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13 Reasons You Should Never Travel With Tom Hanks

Some people just have bad travel luck.

Whether their flights are constantly delayed or their luggage somehow always ends up lost, there are people you know you just shouldnt travel with. And one of those people is definitely Tom Hanks.

With Friday's release of Sully, a film based on Captain Chesley Sullenbergers famous plane landing on the Hudson River in New York City, we have irrefutable evidence that Tom Hanks has the worst luck of any travelerever.

The man has practically created a genre playing characters who end up screwed while traveling. Think we're exaggerating? Here are 13 reasons you should never, ever travel with Tom Hanks.

(There are spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution...much like how you should proceed before agreeing to travel with Tom Hanks.)

The friendly skies are no place to be with Tom Hanks. If you end up flying over an ocean with Hanks, your plane will crash and you will be stranded.

You might spend some nice time together on that deserted island, getting to know each other better. But then, one day, Hanks will suggest making a raft and navigating back to civilization. Because he is Tom Hanks, you will go along with it.

Then there will be a Jack and Rose situation where he takes up the entire raft and you will slip off, dragged away by the seas. But when he wakes up and realizes youre gone, hell scream your name into the vast nothingness. If you were there to see it, you would definitely become overwhelmed with emotion and nominate him for an Academy Award.

Captain Phillips

If Tom Hanks ever asks you to take a trip with him on the open seas, just say no.

If you dont end up shipwrecked, Somali pirates will inevitably board, hell get captured, and youll have to call in the Navy SEALs for help.

Everyone will make it out alive, but youre going to have to shell out a lot money for therapy afterwards.

Forrest Gump

Unless you feel like running everywhere you go, dont travel with Tom Hanks. Youll probably spend hours of your trip just sitting on a bus bench, too.

Catch Me If You Can

This one wont be fun. Hell spend the entire trip just a few steps behind and when he finally catches up with you, youll probably get arrested.

When you finally make it out of prison, Hanks will fly you back home, but onboard the plane he will probably tell you one of your family members just died.

The Terminal

Remember when Tom Hanks had to live inside of JFK and his only source of income was that cart return machine?

Unless you feel like sleeping on chairs and exclusively consuming food from Burger King, dont go to the airport with Tom Hanks.

The Da Vinci Code

So you think youre just on a nice vacation to Paris with Tom Hanks, thensuddenlyyoure embroiled in an international scandal and you cant trust anybodynot even the guy who played Gandalf.

Cloud Atlas

Tom Hanks will either poison you slowly while youre sailing through the Pacific Islands, or youll end up time traveling so frequently that you lose all track of where you are. Either way, theres going to be a lot of vomit.

With Tom Hanks, it's not about the destination. It's about the ridiculously bad journey.

Saving Private Ryan

Tom Hanks has really bad luck in France, man.

Bridge of Spies

And Berlins not safe, either.

Join Hanks for this trip, and youll get captured and he'll have to wait for hours on a sketchy bridge for your release.

New York City can be intimidating enough to visit without having Tom Hanks reveal to you that he is actually a 12-year-old boy.

Yeah, you arent even safe in space from Tom Hankss bad travelers luck.

Space tourism may sound fun, but wait for Harrison Ford's invitation instead.

The Polar Express

You could take a train with Tom Hanks...but it will inevitably jump off the rails and land on ice and the ice will crack and the whole thing will be no good.

Youll make it home alive (so an improvement on the rafting trip), but no one will ever believe you when you tell them what happened.

Whatever you do, do not board a plane with Tom Hanks.

Cailey Rizzo writes about travel, art and culture and is the founding editor of The Local Dive . You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter @misscaileyanne.

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Say you find yourself as a character in a Tom Hanks movie plot. Congratulations! What an opportunity.

But just be careful to steer clear of all modes of transportation.

Tom Hanks is a great actor and seems like a swell guy, but Tom Hanks in movies does not have a safe track record when it comes to travel. The latest installment in the “maybe don’t go anywhere with Tom Hanks” list is “Sully,” which opens Friday. In the movie, Hanks is a pilot whose plane is disabled after it strikes a flock of geese. The lesson: Don’t get onto a plane piloted by Tom Hanks.

That’s something we should have learned long ago. We had plenty of opportunities, and here they are. (Warning, a bunch of spoilers ahead):

“Apollo 13? (1995)

Hanks, an astronaut with dreams of walking on the moon, goes into space with two crew members. But after an explosion, they abort the mission and spend the rest of the movie just trying to make it home alive. Don’t get onto a spacecraft with Tom Hanks.

“Cast Away” (2000)

Hanks boards a FedEx plane that crashes into the Pacific Ocean during a violent storm. He hangs out on a remote island for four years and passes the time by growing a beard, catching fish and developing a close bond with a volleyball. Don’t get on a FedEx plane headed for Malaysia with Tom Hanks.

“Road to Perdition” (2002)

Hanks is in the mob, and his son hides in his car and witnesses another mobster kill a guy. The son is now a murder witness, and the mobster spends the movie going after him. Don’t get into a car with Tom Hanks.

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Take caution when traveling with Tom Hanks, he doesn’t often get where he’s going

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More than three decades into one of Hollywood’s most blue-chip movie careers, two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks has entrenched himself in the public imagination as a baby-boomer version of Jimmy Stewart: an über-American avatar of unimpeachable decency and everyman triumphalism with a shelf full of acting awards and a real-life Presidential Medal of Freedom to prove it.

Often overlooked in the star’s nearly 60-film oeuvre , however, is a recurrent theme of foiled plans and unreached destinations, of crash landings and turbulent seas, of interrupted journeys and uncertain repatriation. That is to say, in so many of Hanks’ most indelible films, his character sets off on a trip and just doesn’t get where he’s going — at least not for a while.

The most recent example: the biographical drama “Sully,” which has earned more than $200 million worldwide since arriving in theaters in September. The Clint Eastwood-directed film — which has once again placed Hanks on many an Oscar pundit’s year-end short list — finds the actor portraying Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the Air Force ace turned airline pilot who, against insurmountable odds, managed to land a US Airways jet on New York’s Hudson River after both the plane’s engines became disabled — a miraculous water touch down that saw all 155 passengers on board escape basically unharmed.

See the most read stories this hour »

Tom Hanks stars as Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in Clint Eastwood’s new film.

But he didn’t really get them where they were going, did he? This isn’t even Hanks’ first cinematic crash landing (that honor belongs to “Cast Away”). Yet audiences just don’t seem to tire of his travel trials by fire, the actor’s unique ability to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune while braving the open road/seas/air (or, for that matter, making celestial perambulations 137 nautical miles above the planet).

With that in mind, here’s an Envelope rundown of Tom Hanks’ bad trips:

‘Apollo 13’ (1995)

The traveler: In this drama plotted around actual events, the actor portrays Jim Lovell, mission commander of NASA’s third manned lunar landing whose immortal utterance, “Houston, we have a problem,” has become cultural jargon for snafus great and small.

The bump in the road: Somewhere outside Earth’s gravitational pull, the spaceship Lovell’s piloting faces a quadruple systems failure—the worst of them involving an exploding liquid oxygen tank — placing the crew in mortal jeopardy. Unless, that is, a heroic Mission Control ground crew can beat the clock and figure out a way to bring them home.

