The actor on Hollywood’s AI dilemma, resisting his nice-guy reputation — and why Jeff Bezos couldn’t tempt him into space.
Part way through our main course, I ask Tom Hanks why he’s here. No disrespect to the two-time Oscar-winning actor, who is as charming as his reputation suggests and loquacious to a fault, but he doesn’t need the publicity.
“I’m getting a free lunch,” he jokes, before acknowledging the demands of the “entertainment industrial complex”. Hanks remains optimistic that “despite the eight billion interviews I’ve done and the movies that I’ve made... the mystery can still remain in an audience [who think], ‘Yeah, wonder what he’s going to do this time?’”
Hanks has arrived at Soutine, which is styled like a fin-de-siècle Parisian brasserie, dressed in stealth-wealth black, exuding big energy that is not overpowering. It takes a moment to process his actual face, familiar from myriad roles over four decades (Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, the list is huge). His greying hair is closer-cropped than in his romcom days (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail), though not the bright white of this year’s grandfather role in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. He scoots across the leather banquette and leans into my recording device. “Hello. Hello. Hello. How are we? That works!”
Hanks has two jobs: actor and celebrity. When he and his actor-producer wife Rita Wilson caught Covid-19 in March 2020, their diagnosis was breaking news across television channels throughout the world. Celebrity has its own chemistry, which can become corrosive or sparkling.
Emma Thompson, who starred as Mary Poppins author PL Travers opposite Hanks’s Walt Disney in Saving Mr Banks (2013), says that mega-fame “tends to change people. But he wears the glamour lightly and he notices what is around him with uncanny precision,” like “a great actor who wasn’t famous”. Judging by the lack of gawps from fellow diners, who appear to be older locals, Thompson’s summary seems acute.
The venue, part of the Wolseley group, has been chosen for its proximity to Abbey Road Studios, where Hanks is recording the narration for The Moonwalkers, a new immersive show on past and future journeys to the moon — even the moon, it seems, needs a bit of celebrity luminescence.
Stars can come with handlers listening in, but today there will be none of that. Will he need to hurry back?
“I have all the time in the world,” Hanks says.
The waitress approaches, worried about interrupting.
“We’re insulted,” Hanks says, a mischievous smile on his lips, before pushing his clear-framed glasses up his nose and studying the menu. “Hit it, Emma, what are you going to have?”
I opt for the dressed Dorset crab and grilled salmon. How would I like it? No one’s ever asked. Pink, I venture. Hanks goes for the avocado vinaigrette and braised shoulder of lamb.
A drink? “Oh no, I’m fine,” he says. “If I had something to drink at lunch, you would be leaving this saying, ‘Mr Hanks had curled up in a ball... in the booth and gone to sleep.’” But, he adds, “If you want to have a martini... go right ahead.” I decline to drink alone. I’d hoped he’d go for his own creation — a Diet Cokagne, which went viral on TikTok earlier this year. “It’s not bad, actually,” he laughs. “A little champagne and a Diet Coke.”
Hanks, who looks trim, is mindful of his food, as he has type 2 diabetes. “I grew up on the American economic diet of processed food, sugars, carbohydrates, the occasional apple and a green salad.” Once a week, as a child, he would go with his siblings to the supermarket “and pick out cereal for the week”, perusing the shelves like “wine connoisseurs”.
I hadn’t planned to leap into his childhood so quickly. There’s so much to cover in a long Hollywood career, one with diversions into writing short stories — 2017′s collection Uncommon Type — and this year’s novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. But Hanks’s self-creation trajectory partly explains how he has become an emblem of the story America tells about itself.
Hanks was born in 1956, in Concord, California, his parents divorcing when he was five. He stayed with his father and two older siblings, while his younger brother went with his mother. Both parents married and remarried, and between five and 10 Hanks lived in 10 different homes, accumulating step-siblings along the way.
Together with his older sister and brother, he formed “a pretty tight unit . . . All we did was laugh. We did kind of grow up feral because we were unsupervised, but we had good sense... I always felt safe at home, I felt welcome.” He shrugs off the upheaval. “I was a pretty lucky guy. Everybody’s got some degree of trauma. Sometimes it’s capital T.”
