Why Tom Hanks can never play a bad guy

Tom Hanks has never played a bad guy in a movie, and he doesn’t think he ever will. Here's why.

Tom Hanks admitted he uses his kindness to his advantage.

“I realise, and I used over and over again, the ability to seduce a room, seduce a group of people, and that it started off when I was very young as a self-defence mechanism but then turned into a manipulative kind of thing because I didn’t realise that I was as good at it as I was,” Hanks, 63, recently told the New York Times.

He continued, “And part of that is I am not malevolent. I’m not mysterious. You’re not going to get a huge amount of anger out of me or anything like that. I’m not coming in to dominate a room, but I am coming in to seduce it somehow.”

Production on Castaway was halted for a year so Hanks could lose weight and grow his hair out.

The Forrest Gump star explained how he used his authentically agreeable temperament to get ahead in his career.

“I thought the thing to do was to win the moment more than carry through with an idea,” he said. “I’d come to a meeting, and they’d say, ‘I understand you have problems with the rewrite’. I’d say, ‘No, no, no, hell, we can make it work’. That’s a cowardice there. And that’s me being willing to seduce whoever that person is on the other side of the room. In which what do I comes off as, ‘Oh, he’s got no problem, he can make it work, he’s a good guy to work with’, et cetera, et cetera.”

Due to his placid personality, the two-time Oscar winner has learned he can never truly be scary.

“I recognised in myself a long time ago that I don’t instil fear in anybody,” he said. “Now, that’s different than being nice, you know? I think I have a cache of mystery. But it’s not one of malevolence.”

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Hanks won an Oscar for Forrest Gump.

Hanks also won an Oscar for Philadelphia.

Therefore, Hanks feels he can’t play the villain.

“It’s because I never get them, because bad guys, by and large, require some degree of malevolence that I don’t think I can fake,” he said.

Appropriately, Hanks will portray the beloved US TV host Mr Rogers in his upcoming movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, which is due out on January 23 next year.

This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission

Originally published as Why Tom Hanks can never play a bad guy