The actor Tom Hanks said was like “working with the Pope”
Some actors drift in and out of the collective consciousness like a transient dream. They arrive with the befuddlement of accidentally meeting a long-time friend in a new location, only for them to seemingly go for a bathroom break, never to return. Such is the industry of Hollywood. However, some have staying power, and Tom Hanks is certainly the latter.
Over 40 impactful years, Tom Hanks has scaled to peaks of international acclaim and adoration as one of America’s most beloved actors. Since his significant breakout role in Penny Marsh’s 1988 fantasy-comedy, Big, Hanks has been a staple presence in high-yielding blockbusters and boasts work with the likes of Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Mike Nichols, Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers.
While the 1980s were instrumental in Hanks’ rise to fame, the ‘90s could be seen as his zenith. An appearance in Philadelphia opposite Denzel Washington in 1993 and the following year’s fictional biopic Forrest Gump saw the actor win his only two Academy Awards to date, both for ‘Best Actor’. These awards made Hanks the second actor, behind Spencer Tracy, ever to have won two consecutive ‘Best Actor’ Oscars.
After this early peak, Hanks maintained near-constant applause through the remainder of the ‘90s and beyond. His most successful movies span from Toy Story and The Terminal to Saving Private Ryan and Captain Phillips. While the actor very rarely portrays a villain, his modern catalogue includes a pleasing blend of comedic and serious pictures.
Indeed, before the arrival of Philadelphia, Hanks’ filmography had been almost exclusively comprised of comedy roles. In a conversation on the Bafta podcast in 2013, Hanks discussed the perks and pitfalls of comedy acting.
“The chops that you develop in comedy are the chops that you will not be slave to, but they will serve you in other aspects of storytelling,” he opined. “There is a timing to it, there is a pace, there is the supreme task of give and take with whoever else you are acting with in the scene. I think that in some ways, comedians, if they ever freed themselves from the self-consciousness and pain of not being funny – because if you’re not funny as a comedian, you die – so if you can get away from that need to be constantly funny you’ll have a bit of a grounding.”
“Going back to the very first job I had, which was in Splash with Ron Howard, I had been doing a comedy television series and got fired from it – went off the air,” Hanks continued. “I was desperate to be funny again, quite frankly. And the very first read-through of the screenplay had all the actors, John Candy and Darryl Hannah and Eugene Levy, everybody was there, all the key department heads.”
Hanks entered the intense audition and tried to “get laughs at the table”. As he’s not a comedian per se, especially in such high-pressure situations, “it was terrible,” he admitted. “I didn’t get any laughs, and I felt like I had failed. And Ron took me aside that day, right after that reading, and said, ‘Look, I know what you’re doing, you’re trying to be funny, you’re trying to score. That’s not your job in this movie; your job is to love that girl.”
“If he hadn’t said that… he could have fired me that day, to tell you the truth, but he had done TV so he knew the things I had fallen into, so he cut me some slack. God bless the boy,” Hanks concluded.
After admitting that Big was perhaps this period’s most crucial hit, Hanks pointed out another prominent moment. “I had made one sort of family drama-comedy called Nothing In Common, with Jackie Gleason,” Hanks remembered. “I don’t know if Jackie Gleason means anything over here, but it was like working with the Pope. But by and large, I mostly made comedies, because I was in my 20s, and they were asking me to, and that’s where I had the chops.”
It speaks highly of Hanks that he has not only had a long and storied career sustainable enough to provide such an interaction but that his humility is still intact. Gleason certainly is a household name in America, but Hanks’ star has far outshone the abrasive comic for some years. However, in true all-American sweetheart style, Hanks is sure to recognise the comedy foundations that allowed him to get his start in the business. It’s attitudes like that which help you retain your position in that business for four decades.
