Tom Hanks didn’t want his character to snort cocaine in ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’
Ever since coming through the acting ranks with his early performance in Splash and Big, Tom Hanks has been delivering efforts of genuine charisma and magnetism. One of the highest-grossing actors in the history of American cinema, Hanks has established his legacy as one of the all-time greats.
There’s been a fearless commitment in Hanks in the way he has given so many iconic cinema moments, from his ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award-winning turns in Forrest Gump and Philadelphia to his eternally memorable efforts in the likes of Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile and Apollo 13.
Interestingly, for all the great lengths that Hanks has gone to throughout his career in delivering his believable characters, there have been a handful of occasions that the actor has thought twice about performing an action on screen, including when he didn’t want his character to snort cocaine in Charlie Wilson’s War.
The 2007 biographical comedy-drama, directed by Mike Nichols, saw Hanks play US Congressman Charlie Wilson, who, alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Gust Avrakotos, developed Operation Cyclone, a program designed to organise and aid the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s.
During an interview with The New York Times, Hanks spoke of his decision to tell his directors that he wanted his characters to perform in a certain manner. Steven Spielberg wanted Captain Miller to avoid killing anybody, but Hanks told him, “I’m sorry, Steven. You’re not going to get me all the way over here and turn me into some other guy just because you don’t want Tom Hanks to kill soldiers.”
In Forrest Gump, Hanks’ character was set to run away from the Vietnam War, according to director Robert Zemeckis, but again, Hanks stood up and said, “Bob, why am I playing a soldier who is really good at his basic training without then showing me slapping in my clip and firing a set of rounds?”
When it came to Charlie Wilson’s War, Mike Nicholls had wanted Hanks’ character to snort cocaine, but Hanks again persuaded his director to approach the film differently. “It was never in the script to show Charlie Wilson snorting coke,” he said. The reason, though, was that Hanks felt that something would be lost if Wilson was shown to be a drug user.
He explained this through a story from the original King Kong movie. In the first cut of the film, there is a scene in which human characters are knocked into a ravine by King Kong, where they come across “the biggest spider you ever saw.” However, Hanks explained that once audience members had seen the spider, they were no longer afraid of King Kong, so the scene was cut.
There’s an analogue in Charlie Wilson’s War, according to Hanks, with the actor noting, “There is that thing that can happen in a movie where, if you show the giant spider, it might blow your real story out of the water. Anyway, with Charlie Wilson, not snorting coke was not spiders in King Kong.”
The story proves Hanks’ deep understanding of storytelling and character building and also details his sheer commitment to the medium of film itself. Charlie Wilson’s War was well-received upon release, perhaps owing to the narrative understanding of Hanks and his desire to tell an empathetic story.
Check out the trailer for the film below.