‘Cast Away’ (2000)

The traveler: His dramatic persona Chuck Noland is a FedEx systems engineer with one eye constantly glued to his watch and a globetrotting career that takes him to far-flung locales — often at a moment’s notice.

The bump in the road: When the character’s plane goes down over the Pacific, he must escape being burned to a crisp in the fiery wreckage, then avoid drowning. And that’s before the real existential challenges set in: grinding out four years in Robinson Crusoe-like solitude on an uninhabited island with no survival skills to speak of and only a Wilson volleyball for companionship. (Hanks landed an Oscar nod for the part.)

‘The Terminal’ (2004)

The traveler: Steven Spielberg strands Hanks as a stranger in a strange land yet again — this time as Viktor Navorski, an English language-deficient immigrant from the fictional Eastern bloc nation of Krakozhia who comes to visit America on a deeply personal mission of reclamation.

The bump in the road: Upon arrival at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, the character learns his homeland has devolved into rebellion. Without a valid passport or visa he’s stranded in a diplomatic no-man’s land and ultimately spends nine months living inside JFK’s international arrivals lounge. There, Viktor befriends a veritable United Nations of airport service personnel and absorbs a fun-house version of the American dream.

‘Captain Phillips’ (2013)

The traveler: What is it with Hanks playing all these captains? In this bio-drama based around headline-making events in 2009, he portrays Capt. Richard Phillips, a merchant mariner piloting his container ship, the Maersk Alabama, through the treacherous Gulf of Aden.

The bump in the road: The character’s peaceful journey across one of the planet’s most dangerous shipping lanes is interrupted when a quartet of Somali pirates — one portrayed by Barkhad Abdi, who landed an Academy Award nomination barking “I am the captain now!” at Hanks — overruns the ship, hellbent on ransoming the vessel and its crew for millions of dollars. After being forced into the lifeboat, Phillips is eventually rescued, though the clear lesson here is to stay off the open seas with Tom Hanks — and the open skies.

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Never Board A Plane, Boat, Or Rocket With Tom Hanks

Francois Duhamel/AFP/Getty Images

If you’re going on a trip with Tom Hanks anytime in the near future, you might want to rethink that decision immediately, because the actor’s traveling track record could not be worse. After the debut of Sully , out in theaters today (September 9), fans realized traveling with Hanks only leads to disaster and despair.

For starters, Hanks and airplanes do not mix well together. Besides being forced to land a plane on the Hudson River after losing two of its engines in Sully , Hanks was also the sole survivor of a plane crash — and was forced to survive totally alone ( well, almost ) on an island for four years before being rescued in Cast Away . Plus, he died in Cloud Atlas after his plane blew up.

Boats and rockets are no better. There’s the time his ship was overtaken by Somali pirates in Captain Phillips and he almost died. Or when his spaceship malfunctioned and he almost died. Fans are not having it with you and your stream of bad luck, Tom. Heck, even The Washington Post (jokingly) cautioned people who wish to travel with him.

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Tom Hanks Has Made a Fortune Bringing Your Travel Nightmares to Life

By Chris Lee

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By now, everybody knows Tom Hanks is "the ultimate Everyman of our age." More than three decades into an acting career littered with Oscars, Golden Globes, and SAG Awards, his abiding humility, all-American approachability, and normcore seriousness of intent have effectively beknighted the star as a modern-day Jimmy Stewart .

The famed airline pilot starred in the fake biopic 'Hanks' on 'Kimmel.'

By Rohan Nadkarni

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What tends to receive less attention, however, is a motif in Hanks' filmography that can fairly be described by a Latinate term I just made up: transit interruptus . In film after film and role after role, the actor creates exquisite drama by playing guys who set out on a journey with the best of intentions—but epically fail to reach their destinations. For example: Hanks' ripped-from-the-headlines biopic Sully , which arrived in theaters Friday and soared to an estimated $35.5 million box-office haul over the weekend, becoming the highest grossing post-Labor Day September opener in Hollywood history. In the film, Hanks plays Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the fighter pilot-turned-airline pilot who heroically crash-landed a disabled jet—which had lost power in both engines after colliding with a flock of Canada geese—in New York's Hudson River, enabling all 155 passengers aboard to escape with their lives.

But Sully 's hair-raising IMAX water landing is far from the only time a Hanks character's travel has been impeded by fate, circumstance, armed conflict, or plain old shitty luck. Curiously enough, a certain calculus of disaster governs these travels, too: The more screwed-up and dangerous the journey Hanks undertakes onscreen, the more money and more critical acclaim his movies seem to take in.

Herewith, a definitive guide to Tom Hanks' Cinematic Travel Nightmares.

The Terminal (2004)

The Traveler: In this Spielberg-directed dramedy, Hanks plays Viktor, a non-English speaking tourist from a fictional Eastern European country, who spends nine months living inside a terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy airport. A bureaucratic mix-up bars him from entering the country but also prevents Viktor from going home.

Chances of survival: 9%. Horrible for his hopes of seeing any kind of lasting peace in our time, but catnip for the Hanks Travel Disaster Matrix.

The Hero's Journey: A fish out of water although he may be, the character uses his savoir faire, charm, and survivor's instinct to become master of his fluorescent-lit, Muzak-saturated domain, evolving into a kind of folk hero for the minimum-wage earners, emigrants, and ethnic minorities who befriend Viktor along the way.

Chances of Survival : 100 percent. Sure, departures lounge seating hardly makes for a restful night's sleep, and sustained airport food-court dining can wreak havoc on a guy's cholesterol. But it's not like Viktor faces any kind of mortal threat inside JFK. Hence The Terminal 's lackluster returns on the Hanks Travel Disaster Matrix.

Domestic gross: $77.8 million

Cast Away (2000)

The Traveler: He's a man in perpetual motion, a time-obsessed FedEx exec who circumnavigates the globe troubleshooting package delivery issues. Until, that is, the cargo plane in which he is traveling plummets from the sky, leaving him stranded on an uninhabited desert island in the South Pacific with only a volleyball named Wilson for company.

The Hero's Journey: Hanks' physical metamorphosis for the disaster drama is startling; his hair grows long, he drops a ton of weight, grows a weird beard, and takes to wearing a loincloth. But even as the character's hopes of rescue ebb and flow, Hanks' dramatic presence remains enormous; he's basically alone onscreen for about two-thirds of the film, and netted an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

Chances of Survival : 50-50. Hanks' castaway island has any number of positive attributes: cooling trade winds, azure waters teeming with fish, an unending supply of coconuts that could theoretically keep him alive for years. But absent some desperate gambit to escape this tropical hell (like the one he eventually devises), the character's odds of riding out the remainder of his days alone in paradise shoot up to around 93 percent—a fate arguably worse than death.

Domestic gross: $233.6 million

Captain Phillips (2013)

The Traveler: Another ripped-from-the-headlines biopic that finds Hanks as Captain Richard Phillips, a merchant mariner whose container ship the Maersk Alabama is hijacked by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. He's basically your next-door neighbor staring down a horde of wild-eyed, khat-chewing buccaneers in one of the most dangerous shipping routes in the world.

