Forrest Gump stars reunite: Robin Wright and Tom Hanks on growing old on film

When Tom Hanks and Robin Wright first paired up on screen for Forrest Gump, they didn’t get a lot of opportunities to talk. Working in Savannah, Georgia, it was ferociously hot. “And we were so busy, all the time,” says Wright. “Tom was out running at lunch periods when normally you would be with the cast and director, hanging out. He was literally working all day, every day.” They did giggle on set, she adds, “to the point where I peed my pants!” She’s giggling now, remembering it. “But there wasn’t time for conversation.”

This time around it’s been different. Thirty years after making the film that won the best-picture Oscar, with Hanks also scooping his second Oscar as best actor, the pair have reunited with director Robert Zemeckis to make Here, in which they play a couple who age from 18 to 80. Here is adapted from Robert McGuire’s graphic novel about the generations passing through a single room in a house in New England.

“We had time while they changed the furniture to have those conversations and have a giggle with Bob,” says Wright. They’re all older now with, as Hanks chips in, a lot more runs on IMDB. “But even with that difference, being adults now in a new chapter, it still felt like no time had passed.”

Robin Wright and Tom Hanks with director Robert Zemeckis on the set of Here. Credit: Nixco Films

The story of Here begins long before the room existed, when its location was no more than primeval slime, bubbling away volcanically. Events then jump a few thousand millennia to show a Native American family hunting in the woods, through to the house’s construction and then the various people who live in it over a couple of hundred years. Windows in the screen, which Zemeckis called panels because they emulate the novel’s format, open up intermittently to show these vignettes of the past.

The core narrative, however, is the story of the Young family, which is not in the novel at all but was devised by Zemeckis and his co-writer, Eric Roth. Hanks and Wright play Richard Young and Margaret, his school sweetheart. They age thanks to prosthetics and the kind of make-up that takes hours to apply and regress via digital de-ageing.

Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly play Richard’s parents, first seen buying the house after World War II and then crinkling into middle age; Bettany is still there as an old man, enfeebled by alcoholism, dying on the couch. “Which was also bizarre,” says Wright, “because Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly are half our age.”

Tom Hanks is 68; Robin Wright is 58. Looking at a digital version of a young self, says Hanks, is definitely discombobulating. “You can talk about it all you want and go through the process of getting tape put on you and your ears raised, all this kind of stuff,” he says. “You still recognise yourself in the mirror. But then we had the live feed of what we were doing and just a few seconds later, the deepfake version of who we were. Part of it was: we used to look like that? And then: the reality is we’re going to look like that. So it’s an odd bit of time travel.”

Robin Wright, with Tom Hanks, says Here is “about the span of life”. Credit: Nixco Films

Stripping away 30 or 40 years – or adding 20 – wasn’t just a matter of changing their faces; as Zemeckis kept reminding them, it meant changing their voices, their gestures, the way they got out of a chair. The teen years were challenging, as Hanks discovered when, in his head, he saw himself leaping off a couch, only to realise he was still sitting. “So then you had to do that little bit of extra effort.”

There were smaller moves, too. “I just remember holding your elbows next to your ribs because you didn’t have the confidence,” says Wright. “You do those little minutiae things …” Seeing someone who resembled herself as Princess Buttercup in 1987’s The Princess Bride moved her to tears, she says.

“I started crying – not because, ‘Oh, youth has died’, it wasn’t that. It was going back in time and remembering feeling what I felt behind those innocent eyes. Not the roles, but doing interviews and being so nervous. There’s that kid who just hasn’t lived enough life!”

Like in Forrest Gump, the lives of the characters in Here reflect their changing times, social moods and events of the day. As a teenager, Richard is aiming to go to art school; Margaret wants to study law. When she becomes pregnant, those dreams have to be shelved. Richard’s sense of responsibility – as a decent man of his times, as Hanks is expected to be – fossilises into timidity; he doesn’t want to do anything new. By contrast, the ageing Margaret is infused with latent feminist ambition. She is about to burst her bonds.

For Zemeckis, this is simply what filmmaking is all about. “I think that’s basically what film is, moving through time,” he says. “You can do it more effectively in movies, showing the passage of time, than you can do in any other art form. So maybe that’s why the stories I gravitate towards are such. The film is about the fact that nothing stays the same. Social life changes, people change, everything changes.”

Wright has made three movies with Zemeckis, the other one being Beowulf (2007). Hanks also made Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004) and Pinocchio (2022) with him. Planning for each film starts with a week where all the key cast and crew are in a room, nutting out what each scene means.

The scenes in Here “all resonate the same with us”, says Wright. “Very American, very family-oriented, and really and truly it’s about the span of life. And Forrest Gump is about that. Bob said it recently himself, that it’s a meditation on mortality. But it’s not a downer, it’s not dark. This is existence.”

Robin Wright and Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump.Credit: Getty Images

Given the business of mortality, what do they want to do with the next chapter of their own careers? Hanks says it is a constant discussion within his family: when to say yes. “I’m an old repertory actor, that’s where I started off, and I just wanted to play every role in every play that they were doing. And you can’t do that. So you have to ask questions,” he says.

“First of all, is it going to be good? Is it a countenance I want to explore, is it a theme I think is worth spending time on, is it just a gig? It has to be – I think it has to be – congenial and challenging at the same time – and those things don’t always go together.”

Wright has been spending more time directing shows like House of Cards and Ozark; she loves being behind the camera. As far as acting goes, she has some new rules. “Rule A: Don’t take a script that has a lot of nights or splits [where shooting is divided between day and night]. B: Don’t work on a boat. C: If it shoots in the Maldives, say yes.”

Working in the Maldives will probably involve boats. “Yes, that can be a problem,” she says, laughing. “But I’m at this stage now, hitting 60, where I would like to work with these two guys forever. I’m done doing the other stuff. I just want to work with people I trust, who get me, and we’re all doing the same vision.”

And, presumably, doing a lot of giggling.

Here opens in cinemas on October 31.