‘Turner & Hooch’ and the scene Tom Hanks found “exhausting” to shoot
Without a doubt, Tom Hanks is one of those performers who has absolutely pushed himself to the limits of the acting profession. In a number of impressive roles, Hanks has embodied a wide range of characters that have proven the reason why he has assumed a position of admirable cultural status.
After all, Hanks is considered to be “America’s Dad” in many ways, having portrayed many likeable people in his many movies. However, Hanks hasn’t always gone for the easy roles because he’s often had to dig deep into his reserves of energy to bring the best out of his performances.
In Forrest Gump, Hanks traverses the cultural and socio-political landscape of 20th century, while Saving Private Ryan saw him head out to Omaha Beach for the invasion of Normandy. In Philadelphia, he played a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS, and his effort in Cast Away was one that required him to lose several pounds to portray a man lost on a desert island.
Still, according to Hanks, none of those efforts were as exhausting as a scene he filmed for the 1989 buddy cop comedy Turner & Hooch, in which he starred alongside Beasley the Dog. Hanks plays an uptight police officer who inherits his friend’s dog after he is murdered and discovers that Hooch might just be able to help him solve the case while also finding that he is going to cause havoc in his domestic life.
According to the actor, there was a scene in the Roger Spottiswoode movie that took him to the limits of his powers. Speaking with Collider, Hanks once explained, “All right. The scene where I first get that dog in a collar, in a car, or attached to a car, it was … Well, just go back and look at it. It was the most physical, exhausting, time-consuming thing.”
Of course, being made back in 1989, there wasn’t the technology to help Hanks make the scene a little less taxing on his patience. He continued: “And because it could only happen in the real world, this is not a moment of CGI to it, there’s not a moment of a stuntman being involved in it. It was just me and Beasley, who was the dog who was playing Hooch at the time, and it was steady cams, multiple, multiple versions of it.”
What was most exhausting for Hanks about the Turner & Hooch scene was that it happened in real time over several hours. According to the actor, his body was “beaten to a pulp” by the time the scene was completed, and the fact that he had to be “petrified” of the dog while “commanding” it was also something that took its toll by the time the shoot was done.
“I still have tactile memories of how hard that shot was to get,” Hanks signed off on the matter. We might think of Hanks’ most exhausting moment as being from Saving Private Ryan or Cast Away, where he plays a character on the brink of their energy, but the surprising truth is that the most exhausting scene the actor had ever been in actually came in a canine buddy cop movie where Hanks’ body and mental energy were put right to the test.
