How Tom Hanks’ “greatest job” as an actor shaped him for future stardom
Do you know how many actors have won consecutive ‘Best Actor’ Oscars in all of history? That’s right, you guessed correctly, it’s two. One of them was the golden age of Hollywood star Spencer Tracy, who picked up gongs in 1937 and 1938, and the other is Tom Hanks, one of the finest movie stars of the modern era.
Hanks won his famous double thanks to his work in the powerful AIDS drama Philadelphia in 1993 and then the absolute game-changer Forrest Gump in 1994, the Robert Zemeckis-directed epic that launched dozens of catchphrases and stands up now as the perfect ‘it’s Sunday afternoon and there’s nothing on, so what shall we watch for about the 25th time’ movie.
Hanks started off as a theatre student in California before moving to New York City in the late 1970s, looking to break into television. It was a feat he managed pretty swiftly, landing a role on something called Bosom Buddies, the premise of which sounds absolutely wild these days, given it was about a guy disguising himself as a woman in order to live in an all-female apartment complex.
His first major film role followed a few years later with Splash, a goddamn mermaid movie alongside John Candy that wasn’t expected to pull up many trees but ended up being a huge 1980s hit, and he followed it straight up with Bachelor Party, a sex comedy typical of the decade that earned five times its budget at the box office.
Hanks was now starting to become a face and a name that people recognised fucking immediately, but it was undoubtedly the 1988 comedy Big that really launched him onto the global stage. The tale of a young boy who pleads with an abandoned end-of-the-pier fortune-telling machine to make him into a man was a massive success and turned Hanks from an accomplished character actor into a leading man. It also earned him his first Academy Award nomination.
After a string of films that underwhelmed audiences in the early 1990s, Hanks then had a run of movies that matched up against anyone else in terms of box office. Sleepless in Seattle and Philadelphia were followed by Forrest Gump in 1994, both landing him Oscars and making him the best-paid actor in films at the time.
He continued the run with the space catastrophe movie Apollo 13 and, of course, provided the voice of Woody the Cowboy for one of the biggest animated hits of all time, Pixar’s Toy Story. By this point, Hanks had grown influential enough to really pick and choose his roles and directors, and he did so to immense effect to round off the decade with two more enormous films: the Stephen King adaptation The Green Mile and Steven Spielberg’s landmark war movie Saving Private Ryan.
This century has brought Hanks more success, albeit sometimes in his capacity as a director or producer, and he is no longer a box office guarantee as a lead. But he has shown the ability to do serious and comedy in equal measures as well as some fine supporting turns in the likes of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.
Looking back on his career, Hanks recently told Collider: “My first job, as an actor, was in a rotating repertory theatre, which I think is the greatest job an actor can have because there is such a variety that is demanded of you. You don’t really have to make any choices.”
And Hanks acknowledged that his years of simply putting his all into whichever production he and his colleagues were tasked with putting on provided a fantastic basis with which to launch the acting career which has brought him so much success.
“1977 at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, we did six plays a year,” he added. “There was a comedy, a historical, a tragedy, something contemporary, and something made up. The job of the actor was to live up to the text and the expectations of what each individual play was. When you get into film or television, those are singular decisions that you make. The job is the job, and the text is the text. There’s never been a circumstance where I’ve thought, ‘It’s time to do a comedy,’ or ‘It’s time to get serious,’ or ‘It’s time to do something historical’.”
Hanks will soon be seen, or rather heard, in yet another Toy Story instalment, and he’s also filming a sequel to Greyhound, his 2020 war film, alongside Emmy award winner Stephen Graham.