The Hero's Journey: Phillips orders his crew to hide in the engine room while offering himself up to capture—the pirates expect a multi-million-dollar ransom payday from their shipping company. But after an unsuccessful escape attempt, the captain ultimately resigns his fate to a higher power: the Navy SEALs responding to the emergency.

Chances of Survival : 45 percent. Phillips' odds plummet initially thanks to his demonstrated ability to piss off pirates, but American military might re-shifts the balance of power to all but ensure a happy ending (albeit a lower score on the Hanks Travel Disaster Matrix).

Domestic gross: $107 million

Apollo 13 (1995)

The Traveler: In this Ron Howard-directed docu-drama based on real events, Hanks portrays astronaut Jim Lovell, mission commander of America's third Moon landing—an aborted mission that became a struggle for survival when one of the spacecraft's liquid oxygen tanks exploded.

The Hero's Journey: "Houston, we have a problem," Hanks memorably intones as the ship's emergency warning system lights up like a Christmas tree and the ship basically runs out of gas and air some 200,000 miles above the earth's surface. The chummy family guy—who would have been first to walk the moon, had things turned out as planned—spends the rest of the movie turning impending disaster into a uniquely American triumph of determination and courage.

Chances of Survival : 41 percent. Apollo 13 amply demonstrates the rudimentary technology and limits of human competence that doomed the mission. But let's face facts: If you're an astronaut facing the cold oblivion of outer space death, there are worse people to have in your corner than the brightest minds of NASA.

Domestic Gross: $179 million

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

The Traveler: Going behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France for Steven Spielberg's unforgettable World War II epic, Hanks portrays Army Ranger Captain John H. Miller—yet another captain!—who leads a small platoon of hardened grunts through battlefield carnage to rescue the surviving member of four servicemen brothers killed in action.

The Hero's Journey: He arrives onscreen John Wayne-like, seemingly inured to the death and destruction around him. But as the bodies pile up, most notably those of his own platoon, Miller reveals the trembling hand and trembling heart that govern his actions. A former English composition teacher and local baseball coach—an American everyman if there ever was one—he's haunted by the 94 men who died under his command. Hanks earned his fourth Oscar nomination for the role but lost out to Life Is Beautiful star Roberto Benigni.

Chances of Survival : Nine percent. The character finds himself in the shit at not one but two of France's bloodiest WWII battles: the storming of Normandy Beach and the Battle at Ramelle. Horrible for his hopes of seeing any kind of lasting peace in our time, but catnip for the Disaster Matrix.

Domestic Gross: $216.5 million

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Elevating your travel

‘The Terminal’ In Real Life: Passengers Stranded In Transit…

Gilbert Ott

Gilbert Ott is an ever curious traveler and one of the world's leading travel experts. His adventures take him all over the globe, often spanning over 200,000 miles a year and his travel exploits are regularly... More by Gilbert Ott

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Amen! Loved the comments about Tom Hanks!

Never thought I would see something like this at least in my lifetime. I am still amazed however when I look at my flight tracker to see so many planes still in the air that are not cargo related.

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Fact check: Tom Hanks is now a Greek citizen, but pedophilia has nothing to do with it

The claim: tom hanks became a greek citizen because pedophilia there is considered a disability..

A QAnon conspiracy theory making the rounds on social media falsely claims Tom Hanks became a citizen of Greece because it classifies pedophilia as a disability.

A July 28 Facebook post that was shared more than 2,300 times said, “while everyone was distracted by coronavirus Tom Hanks became a citizen of Greece … a place that recognizes pedophilia as a disability,” with a side eye emoji. That Facebook user, Gigi Kundalini, told USA TODAY that she found the Greek citizenship news through a BBC article, but did not comment on the other claim about pedophilia.

The post is part of a larger trend of posts that question Hanks' new Greek citizenship, alluding to Hanks being involved in child sex trafficking.

Some of the posts include hashtags for QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory that alleges the world is controlled by a small group of elites who are pedophiles and devil worshippers. Part of QAnon’s theory is a “deep state” entity run by politicians, celebrities and business leaders who operate a child sex trafficking ring and are working against Trump.

More: Fact check: Mask-wearing not connected to child trafficking

QAnon supporters have also alleged that other celebrities are tied to child sex trafficking, such as Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres and the Clintons. USA TODAY has rated those accusations as false as well.

When Hanks first was in quarantine back in March after contracting the novel coronavirus, some posts alleged he was arrested for pedophilia. Those were also reported as false .

Did Tom Hanks become a Greek citizen?

Yes, he did, along with wife Rita Wilson, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotaki announced. On July 26, Mitsotaki posted a photo on Instagram of himself with Hanks and Wilson who were holding up Greek passports saying they “are now proud Greek citizens!” followed by a Greek flag emoji and a thumbs up emoji.

Hanks, Wilson and their children were awarded honorary Greek citizenship after their work in bringing attention to a July 2018 wildfire near Athens that killed more than 100 people, according to the BBC.

Hanks and Wilson have been visiting Greece for years and own a home on the island of Antiparos, BBC reports. Wilson also has Greek heritage, and Hanks converted to the Greek Orthodox Church. They have both expressed their love and admiration for the nation.

In January at the Golden Globes, Hanks mentioned his honorary citizenship .

“Greece is a haven,” he said. “My family goes to Greece. I’ve been around the world. I’ve been to the most beautiful places in the world. None of them tops Greece.”

More: Conspiracy theories: Here's what drives people to them, no matter how wacky

Is pedophilia listed as as a disability in Greece?

Pedophilia is not considered a disability under Greek law.

In 2012, there was proposal in Greece to include behavioral disorders “such as compulsive gamblers, pyromaniacs, pedophiles and fetishists on the list of disabilities,” according to a Snopes.com fact-check . The idea was the additions would enable better medical assessments, but the classifications was not meant to affect disability benefits, according to BBC as well as Business Insider .

However, the idea drew quick outrage, including from the Greece National Confederation of Disabled People, which said in a press release that conditions like pedophilia, pyromania, voyeurism, ostentation and sadomachism were removed from the new Disability Identification Table after a huge upheaval occurred throughout Greek society.

More: What is QAnon and where did it come from? What to know about the far-right conspiracy theory

Faced with the uproar, the proposal was short-lived and pedophilia was scratched from the list a few months later, according to Snopes.

Greece’s current Disability Assessment Application , read via Google Translate, does not include pedophilia or other conditions like pyromania and sadomachism. The application instead mentions conditions like deafness, blindness and disorders like hemolytic anemia.

Is there any evidence that Tom Hanks is a pedophile?

There is no evidence that Tom Hanks has engaged in pedophilia.

A search for “Tom Hanks” on California’s sex offender registry and the U.S. Department of justice’s national sex offender registry resulted in no records, according to a previous fact-check from USA TODAY.

Some of those claims regurgitated through QAnon conspiracy theorists stem from a belief that Hanks, along with many other celebrities and political leaders such as the Clintons, are involved with Jeffrey Epstein in an alleged child sex trafficking ring. Some QAnon theories allege Hanks was a frequent visitor to Epstein's island and flew on Epstein’s jet. A look at the flight logs of Epstein’s jet by Reuters contain no evidence of Hanks ever being on the plane.

