Oscar-nominee Tom Hanks is known as Mr Nice Guy — but he reveals he has a dark side too
Double Oscar-winner Tom Hanks is Hollywood’s nice guy, but the superstar veteran actor warns against anyone who is trying to take advantage of his good nature.
Entertainment
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Tom Hanks’ appearance at this month’s Golden Globe Awards might just have been peak Hanks.
The two-time Oscar-winner teared up in a speech after being presented with the prestigious Cecil B. De Mille award recognising his long and hugely successful career as he paid tribute to his family, A-list co-stars such as Meryl Streep and Denzel Washington and shared wisdom acquired from more than 40 years in the business.
Even his flummoxed face as host Ricky Gervais put the sword to celebs such as Felicity Huffman became one of the year’s first viral memes.
But fellow Oscar-winner Charlize Theron probably put it best in her introduction of the man she proudly names as her hero.
“The most undeniable thing that can be said about Tom Hanks is both deceptively simple and yet overwhelmingly true,” she said.
“He just makes the world a better place.”
What better man, then, to play the revered endlessly patient, altruistic, American television personality Fred Rogers in the feel-good movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood?
A puppet-wielding, former minister, whose preschool show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ran from 1968-2001, the supremely avuncular Rogers became a staple of many an American childhood.
The casting of famously benevolent Tom ‘Mr Nice Guy’ Hanks as Rogers surprised exactly no one – and the film has clearly touched a warm, fuzzy nerve with audiences and voters alike.
It has just earned Hanks his first Oscar nomination – for Best Supporting Actor – for 20 years, his sixth in total.
The similarities between these two cultural icons seem obvious, though Hanks begs to differ.
“I’m not like Mr Rogers,” he insists, shaking his head.
“I probably try to seduce a room as opposed to embrace a room, like he did.”
In contrast to many of Hanks’ peers, who have cultivated a sexier ‘bad boy’ persona, he has been branded with the ultimate pristine image.
Unsurprisingly, that squeaky clean mantle proves tiresome at times, though he knows the comparison drawn was intended with the best intentions.
“Listen, I’m 63-years-old. There is nothing that you can say that will insult me at all,” he assures. “Absolutely nothing. It bounces off me.”
Joking aside, what does awaken the dark side in Hanks?
“The stuff that makes me mad?” he asks, looking delighted by the question.
“I’ll tell you this: if anybody takes advantage of my good nature, they’ll have hell to pay. Anyone who has done it, will say, ‘Oh he’s not that nice a guy,’” he smiles.
“Because when that happens, the hammer comes down and it’s relentless.”
He nods, “I take care of business when it’s got to be taken care of.”
Even so, his litany of famous films often feature him in roles requiring a sort of quintessential goodness, as evidenced in Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994), both of which garnered him the Best Actor Academy Award in consecutive years.
He also had little chance to show his dark side in Apollo 13 (1995), Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Green Mile (1999), Cast Away (2000), Saving Mr Banks (2013), Captain Phillips (2013) and Sully (2016).
But he did get to show off his romantic charms in such classics as Sleepless In Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998).
Behind the camera, meanwhile, he’s also enjoyed collaborating with Steven Spielberg as producer and director of five projects including miniseries Band Of Brothers and The Pacific.
A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood is directed by Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and works as a bookend to the acclaimed, multi-award-winning 2018 documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
The film also stars Matthew Rhys, as a disgruntled, cynical journalist, Lloyd Vogel, whose relationship with Rogers is the centrepiece of the film.
The premise was inspired by an Esquire profile piece on Rogers, in 1998, titled, ‘Can You Say …. Hero?’, written by real-life journalist Tom Junod who requested a pseudonym for his big screen ‘debut’.
Naturally, the burden of portraying a real person presented numerous challenges for Hanks, particularly one so many people feel they ‘know’.
“Everyone has their own personal individual connection to Mr Rogers and so every moment of every day, you’re wondering if you are doing it right,” he says.
“I had to get the mannerisms, and of course, I don’t speak as slowly as he did.”
Rogers’ costume of sorts, a red zippered cardigan and a necktie, helped Hanks get into character.
“He had a bajillion of those cardigans,” he laughs.
“But as he was colour blind, he just knew he was wearing a cardigan, and it probably looked kind of grey to him.”
The Welsh-born Rhys, however – primarily known for his role in TV series The Americans, in which he starred alongside his wife, Keri Russell – had no idea who the film was about.
“But when I asked Keri, ‘Who is Mr Rogers?,’ she welled up. She then gave me a 45-minute introduction to Mr Rogers and what he meant to America.”
Although Rhys and Hanks both worked on The Post (2017) they did not share any scenes together.
“It took a long time for me to stop my head from saying, ‘Oh my God, that’s Tom Hanks!’” Rhys laughs.
“I thought I’d get over it quicker than I did but he was an icon for me growing up. I’m sure as a journalist you’re very tired of everyone telling you how great he is, but that is the stifling truth,” he says.
“And to work with him, he has that alchemy going on where you realise, ‘Oh, it’s a kind of magic.’”
Unsurprisingly, Rogers took some ribbing from comedians over the course of his career.
“Quite frankly, some of what he did was comedic,” admits Hanks.
“He talks so slowly, and to puppets, so if you just tilt it a little bit, like Eddie Murphy did with Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood, [a skit he performed regularly on Saturday Night Live, and rebooted for the show last month], you can really easy make sport and make fun of Mr Rogers. And of course, that would be the anathema to anything we were trying to do with what this movie was.”
Does he think Mr Rogers would still have his place in this age of social media, rife with bullying and harsh judgment?
“Well, the generation that Mr Rogers knew he had influence on were those who had not yet been influenced by the way the world works. And that means somebody from the age of about two-and-a-half to four-and-a-half. The problems that we’re talking about now are grown-ups that make a decision to be bullies, grown-ups making a decision in order to communicate this information or grown-ups who have gone through their own rationales and come up with their own sensibilities.
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“I think rather than try to address those people, he would instead address the young people between two and four-and-a-half, who would probably say something, not unlike he did back in the day, when he’d say, ‘You’ve probably been hearing the word assassination,’ or ‘Some of you might have experienced the word divorce and what that means.’”
He pauses. “I think Mr Rogers would still be talking to kids that were still so young they might not have phones in their hands yet, if their parents are sane,” he laughs.
“The kind of parents who wouldn’t give their three-year-old an iPad yet and say, ‘Go for it! Find everything you want!’”
It seems clear – the world would be a better place if Mr Rogers were still on screen. Hanks nods.
“I don’t want to put anything on who Mr Rogers is or what he would have done, but he’d still be talking to the people coming up, those who would learn by the time they are six, or seven or eight or nine or ten, what it is to be kind and what it is to be good.”
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood opens on Thursday.