Tom Hanks reveals the first acting advice he ever received
Tom Hanks has revealed that the first piece of acting advice he ever received was, remarkably, for a film released just last year. According to Hanks, he was given tips on his craft when working on the film A Man Called Otto, directed by Marc Forster.
Hanks had been speaking on the Reel Blend podcast earlier this month and explained that when he was filming the movie, he was struck by certain reservations over a particular scene. He said: “I won’t tell you what scene it is in the movie, but it’s Otto by himself at his house.”
He continued: “We’d set it up, and we knew what it was, and we knew how it went. And in the back of my head, I was thinking, ‘I don’t think we’ve earned this moment in our movie yet. I think this is too presentational. It’s too on the nose. There’s no subtext to it. It’s only text.’ And I’m thinking, ‘This scene is fake.'”
Fortunately, when Hanks opened up to Forster about the scene’s ‘fakeness’, Forster also felt that the scene was a little on the overproduced side. “I said, ‘You are saying what is in my head!'” Hanks added. “He says, ‘So can we take all the fake stuff out of this and do it less fake?’ I said, ‘Marc Forster, you are the first director I have ever worked with who has sat down on a set with me and said, ‘Please make this less fake.'”
According to Hanks, directors “usually want the absolute opposite. He added: “Can you turn the fakeness up a little bit on this? You know, Tom, I know it’s very realistic, but this is a movie, and it needs to be a little bit more fake”. It’s quite amazing that it took the iconic actor until nearly 2022 to be told any sort of acting advice, but, according to Hanks, Forster had the gall to give it.
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