Our rating: Partly false

It is true that Tom Hanks, along with his wife Rita Wilson, did become a citizen of Greece. But Greece does not classify pedophilia as a disability, and there is no evidence that Tom Hanks is a pedophile. The allegations are a series of conspiracy theories purported by QAnon supporters. We rate this claim as PARTLY FALSE, based on our research.

Our fact-check sources:

USA TODAY, June 18, Fact-check: Ellen, Oprah, many others are not under house arrest for child sex trafficking
USA Today, July 22, What is QAnon and where did it come from? What to know about the far-right conspiracy theory
Snopes.com, July 31, Is Pedophilia Considered a Disability in Greece?
Misbar.com, Aug. 1, Greece Didn’t Classify Pedophilia as a Disability
BBC.com, March 12, 2012, Greece disability list sparks welfare benefits row
Business Insider, Jan. 10, 2012, The Greeks Are Confused By A New Law That Would Classify Pedophiles And Pyromaniacs As 'Disabled'
Greek National Confederation of Persons with Disabilities, Significant positive changes in the new disability assessment panel
Greece, Electronic National Social Security Agency, Disability Certification Center
BBC, July 27, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson officially become Greek citizens
YouTube, Jan. 5, Cecil B. deMille Award Recipient Tom Hanks Full Press Room Speech | THR
Newsbreak.com, March 18, Fact Check: Tom Hanks, Others NOT Arrested for Pedophilia Or Other Crimes in QAnon Conspiracy
Reuters, Fact-check: Tom Hanks is not recorded in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

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Tom Hanks on the Rewards and “Vicious Reality” of Making Movies

By David Remnick

A blackandwhite photo of the actor Tom Hanks who is sitting on a chair backstage.

Not long ago, I was preparing to interview Tom Hanks at Symphony Space, a theatre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for an audience of seven hundred-plus people at The New Yorker Live . Hanks had just published a novel called “ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece ,” and he was hitting the road for a while. Symphony Space was the first stop on the tour. Someone from Knopf, his publisher, let me know that I would embarrass Hanks if, in my introduction, I went through the litany of movies he has starred in since the early eighties. In fact, if I had, that would have been the whole evening. The list is long and shimmery. Hanks is that rare thing, a real movie star who has sustained a four-decades-and-counting career. It’s not just that he has won two Oscars in a row (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”) or made box-office hits including “Splash,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and Steven Spielberg’s most enjoyable film, “Catch Me If You Can.” He’s also capable of taking on a predictable vehicle, such as the recent feature “ A Man Called Otto ,” and pumping some life into it while attracting a sizable audience.

What surprised me is the degree to which Hanks, particularly in front of a live crowd, in no way resembles Jimmy Stewart, the laconic Hollywood icon to whom he’s most often, and most lazily, compared. When we met beforehand, then onstage for an hour and a half, and, finally, over a long dinner at a local Greek restaurant, Hanks was about as laconic as Muhammad Ali. Or a hand grenade. He is funny, sarcastic, self-knowing, and a tireless raconteur, particularly about his day job. In our interview, he sometimes answered questions as he might in a more private setting than Symphony Space; far more often, he took some element of the question as a cue for a prolonged, well-polished anecdote, performed at the edge of his seat. Hanks’s novel is all over the place at times, undisciplined and overstuffed, but it contains extended passages and set pieces describing how movies are made that are entirely worth the ticket.

As an editor, I’ve always been frustrated by the degree to which the gatekeepers of the Entertainment Industrial Complex, as Hanks calls it, bar reporters from watching how a film gets made, limiting inquisitive journalists to a few distant glimpses of the process and then a concocted interchange on the official press junkets. And so I began our conversation at Symphony Space, which was recorded for The New Yorker Radio Hour and is published here in edited form, with my parochial complaint and a discussion of how Hanks sees things from inside.

Tom, I want to start with your novel, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.” I have a question, and of course it comes in the form of a complaint. In 1952, The New Yorker assigned Lillian Ross to write about the making of “The Red Badge of Courage,” a film by John Huston.

Starring Audie Murphy.

And it wasn’t until almost forty years later that another journalist, Julie Salamon, got similar access to the making of another film, which you were in, “Bonfire of the Vanities,” for her book—

“ The Devil’s Candy .”

Why do the makers of movies make it so mysterious to the rest of us how movies really get made, which I suspect is something that’s behind this novel?

Well, it’s not a conspiracy. No one is hiding anything. If anybody who is what we call a “noncombatant” or a “civilian” wants to visit the making of a motion picture, they’ll be bored out of their skull. Nowadays, you’ll go onto a soundstage, and there’ll be a blue screen, and there will be guys up on a cherry picker moving some cables around. And you’ll think, Is that it? And the answer is . . . yeah. Because they have to move those cables around, and because somewhere somebody is being put into a harness, and they’re going to be dangled above an air mattress, and they’re going to have to make out with somebody else. And you’ll wonder, What’s going on in this movie? And then, when you see that moment from the movie, it’ll turn out it’s the most passionate, important beat in the film. And you were there!

Do you think moviemaking defeats journalism and required writing a novel? Also, writing a novel is hard. Why did you want to be the guy to reveal how this is done?

Writing a novel is not that hard. Writing a novel that anybody wants to read is hard. Anybody can sit down for a few hours every morning for a couple of months and bang out something that’s going to last about three hundred and sixty pages. Whether or not it’s a piece of crap or not—that’s where it’s going to come down. I don’t think there’s anything more fascinating than hearing anybody talk about what they do for a living, what their passion is, and how they ended up doing that. That, to me, is a great story.

You have this passage early in the novel: “Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossamer at others, slow as molasses on a Wednesday, but with a gun-to-the-head deadline on a Friday. Imagine a jet plane”—I love this—“Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by musicians, supervised by executives fresh out of business school, to be piloted by wannabes with attention deficiencies. What are the chances that such an aeroplane is going to soar?” So, do you feel, when you’re in the midst of this weird combination of boredom and chaos, that a movie is going to come out of this?

Let me put it this way. You ran away from your miserable life and your horrible, abusive family to join the circus when it came through town, because it was a number of things: It was glamorous. It was an escape from your life of missed opportunities. And you work on that circus now, and you join it, and you are on the road, and you tear down that tent, and you put it back up every Thursday. What’s required of you, as a member of the circus, is to make sure that the net for the trapeze artists will actually save their lives when they fall from the sky. Suddenly you’re not just a member of the circus. You have a life-and-death responsibility for the safety of somebody else that you work with every day. Making a movie also has this vicious reality to it: they last forever. So, if you’ve done a shitty job in whatever your responsibility on that movie is, it will haunt you for the rest of your days.

Do you know when you’re acting well, in those little snippets of thirty seconds of filming?

You don’t. All you can do is have some kind of faith that your instincts have joined you. All you can do is open a vein, bleed it out. You dig around in the riverbed long enough and say, Here’s the gold dust, here’s a nugget, please do well with this, Mr. Director, editor, scorer, Foley artist, sound mixer, dialogue mixer. Please, I entrust my family jewels to you. My manhood is in your hands. And then they will do what they do.