So is his a small or capital T?
“Mostly small T with the occasional capital T.” Sometimes, on the long unaccompanied bus journeys he would take to visit his mother, “there were grown-ups [that] were a little too interested in me... I had sense enough to know that these were creepy people.”
Twice married himself, he holds no rancour towards his parents but wishes they had been more communicative. “Every time we were up and moving, no one said, ‘Here’s why we’re moving.’ We just did [it], sometimes under cover of the night.”
I say that his short story Special Weekend from Uncommon Type, where a nine-year-old boy gets to spend precious time with his mother, drinking chocolate milk, eating in restaurants and travelling in a fancy car, conveys the bewilderment of a child buffeted between adults. He nods: “I sent that to my siblings and said, ‘Recognise yourselves here?’”
Our starters arrive. Hanks’s avocado is some healthy distance from the processed food of his childhood. My crab is light and creamy.
This constant movement made him skilled at adapting, and creating his own fun, watching hours of television and visiting the cinema, pursuing his curiosity.
Culture also offered solace. “All the great plays [are] about loneliness,” he says, recounting an insight delivered to him by the theatre director Vincent Dowling. “It’s about the battle we all have to be part of something big.” It was only as an adult, says Hanks, that he realised “that’s the reason I would go to the [movie] theatre by myself as an 18-year-old kid, to be exposed to that language of loneliness”.
The early years of acting while juggling a young family were precarious. “I had my first job on TV [a sitcom, Bosom Buddies] in 1980, and I was going from not making any money at all to making just barely enough.” Such experiences make him empathise with actors and writers who took part in this year’s labour dispute in Hollywood over residual payments and the use of artificial intelligence. People work “pay cheque to pay cheque. It’s brutal.”
This is not a problem, surely, for his own four children, who sometimes get ribbed for being nepo-babies. “It is a 50/50 split between the advantages and disadvantages of their last name... They’ve got to pull their own weight and they’ve got to figure out what they’re doing.”
Returning to AI, Hanks has said that audiences may be unfazed by watching an artificial version of him. Is that not depressing? He is “pragmatic”.
“Some people are not going to dig it because it’s not really a real human being, and other people simply aren’t going to care because the story is OK. That’s not that different from any type of tool that [has] come into the moviemaking process since sound.” The long view is a recurring theme with Hanks, a voracious reader of history.
Nonetheless, Hanks, whose AI-confected image was recently used in a dental advertisement without his permission, says the repercussions of new technology require constant vigilance. “You want to put all those people out of work?” He sees the recent deal that ended the strikes as a pause rather than an end to the issue of AI’s encroachment on acting. “They’ll have to get to that again later on.”
We are close to politics. Recently, I watched a clip where Hanks swerved a question on Israel. Should celebrities deliver opinions on, well, everything? “I’ve been around a very...” he laughs, lowering his voice, “very long time and I’ve stepped my foot into a number of things.”
At home, he has campaigned for the Democrats, although his narration of a video celebrating Joe Biden’s first year as president drew comparisons with 2007′s The Simpsons Movie, in which an animated Hanks says: “The US government has lost its credibility, so it’s borrowing some of mine.” When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Hanks gave an impassioned speech on American progress. “I’m not pessimistic,” he says. “Bad shit goes on all the time... And, quite frankly, fools have power for a while and even smart people do dumb things.”
This brings us on to social media, something he used to like as “another form of creativity” but now views as “just a time suck”. He posts on Instagram to publicise his projects, but there is always the risk of saying “something so frigging dumb that I will never, ever, ever be able to retract... Be careful of that vox populi, man.”
Social media has also encouraged conspiracists to spread malevolent theories about him. “There’s no law against being an imbecile,” he says. The internet may have “magnified and magnified and magnified” disinformation, Hanks says, acknowledging “ignorance is a dangerous thing”. And yet, he says, “It’s always been.” There’s that long view again.
