How Tom Hanks fell in love with a movie he didn’t understand: “I read 80 pages and said I can’t take this”
It may not be a requirement, but it’s certainly handy for an actor to understand a script if they’re considering taking a role. If they can’t wrap their heads around what’s happening on the page, then how are they supposed to pull it off on set? Tom Hanks didn’t have a clue, but it didn’t stop him from diving in.
For the most part, the two-time Academy Award winner has played relatively straight-laced and straightforward characters. Obviously, there are subtleties, nuances, and complexities at play, but on the other hand, Hanks hasn’t become synonymous with embodying superheroes, action heroes, aliens, or fantastical beings.
He’s Hollywood’s ultimate everyman, and he earned that reputation by playing a lot of everymen. Sure, there are often heightened circumstances, far-fetched scenarios, or daunting odds that need to be embraced and ultimately overcome, but Hanks, more often than not, always tends to err on the side of reality when it comes to choosing his projects.
Of course, there always tends to be an exception to the rule, and for Hanks, it came in the shape of Cloud Atlas. The ambitious interweaving sci-fi epic crafted by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer has gradually evolved into a certified cult classic in the years since its release, but at the time, many viewers couldn’t comprehend what the movie was supposed to be. As it turns out, Hanks was among that number, too.
“I had read 80 pages of it and said, ‘I can’t take this,'” he confessed to the LA Times. “I couldn’t penetrate it.” Watching Cloud Atlas is enough of a mindfuck on its own, so it’s understandable that the actor had difficulties trying to process what the sprawling multi-stranded narrative was trying to say when he didn’t have the benefit of any visuals to inform his thinking.
Hanks was required to play six completely different characters who appeared in a sextet of timelines spanning from 1849 to 2321, which required varying degrees of makeup, prosthetics, costuming, and accent work. Trying to read through the script was a prospect he found too daunting to achieve in a single sitting, but he couldn’t have been happier that he persevered and signed on.
He didn’t understand Cloud Atlas during his initial readthrough, but once he’d committed, he was all-in. That confidence may not have been reflected at the box office, but Hanks now views it as one of his personal favourites. It’s one of the very movies he’s been in that the legend has watched at least twice, and he was so taken by the finished film that he claimed his entire consciousness had been altered simply by being a part of it.
And to think, he’d have missed out on all of that if he’d decided Cloud Atlas was so impenetrable that it wasn’t worth his time.