Oftentimes, when you go to work as an actor, they can almost ask you this question: What mood are you in today? You say, “You know, I feel pretty good. Had a great night last night. I slept. The Knicks won. What are we doing today? Oh, that’s right. We’re doing the scene where I have to have a nervous breakdown and weep copious tears and go to such a deep and dark place emotionally that it’s going to take me a day and a half to recover.”

That’s one thing that can happen. The other thing that can happen is “Hey, how you feeling today?” And you say, “I’m sick. I have a terrible headache. I had the biggest fight in my life with my wife. We can’t stand each other. My kids are all going through horrible troubles. My brother has called me and asked me for money. I don’t have a passport, so I can’t leave the country. My business manager has stolen millions of dollars from me. I’m going to be destitute if this movie doesn’t work. And, quite frankly, I’m at the end of my emotional rope. I don’t want to work. I don’t want to be alive today.” Well, that’s too bad, because today you’ve got to fall in love with the dog. That is the requirement of being an actor sometimes.

Now, here’s a story from a famous movie. Are you ready for it? “Forrest Gump”!

[ Big applause from the audience .]

Thank you! Thank you! I made it thirty-seven years ago, ladies and gentlemen. I was big in the nineties. Remember the nineties? Weren’t they great? Before streaming! VHS was making money hand over fist for everybody.

Anyway, we were shooting “Forrest Gump” in Cherokee Square, in Savannah, Georgia. We’re on the world-famous park bench. We’ve got various props. There was so much dialogue. And I was so exhausted because we had shot twenty-seven days straight. Remember how Forrest ran across the country? Well, there’s only one way to get those scenes, in those days. You had to fly to the goddam place, put on the costume, run for an hour and a half, then go back, get on the plane, and then fly to, say, New Hampshire, and do it all over again. So I’m exhausted. I don’t know what’s going on. The scenes on the park bench have oceans of dialogue, and we shot them in a day and a half. And I said to Bob––the director, Robert Zemeckis––“Bob, my head is fragile, frazzled. We’re doing all these scenarios with different people, and every one of them has a page and a half of dialogue. I will never be able to keep this in my head.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Tom. We’ll shoot it like ‘I Love Lucy.’ We’ll have four cameras. We’ll put the words up on cards if you need it. You can just read ’em.”

I said, “Oh, great, thank you. Let’s make this an even more artificial atmosphere!”

Now, the good news is, we got it all down pretty fast. But at one point I say, “Hey, Bob, I got a question for you.”

“What, Tom?”

“Is anybody going to care about this movie? This guy sitting on a bench, in these goofy shoes, in this cuckoo suit, with a suitcase full of ‘Curious George’ books? Are we doing anything here that is going to make any sense to anybody?”

And Bob said, “It’s a minefield, Tom! It’s a goddam minefield. We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Any footstep we take could be a Bouncing Betty that’ll blow our nuts right off.”

And so Bob Zemeckis, God bless him—I’ve worked with him more than once—landed on the absolute truth of anybody who has gone forward and said, We are going to commit something to film today. You do not know if it is going to work out. You can only have faith.

So you worked on “Bonfire of the Vanities,” which didn’t succeed, and you worked on “Saving Private Ryan,” which did. Don’t you know if they’re going to be any good while you’re in the middle of making them?

No. There’s no way to tell, because the process is so slow. And so specific. You can only have faith and hope—and what’s bigger than faith and hope? You have to trust the entire process to collaborators who you hope are working at the absolute top of their game farther down the line.

You write in the book, and I’ve heard you say elsewhere, that you take enormous offense at the notion of anybody hating a movie.

Why is that?

O.K., let’s admit this: We all have seen movies that we hate. I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them. Here are the five points of the Rubicon that are crossed by anybody who makes movies.

The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. Your fate is sealed. You are going to be in that movie.

The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make, or it does not work and it’s not the movie you wanted to make.

That has nothing to do with Rubicon No. 3, the critical reaction to it—which is a version of the vox populi. Someone is going to say, “I hated it.” Other people can say, “I think it’s brilliant.” Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is.

The fourth Rubicon is the commercial performance of the film. Because, if it does not make money, your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be. That’s just the fact. That’s the business.

The fifth Rubicon is time. Where that movie lands twenty years after the fact. What happens when people look at it, perhaps by accident. And a great example of this is “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which was made [in 1946] and disappeared for the better part of, I’m going to say, twenty years, locked up in a rights issue. It wasn’t even viewed at the time as being a commercial hit. Enough people liked it, so it was nominated for Best Picture. [ The film only became a universally admired Christmas classic after the copyright ran out in 1974 and it entered the public domain, becoming a television constant. ]

For me, it happened on a movie that I wrote and directed called “That Thing You Do!” I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it. When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of vox populi. It didn’t do great business. It hung around for a while, was viewed as being some sort of odd, kinda quasi-ripoff of nine other different movies and a nice little stroll down memory lane. Now the same exact publications that dismissed it in their initial review called it “Tom Hanks’s cult classic, ‘That Thing You Do!’ ” So now it’s a cult classic. What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time.

How is it different to work with a director like Nora Ephron , for example, as opposed to Steven Spielberg?

Steven Spielberg has been thinking in cinematic terms since he was eight years old. And you can look at his films, what he did when he was a kid, and you can see his DNA all over them to this day. Nora Ephron was a journalist. She wrote her screenplays from a journalistic point of view.

What does that mean? Writing a screenplay from “a journalistic point of view”?

There is a type of authenticity to the dialogue that is very, very, very particular. It scans in a different way. It’s not necessarily human behavior. It’s a give-and-take between the characters that propels the story. Not unlike a journalist. She also rehearsed her movies as specifically as she wrote them. A lot of her scenes go on for eleven, fifteen, seventeen pages sometimes. We rehearsed them in real time so that, by the time we got to the set, we knew that it would be broken up into eight different sort of setups throughout the geography of an apartment or a restaurant or what have you. You land on the same specificity then, when you’re shooting them, as you did when you rehearsed it. And Nora, she was tough. She would say, “Hmm, I know what you want to do with that moment, but I hate it. And so, therefore, let’s not do it that way.”

I was very cranky, particularly when I first met her to do “Sleepless in Seattle,” because I was really big and, you know, I had some hits under my belt. We got together, and we were going to make this movie about a guy and a kid and a la di da di da —“Sleepless in Seattle.” And she was very intimidating, right off the bat. When we were working on the rehearsals for it, I realized that one of the things that was driving me nuts about the project is that Nora and Delia Ephron, who helped on the screenplay, are—

Sisters, but they are also mothers. It was a movie about a father. And I said, “You guys are the wrong gender to understand what’s going on in this scene between me and my son.”

A remark like that always goes well.

And she loved it. “Oh, Tom, tell me more.” And the argument I had was “You have written a scene in which a father is undone by the fact that his son is upset about him going out with a woman.” Oh, no. I said, “There is not a father on the planet Earth who is gonna give a rat’s ass what his son thinks about him going out with a woman. Because you know what that father wants to do? He wants to get laid. And that’s what’s missing from your little gender-ish scene that you wrote.” And she said, “Well, then, why don’t you say that?” That was a very empowering moment. She would often say this: “Well, when you’re right, you’re right.”