We’re too busy chatting to finish our starters, but encourage the waitress to clear the plates and bring the lamb and salmon.
With all the hoo-ha around his celebrity, it is easy to lose sight of just how important the work is to Hanks. “You want to promote the work that you’ve done... But then there is a whole phalanx of people you’re talking to, and the last thing they want to hear is about the work. They want to find out if you’ve been in jail... Oftentimes, you crawl back to the car or back to your little apartment somewhere [and] you’re filled with self-loathing.” If I’m making him hate himself, he is too polite to say.
Showing the work that goes into films was one reason Hanks wrote The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. He had always written, counting his late friend Nora Ephron as an influence, but only became disciplined about it later. The novel chronicles the creation of a huge superhero film, from its genesis as a comic book to the screen, weaving together a series of interconnecting life stories.
In adopting so many diverse voices, was he worried about writing without lived experience? It’s not just publishing but film that is grappling with such issues. Perhaps today, Hanks would have come under fire for playing a gay man, as he did in his Oscar-winning turn in Philadelphia? “The whole thing is going to be two steps forward, one step back or occasionally two steps back and only one step forward,” he says enigmatically.
His assistant pops her head round the corner. We’ve barely made a dent in our main courses but he’s in no rush to finish.
Hanks says he channelled his own life into one of the novel’s preening leading men. “Every single thing he does, I have done. I have had ideas I tried to incorporate [into films]... I’ve said wildly inappropriate things to people, thinking I was funny or charming.” That goes against his congenial image. “It [was] the adventures of a confused young man who needs to have a little bit more experience.”
The nice-guy reputation confuses the man with the roles, and it rankles with Hanks. “It’s the easiest thing to say,” he says. “And there’s a slight pejorative.” It ignores roles as a mob enforcer (The Road to Perdition) and a money-grabbing manager (Elvis).
Surely niceness or decency, or whatever you want to call it, has an overlooked depth? “I could walk you through almost all the characters that I played and say, ‘Look at the crux of struggle that that guy’s been through,’” Hanks says. The reason he wanted to play Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the commercial pilot who made an emergency landing on the Hudson river in 2009, was not because he was a hero, but because of his internal conflict. “He was under back-breaking pressure, thinking that if he had done anything wrong, he would lose his licence.”
Is Hanks still ambitious? “I’m still competitive, but the only challenge in my own head is, what is good and what is worthwhile? Is the theme worthy of examination?”
Which takes us beyond the confines of planet Earth to the Moon, and The Moonwalkers installation. It will be housed in a large room in central London that is currently showing a vivid carousel of artist David Hockney’s work, with Hanks’s narration weaving around music and digital projections.
He has always been fascinated by the Moon, co-producing the HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon, as well as starring in Apollo 13. In 1969, when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, Hanks was a teenager. “Oh, my God, I [felt] lucky to be alive. I was this generation that could talk about this great Rubicon of history.” I ask if Hanks was ever tempted to take up Jeff Bezos’s offer to go on a Blue Origin space flight — as long as he paid about US$28 million. “Oh, no. I’m good.” A quick suborbital fly-by not ambitious enough? “Well, yes, quite frankly.”
The Moonwalkers is no mere nostalgia trip; Hanks wants to show the rhythm of history. “If I was going to tell you this: there’s a major war that is occupying the entire populace of the world. The Mideast is in constant crisis. The American political system is so fraught with divisions that families will not sit down at the same table together because of how they voted. The environment is under onslaught and people are worried about how they’re going to pay the rent tomorrow. OK, what year am I talking about — 1969 or 2023?” he asks with a rhetorical flourish.
“I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen again in humanity that we’re all watching something that is . . . so unifying.” This is a rare moment of gloom; Hanks’s long view of history fails to offer a balm.
He’s barely touched his lamb, and a waiter checks that everything is OK. “This was very good. But we were talking too much.”
The Moon beckons. Hanks needs to leave for Abbey Road. “Emma,” he says, the consummate pro, “you got the best of me.”
Written by: Emma Jacobs
© Financial Times