Tom Hanks proclaimed ‘America’s captain’, not just in film
From Hollywood actor to covid survivor and face mask vigilante – captain feels like Tom Hank’s natural rank as he becomes lockdown hero amid the quasi-conflict of the pandemic.
For years he was “America’s dad”, then as Woody in Toy Story he was America’s best friend and as the beloved children’s TV presenter Mr Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood he became America’s twinkly-eyed grandad. Now comes another gushing patriotic epithet for Tom Hanks. He is, said the Wall Street Journal this week, “now officially America’s captain”.
A real-life Captain America? Well, there’s certainly some of the superhero’s unswerving, old-fashioned wholesomeness in Hanks’s DNA, although that captain had been pumped full of “super-soldier serum”, which seems a bit of a cheat for one as upstanding as Hanks. The actor, who turned 64 yesterday, pointed out recently that he has played plenty of captains: Captain Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, Captain Richard Phillips in Captain Phillips, Captain Sully Sullenberger in Sully, Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan. In his new film, Greyhound, he’s playing a commander, Ernest Krause, an untested man in charge of an American destroyer in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Captain feels like his natural rank, though – a born leader who is still in touch with his men. You wonder if that’s why Hanks, a loyal Democrat, hasn’t gone into politics and has only directed two films: That Thing You Do and Larry Crowne – despite a palpable feel for the craft of filmmaking. A director – or a president – is too elevated, too remote.
Unlike James Stewart, the actor to whom he is so often compared, Hanks has never seen active service. If the pandemic really is a quasi-conflict, though, then he’s been leading from the front. In March, while in Australia preparing to play Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, in an as-yet untitled film (the rank was an honorary title in Parker’s case, a rare example of a Hanks character being something other than what they seem) Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson tested positive for coronavirus.
They became, as he told a newspaper this week with typically winking eloquence, “the celebrity canaries in the coalmine of all things COVID-19”. It certainly made the whole thing seem more real. If Tom Hanks could get it, anybody could.
— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) March 12, 2020
Hanks was initially worried that he would be high risk, given that he has type 2 diabetes and a stent in his heart. The doctors assured him that he would be fine, as long as his temperature didn’t spike and he didn’t develop pneumonia-like symptoms.
— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) March 13, 2020
If they weren’t worried, he decided he wouldn’t be either. “I’m not one who wakes up in the morning wondering if I’m going to see the end of the day or not,” he said. “I’m pretty calm about that.” It’s the kind of thing you can imagine coming from the lips of Spencer Tracy, whom Hanks emulated in 1995 by winning back-to-back Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump.
Thanks to the Helpers. Let’s take care of ourselves and each other. Hanx pic.twitter.com/09gCdvzGcO
— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) March 15, 2020
Hanks is famously affable in interviews and loquacious on social media, on which he holds forth on subjects from politics ("When we all vote, America can be America for all Americans") to his support for Aston Villa ("Up the Villa! First sports in 100 days"). All of his posts are signed “Hanx”. Having made an undramatic recovery from Covid, he has stridently insisted that people stick to the rules. “If you can’t wear a mask and wash your hands and social distance, I’ve got no respect for you,” he said recently.
— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) March 23, 2020
Which brings us to the reason that Hanks has been championed so enthusiastically in recent weeks. He has been proclaimed as America’s captain because the country has been so manifestly lacking one. He’s the polar opposite of Donald Trump, superhero to his supervillain. Where Trump is unpredictable, vindictive, humourless, callous and crass, Hanks is reliable, forgiving, funny, empathetic and classy.
Groovy #CouchParty today for, like, oh what’s the word? DEMOCRACY, that’s it. @WhenWeAllVote. I’ll be there.
— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) April 20, 2020
Much has been made this week of Trump’s difficult childhood. Well, Hanks’s was no picnic either and look how he turned out. Born in California, he saw his parents divorced when he was five. His father was a travelling cook so Hanks moved around a lot as a boy. By the age of ten he had lived in ten different houses. In 2016, discussing his childhood on Desert Island Discs, there were seven seconds of dead air while Hanks wept, remembering how lonely he had been. “I picked these very evocative pieces of music from throughout my life and it unhinged me for a while,” he told The Times later that year. “It was in a tiny little booth in Broadcasting House, like a confessional.”
Presumably in search of stability, Hanks married early, at 22, to the actress Samantha Lewes, with whom he already had one son, Colin, born in 1977. They had a second child, Elizabeth, in 1982, and Hanks has said that fatherhood stopped him becoming a “shit-face artist who ends his day at 4.30pm with the first of three cocktails”. He and Lewes divorced in 1987 and Hanks married Rita Wilson the next year. He has described Wilson, with whom he has two sons, Chet and Truman, as the love of his life and says that he knew, from the day he met her, that he would never be lonely again. Wilson has Greek and Bulgarian roots; Hanks converted to her Orthodox Christian faith and married her in the church in which she had been baptised. Last year he became an honorary Greek citizen. He has three granddaughters, who must get the best bedtime stories.
Controversies? Hanks claims to swear a bit, although in public it rarely goes beyond “jeez” or “holy cow”. His son Chet has proved far more adept at causing offence, adopting a cod-Jamaican accent at the Golden Globes this year ("Big up, the whole island massive!"). You can’t imagine his old man doing that, a rare example of a parent being woker than their child.
I suppose in today’s climate Hanks might have got flak for being a straight man playing a gay one in Philadelphia, or milking his character’s learning difficulties for laughs in Forrest Gump.
And yes, you could argue that he’s done a few too many war movies, played a few too many corn-fed nice guys, all the way back to his breakthrough in Splash in 1984.
When he moves away from them, however, the reaction is often muted. In Cloud Atlas (2012), he variously played a doctor in the 19th century, a hotel manager in the 1930s, a scientist in the 1970s, a gangster in modern-day London and a member of the remnants of a post-apocalyptic 24th-century society. “I thought, jeez, this thing is so fab; it’s the only movie I’ve been in that I’ve seen more than twice,” he said. “And it didn’t do any business.”
The same goes for bad-guy roles. “The villains they offer me are the ones that say things like, ‘Before I kill you, Mr Bond, perhaps you’d like a tour of our installation?’ ” he told The Times in 2016. He believes that he’s the “guy next door” and the “new Jimmy Stewart” simply because “I’ve got a squeaky voice and a big nose, so I guess that makes me qualified”.
It’s about more than that. It’s about unfashionable things like decency and integrity and kindness. Elbow grease too: on his crowded forthcoming slate are A Man Called Ove, in which he’ll portray a cranky retired man striking up an unlikely friendship with his lively neighbours, and News of the World, where he’ll play yet another captain, Jefferson Kyle Kidd, “a Texan travelling across the Wild West bringing the news of the world to local townspeople”. He’s also executive producer on the film version of Beautiful, the Carole King musical.
It will take more than a global pandemic to stop this man. In Avengers: Endgame, Captain America becomes the first mortal to be deemed worthy of wielding Thor’s hammer. Only, surely, because they didn’t give Hanks the chance.
(Greyhound is available on Apple TV Plus)
The Times
More Coverage
Yoga, wellness and death: check into The White Lotus
The super-rich have moved on to Thailand for the third series of Mike White’s hit thriller. Its stars talk about their trip of a lifetime.
UK’s island deal to avoid ‘missile crisis’
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s deal to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is necessary to avoid setting off ‘a serious confrontation’ in the Indian Ocean, a Foreign Office minister says.