Tom Hanks’ brief cameo in ‘Band of Brothers’
As well as his lifelong love affair with collecting antique typewriters, World War II has been an endless source of fascination for Tom Hanks, although the latter has had a more pronounced and noticeable impact on his efforts as an actor and filmmaker.
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is the most obvious example, but that wasn’t Hanks’ first dalliance with the conflict in an on-screen capacity, although it’s fair to say not many people would hold co-writer and director Moshé Mizrahi’s 1986 drama Every Time We Say Goodbye up as one of the star’s most memorable outings, especially when it’s endured as the single lowest-grossing theatrical release of his career.
The two-time Academy Award winner would also write the screenplay and play the leading role of Ernie Krause in the submarine story Greyhound, in addition to his exploits on the small screen that saw him partner up with his Saving Private Ryan director for a loosely connected trilogy of episodic wartime epics.
Spielberg and Hanks would co-create Band of Brothers before serving as executive producers on The Pacific and Masters of the Air, and he also directed one episode of the former. Not only that, but the fifth instalment, ‘Crossroads’, saw him make a cameo appearance, even if he was hidden in the background as a way of not drawing attention to the A-list megastar popping up in a solitary scene.
Band of Brothers marked early opportunities for a cavalcade of performers who would go on to achieve success in their own right, with Damian Lewis, Michael Fassbender, Dominic Cooper, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Graham, Tom Hardy, James McAvoy, Simon Pegg, and Andrew Scott all popping up at one time or another, leaving Hanks as comfortably the biggest name to have ever graced the classic miniseries.
Despite that, he made his on-camera contributions in the most unassuming fashion possible, standing towards the back of an assembled throng and wearing a red beret to partially obscure his face. The very definition of ‘blink and you’ll miss it’, the ‘Crossroads’ director evidently didn’t want to be the centre of attention but still felt the need to get himself involved in the action somehow.
More than 20 years on from its initial airing, Band of Brothers is still held up as a landmark for small-screen storytelling, and served as one of the very first shows that heralded the incoming arrival of TV’s ‘Golden Age’. It holds up just as well as ever, and while both The Pacific and Masters of the Air are worthy successors and companion pieces in their own right, it would also be fair to say that neither of them have managed to quite recapture the inimitable magic of their illustrious forebear.