Later on, I said, “It was great that you let that happen, in the cumulative, collaborative process of making a movie.” And she said, “Well, you wrote that.” I said, “No, Nora Ephron, I did not write that. I complained at you in rehearsal, and you decided to put it into the movie.” But she said, “That’s what writing is.” I said, “Writing is sitting down and complaining on paper? That’s what writing is?” She says, “Mmm, yeah.”

You had a stronger role in conceiving the idea for “Cast Away.”

I had read that huge jumbo jets filled with nothing but envelopes and packages flew across the Pacific Ocean twice a day, going to Australia and back. Four people fly this plane? That’s either the greatest gig in the world or the worst gig you could possibly have as a pilot. Turns out it’s a really good gig, because they don’t have to put up with jerks like us, the passengers. And I thought, What happens if one of those planes goes down?

I wanted to reduce a guy down to someone who was not going to survive unless he had the five elements necessary for human life: food, water, fire, shelter, and company. We worked on “Cast Away” for eight years before we ended up making the movie. That’s how long it takes. Bob [Zemeckis] had this idea, which was “You know”—this goes into how you make a movie—“are we really gonna go down to, like, Fiji, and put you in a fat suit, and then take the fat suit away, and stick a wig on you, and glue a beard on? That stuff won’t even stay on your face down in that humidity and with all that salt water. If we were really bold, you know what we’d do?”

“What would we do, Bob?”

“You’d get really fat, and we’d go shoot the first half of the movie. Then we’d take a year off and you’d lose all that weight and we’ll shoot the second half of the movie.”

And that’s what we did. And it would be virtually impossible to do now. You could probably do it through C.G.I.

We also had a screenplay that was loaded with dialogue, in which I, as Chuck Noland, would have lines like this: “Well, I am all alone on this island. Look at me, all by myself. Holy cow, there is no one on this island to talk to except me. I better find a source of food and water. Shelter would be nice, too. And how in the world am I gonna make fire?” We had all this dialogue in it, and, when we got down there, we shot one scene where I said something like “Hmm, what am I going to do now?” I said something like that to myself, and I turned to Bob and said, “Bob, I don’t think there should be a word of dialogue out of Chuck.” And he said, “I don’t think so, either.”

I said, “The only time I should talk is when I think somebody is there—‘Who’s there?’ ” And the other one is if I see, if I think someone is out there: “Help!” And I end up talking to Wilson, the volleyball.

In Keith Richards’s autobiography , he says at a certain point, as a public person, you’re dragging around your own persona like a ball and chain. Practically every time there’s a feature story about you, you’re compared to Jimmy Stewart. How does a persona work for an actor? Is there one? Are you aware of it?

There’s nothing you can do about it at all, except never ever, ever, ever talk to the press. Honestly, think about it. There are some artists out there—some filmmakers, some actors—you don’t know anything about them, because they do not go off and promote their movies or open themselves up in any manner. Maybe it affects their ability to work; maybe it doesn’t. But the truth is, no matter who you are, you carry your countenance with you into every single job you do. So much so that now the first two paragraphs of any review of any of my movies are actually about all the other movies I’ve ever made. The last movie I did was “A Man Called Otto.” I’m going to say nine reviews out of ten said, “Giving up his ‘Forrest Gump’ nice-guy persona,” or “Not unlike Jim Lovell, in ‘Apollo 13,’ Tom Hanks’s ‘Otto’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

We were talking about this backstage a little bit: All arts have highs and lows. Epic poetry, drama, the novel, whatever it might be. And I said to you, my wife and I were looking for a movie to go to the other night, and we couldn’t find one. I mean, revival houses aside. Superhero movies especially aside. It’s not as if I was looking to be hypercritical. I just wanted to go to a movie on Saturday night. And you agreed with this quandary. Where are we in movies now?

As far as our choices of what to invest in for our own entertainment, the options are myriad. If you want to spend time looking at something that is more or less curated by somebody else for your enjoyment, you can start with YouTube and watch any damn thing you want. I mean, I’ve gone down the YouTube hole just looking at commercials from the nineteen-fifties. “What’d you do last night?” “For eight hours, I watched commercials from the fifties and sixties, and I remembered every fucking one.” You can be entertained till the cows come home––television, streaming services, what have you. You can literally watch anything you want that is available at any time.

What we’re really talking about here is the decision that we all make: to be in a room at 7:15 with a bunch of strangers who have made the same decision to go and be in that room along with us. I’m not Cassandra here. And I’m not clairvoyant. But the number of movies that we’re going to get to choose to go and see are going to be fewer, as far as going to that room full of strangers and paying money and being there at 7:15. But the option to be enthralled by somebody’s storytelling is going to be—we have an infinite number of options at our fingertips, and we will land on them individually .

Be honest: How many times have you—and maybe you alone, or you and your family—said, “Hey, let’s watch something tonight”? Great, you pick up the remote and it takes you forever to agree on what you’re going to watch on Apple or Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime. “Oh, no, not that. No, not that. No, not that.” So forty-five minutes later you have decided, by way of bitter compromise, what you are going to watch—which is not what you really want to watch, but you’re going to have to go along with it because three of the rotten members of your family have voted in favor of this thing and you’re on the losing side. You turn down the lights. You enter your fucking password. And the code comes along and it asks for your billing address. And someone has to go through their phone, come up with a billing address. Because why did they reboot this? Who rebooted it? So there’s another fifteen minutes that are lost to the process. Now you’re finally ready to start the movie that you have all “agreed” to watch. And you think, At last, let’s watch the movie. Seventeen minutes into it, you think, I have no investment in this movie whatsoever. I don’t like this movie. I’m going to leave the room and not bother watching the rest of this movie. Right? How many times?

That doesn’t happen if you’ve been in a room full of strangers at 7:15. You’re hugely invested in it. All of your sinews, all of your money, all of your time and intent you have mapped out in your life says, I’m going to be in this cinema. And that option is not going to go away. And, if you’re lucky, you will be held in its thrall.

We have some questions from the audience. This is great: Did you do your own swimming in “Splash”?

Oh, God, yeah. Absolutely. “Splash” is the first motion picture I really made. I made a low-budget slasher movie on Staten Island once, but this is the first thing I’d done on one camera, save for an episode of “The Love Boat,” in 1980. I got that job because everybody turned it down. All the A-list movie stars—

Name names. Who turned it down?

Who was an A-list movie star in 1983? Dudley Moore. Warren Beatty. A ton of people. Nobody wanted to make a movie with Opie Cunningham about a mermaid for Walt Disney, because their previous hit was “Gus,” the field-goal-kicking mule. Nobody wanted to make this movie. So I had a meeting with Ron Howard. He said, “Listen, you got the job. You’re perfect.”

And I said, “You’re kidding me!”

He said, “No, but I need you to do a test with Daryl Hannah.”

“Well, I’ll do the test. Can I get fired if I do this test? Or, you know, like—”

“No, no, no, but you gotta go out to this scuba-diving school and learn how to scuba dive.”

