Road to Perdition, which was based on Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner’s 1998 comic book. The grim noir told the story of a conflicted mob enforcer in 1931 Illinois who enlists his 12-year-old son in a revenge mission against the psychotic gangster who murdered his wife and youngest son.
Hanks told Entertainment Weekly, “I just got this guy. If you’re a man, and you’ve got offspring – emotionally, it’s devastating.”
The role of Michael Sullivan, a taciturn killer whose emotional depths are hidden behind layers of quiet reserve, seemed outside Hanks’ usual wheelhouse, but that was why he was so interested in the role. It gave him the chance to stretch himself as a performer, and when he found out he would be doing that opposite Paul Newman, it only made the project all the more exciting.
Newman, then 77 years old, was cast as John Rooney, a mob boss who is both Sullivan’s employer and a surrogate father figure. In the early 2000s, Newman was firmly ensconced in ‘living legend’ territory, and his performance as Rooney would land him his tenth Oscar nomination. It would also be his final live-action performance of a storied career, lending the role even more poignancy.
Interestingly, the first time Hanks ran through a scene with Newman in rehearsals, his excitement at working with Butch Cassidy himself quickly turned into something else entirely: intimidation. Suddenly, one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars felt out of his depth for the first time in his career, and he admitted the only thought that kept running through his mind was, “Pinch me”.
Indeed, when Hanks spoke about the experience during an appearance on the Armchair Expert podcast in 2022, he said he “absolutely” had impostor syndrome. “I made one movie with Mr Paul Newman,” he mused. “It took a bit for me to make peace with that fact: ‘I’m in a movie with Paul Newman.'”
Thankfully, if there was one thing Newman hated more than anything, it was people treating him like he was better than anyone else on set. So, he did everything in his power to put his colleagues at ease by reminding them he put on his trousers one leg at a time, just like they did.
“He just comes in and he’s the lowest-maintenance guy you’ve ever come across, and easy to talk to,” Hanks remembered, before recounting how Newman put everyone at ease after shooting his very first scene. “There was a moment of silence,” Hanks explained. “Then, he looked at us all and he said, ‘The first day you feel kind of self-conscious, don’t ya?’ And everybody was released from any sort of bondage of honour that we were feeling.”
Brilliantly, Newman’s other primary tactic for disarming people was his propensity for truly shocking, off-colour jokes that nobody would expect to emanate from a man whose career began in Old Hollywood pictures. “It’s all razzle-dazzle, anyway,” Newman chuckled. “You find the humorous part, I think you can dispel it all pretty quickly.”