I said, “Are you kidding me? You’re going to pay me to learn how to scuba dive?” So my job, as an actor in a movie, consisted of this: I’m in the Bahamas—like some combination of James Bond and the Beatles, for crying out loud. And I leave the hotel at 6:45 in a Speedo and a T-shirt. I walk down to the beach and get in a speedboat that takes me out to the camera barge, [and] then we’re towed out two miles away from the island. And we shoot all the stuff with me swimming in the ocean. Is this not the greatest freaking job on the planet Earth?

We were shooting in thirty feet of water in the Bahamas. And, because we’re all down there, it takes . . . you cannot go up to the surface and have a conversation. It has to be all planned before you go out there. Daryl is in her incredibly uncomfortable mermaid tail. She’s connected to a cable so she can move the thing. She and I are supposed to look at each other and fall in love. I do not have a mask on. You cannot see anything without a mask on. I see this blurry shape of orange and blond, which is Daryl. And I’m supposed to be underwater with a look of awe and love on my face. But actually I’m quite confused and scared for my life, because I have no oxygen tanks on, a safety diver is just out of camera, and I literally have twenty-pound weights in the pockets of my pants to hold me down on the bottom of the sea. So I am this far away from making headlines as a tragic moviemaking death in the Bahamas. “Tom ‘Bosom Buddy’ Hanks Tragically Lost in Unfortunate Moviemaking Accident.” Ron swims by in his scuba outfit and signals over to me to come. Two guys then dragged me over to what we called the underwater sound booth, which was a dome of plastic weighted on the bottom of the sea floor with enough air pumped into it. So there was about this much of an air pocket, twenty-five feet under the surface of the sea. So I’m in an air pocket. And Ron Howard’s head pops up. And he’s got his regulator in his mouth and his mask, and he pulls it back out of his mouth and says, “Try to be more in love with her!” Then he swims back away.

You know what I did? I went out there and I tried to be more in love with her. That was what my job was. And, if you look at that moment in the movie, you see a guy in his street clothes falling in love with a beautiful mermaid, and they swim off to Mermaid Land together at the end of it. And you buy every moment of it, because that’s the contract we as individuals have with the movie that we are seeing.

Writing is horrible. You lock yourself in a room, and you’re all by yourself. And if you are lucky—if you are lucky—at the end of the day, there might be a page or two. And it’s inevitably bad. And people become very—I mean, I work with writers all day long. They get irritable. They’re a disagreeable group. It’s really hard. Why put yourself through this?

Well, first of all: I don’t have the slightest fucking idea. I don’t think I became any sort of serious writer with a sense of drive and curiosity that is necessary in order to do this, except for somewhere in the last sixteen years. Part of it is because there is nothing better for the soul—and I don’t think there’s anything better for the artistic reach—than to be involved in something that scares the living daylights out of you, in which you cannot come into a job and say, “I know exactly what I want to do here. Stay outta my way, everybody, because I am going to blow you away. Can someone cover my bald spot for me, please?”

How do you view this quandary that we all face, whether in work or life or love or family or just in our brief time on this planet: the business of getting older?

I will tell you that, no matter where you are in your arc, no matter where you are as far as your age goes, your body, your wherewithal, you still get to come back to this empirical truth: you start at the beginning of whatever story you’re telling, and you just work your way through it. I am sixty-six years old. I got my first job as an actor when I was twenty, at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, in Cleveland, Ohio. And the requirements then were the same exact ones now: Learn the lines. Start at the beginning. Tell the whole story till you get to the end. ♦

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4 False Rumors About Tom Hanks That Went Viral Recently

He's not playing mlk in an upcoming netflix movie, and a photo supposedly showing him in a pro-trump shirt is fake., jessica lee, published aug. 18, 2023.

Tom Hanks is bait for corners of the internet spreading misinformation. For years, he's been the target of false or baseless rumors, ranging from pedophilia-related conspiracy theories to Forrest Gump-related claims . Snopes keeps a running list of all fact checks about Hanks on its site.

Summer 2023 continued that trend. From a doctored photograph supposedly showing Hanks in a T-shirt supporting former U.S. President Donald Trump to an out-of-context clip of him on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!," these four rumors spread in July and August.

— Snopes staff contributed to this report.

Digitally adding phrases to the T-shirts of famous people in photographs is a common misinformation tactic. The real photograph of Hanks showed him walking around Sydney, Australia, in a plain T-shirt.

For years, social media posts have claimed that Hanks called a child at a beauty pageant a "sexy baby." The clip in question was a parody of reality show "Toddlers & Tiaras" on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in 2011.

While it's not clear if Hanks is actually sporting a black eye in this photograph, conspiracy theorists believe he is, and that means he's part of a so-called "Black Eye Club." As the theory goes, politicians and celebrities are getting black eyes during strange initiation rituals to become members of the illuminati or other secret groups.

This viral image supposedly showing Hanks embodying the Black civil rights leader was seemingly generated by artificial intelligence (AI) software. Had this news about the alleged movie directed by Steven Spielberg been real, there would have been outrage over Hanks in blackface.

By Jessica Lee

Jessica Lee is Snopes' Senior Assignments Editor with expertise in investigative storytelling, media literacy advocacy and digital audience engagement.

Article Tags

Fact Check: About the Rumor Guy Fieri Threw Tom Hanks Out of Restaurant Because the Actor Is 'Ungodly and Woke'

Celebrity chef Guy Fieri threw Tom Hanks out of his restaurant in January 2024 because the actor is "ungodly and woke."

Labeled Satire ( About this rating? )

In early January 2024, the website Esspots published an article claiming that celebrity chef Guy Fieri kicked Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks out of one of his restaurants:

"He's Ungodly and Woke": Guy Fieri Throws Tom Hanks Out Of His Restaurant In what can only be described as a scene straight out of a surreal comedy sketch, Guy Fieri, the spiky-haired maestro of Flavortown, reportedly ejected none other than America's beloved actor, Tom Hanks, from one of his diners. The reason? Fieri branded Hanks as "ungodly and woke." Let's take a flavorful dive into this bizarre gastronomic tussle that's cooking up a storm.

The story was recirculated on Facebook , with some commentators posting their support for the Food Network favorite. " Thank you for recognizing 'this type'....& doing something positive," wrote one, while another responded, "I always had some Bad feelings about Hanks ! But after Apollo 13 I thought maybe I was wrong, evidently I should trust my feelings !"

( SpaceX Fanclub /Facebook)

However, this item was not a factual recounting of real-life events. The article originated with a website that describes its output as being humorous or satirical in nature, and the author admitted that the scenario was completely fabricated at the end of the article:

The fictional ejection of Tom Hanks from Guy Fieri's restaurant over accusations of being "ungodly and woke" is a humorous and exaggerated portrayal of the cultural divides and absurdities that can exist in our society. It's a tale that serves up a generous helping of satire, seasoned with a pinch of irony and a dash of absurdity, reminding us to take a step back and enjoy the lighter side of life's unexpected moments.

A similar story appeared on SpaceXMania : " The atmosphere shifted when Fieri approached Hanks' table. Instead of exchanging pleasantries, Guy Fieri began a passionate monologue, criticizing what he saw as the actor's 'ungodly wokeness' and his involvement in various social and political causes."

SpaceXMania's website disclaimer also labels its work as satirical:

Our mission? To bring you the freshest fake news, some sassy analysis, and a good dose of satire, all rolled into one crazy concoction that orbits around Elon Musk and everything that's lighting up the viral/trending charts.

Both stories contained clues that the alleged incident hadn't actually happened. For example, w hile it was said to have taken place at one of Fieri's unidentified restaurants, the establishment's location was not revealed in either story. Fieri has "about 90 restaurants," according to a Variety article published in late 2022.

Esspots wrote that the hashtag #FlavortownFiasco trended as the news of the alleged incident spread. However, a search revealed no such hashtag in use on any social media platforms.

Additionally, no credible sources reported on Fieri ejecting Hanks from his restaurant, which would have occurred had the incident actually happened .

Hanks is among several high-profile celebrities targeted by false claims allegedly connecting them to rumors of pedophilia . The claims are a part of the large web of QAnon conspiracy theories , which have been circulating since at least 2016.

Snopes has previously written about other satirical news involving Fieri, including one about the chef ejecting soccer star Megan Rapinoe from one of his restaurants, and another about banning Whoopi Goldberg .

For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.

Breaking: Guy Fieri Kicks Woke Tom Hanks Out Of His Restaurant, "He's Creepy And Ungodly." 4 Feb. 2024, https://spacexmania.com/breaking-guy-fieri-kicks-woke-tom-hanks-out-of-his-restaurant-hes-creepy-and-ungodly1466/ .

Robin, Alex. "'He's Ungodly and Woke': Guy Fieri Throws Tom Hanks Out Of His Restaurant." Esspots , 9 Jan. 2024, https://esspots.com/hes-ungodly-and-woke-guy-fieri-throws-tom-hanks-out-of-his-restaurant144/ .

Wagmeister, Elizabeth. "The World According to Guy Fieri: Food Network's $80 Million Star on His New Show, Meeting Al Pacino and TikTok Fandom." Variety , 30 Sept. 2022, https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/guy-fieri-food-network-salary-shows-interview-1235388817/ .

Two white men are pictured next to each other. The man on the left has white hair and is wearing a blue button down, while the man on the right is wearing a black button down and suit jacket. From left to right, Ethan Miller/Getty Images and Leon Bennett/WireImage.

Actors Who Refused Roles In Tom Hanks Movies

No matter their personal tastes, affiliations, or walk of life, pretty much anybody who enjoys movies can agree on Tom Hanks. He's one of the most successful and acclaimed actors of this era — or any era — and pretty much every film in which Hanks appears is an event. It's hard to imagine anybody but the charming, likable, and avuncular Hanks starring in any of the entries in his varied canon, like "Apollo 13," "Sleepless in Seattle," "Philadelphia, "The Da Vinci Code," "Big," "Forrest Gump," and "Saving Private Ryan."

A Tom Hanks movie is almost guaranteed to be a critical or commercial hit, and most any professional actor in the world would thank their lucky stars at an offer to appear alongside America's middle-aged sweetheart in a major motion picture. But, for a variety of reasons, several stars — many of them as famous or even more famous than Hanks — had to pass on the chance. Here are some casting near-misses, brought about by rejection (polite or otherwise), involving Tom Hanks films.

Garth Brooks (Saving Private Ryan)

Unlike many other top-selling music superstars, country icon Garth Brooks hasn't done a lot of acting over the years, though this apparently isn't because he hasn't had offers. In 2013, Billboard revealed that Brooks' former production partner and de facto talent agent Lisa Sanderson had filed a lawsuit against the singer, alleging that she lost money because Brooks turned down perfectly good acting roles out of ego. Brooks is a "paranoid, angry, deceitful and vindictive man who will turn against those closest to him on a dime," the suit claimed.

Sanderson said that Brooks could have starred in 1996's "Twister" but opted against doing so because he didn't want the CGI tornado to pull the focus away from him. And, per the lawsuit, Brooks also said no to a Tom Hanks film out of fear of being upstaged: 1998's "Saving Private Ryan." According to Sanderson, Brooks "wanted to be the star and was unwilling to share the limelight with [...] Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, and Edward Burns." In a statement (via E! News ), Brooks denied all of Sanderson's claims.

John Leguizamo (Philadelphia)

By the early 1990s, Tom Hanks was one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood, but he was known primarily for lightweight, populist fare. In 1993, Hanks took on the most dramatic role of his career to that point: He played Andrew Beckett, a lawyer with AIDS who grapples with systemic homophobia while suing his former law firm for wrongful termination in "Philadelphia." Hanks won an Academy Award for "Philadelphia," which also stars Antonio Banderas as Beckett's lover and partner, Miguel Alvarez.

The role of Miguel nearly went to an actor who, like Hanks, was best known for his comedic work, John Leguizamo. "I was supposed to be Tom Hanks' lover," Leguizamo said on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" in 2017. Of course, "Philadelphia" went on to be a huge success. To make matters worse, Leguizamo turned the picture down in favor of 1993's "Super Mario Bros.," a notorious box office bomb . "They all won Oscars, and I won the 'John How Could You Be So Stupid Award' from my wife," Leguizamo added.

Dave Chappelle (Forrest Gump)

While simultaneously building a career in stand-up comedy, Dave Chappelle landed supporting roles in a number of high-profile films in the 1990s, such as "Robin Hood: Men in Tights," "Undercover Blues," and "The Nutty Professor." When Tom Hanks was ready to follow up his dramatic turn in "Philadelphia" with the American history epic "Forrest Gump" (which would win him his second Oscar), Chappelle was on the list of actors that producers wanted to play Forrest's friend Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue, a man even more kind-hearted and less intelligent than Hanks' character. They meet while fighting in the Vietnam War, and, after Bubba's death in combat, Forrest goes on to start a shrimping company in his honor.

"Forrest Gump" would earn $678 million , win a bunch of Academy Awards and dominate the 1994 film awards circuit — but it did so without Chappelle. Mykelti Williamson played Bubba instead, because Chappelle said no. "They tried to get me in 'Forrest Gump,'" Chappelle said in a stand-up set (via Comedy Hype ). "I must have read the wrong script. This script stunk when I read it." Chappelle seemingly took offense at being asked to play a Black character presented as so wildly unintelligent. Four years later, however, he'd finally appear in a big movie with Hanks, featuring in "You've Got Mail."

David Alan Grier (Forrest Gump)

Mykelti Williamson was relatively unknown when he landed the role of Bubba in the Tom Hanks-led hit "Forrest Gump," a part that would send him straight into major film acting and out of guest star roles on episodic television. Before casting him, producers attempted to land an actor with whom audiences would be more familiar: David Alan Grier. However, like Dave Chappelle, he said no.

A film and Broadway veteran, Grier was best known for the Eddie Murphy movie "Boomerang" and his four-year stint on Fox's popular sketch show "In Living Color" at the time. "Forrest Gump" would have been his most high-profile gig yet, but he passed nevertheless. He admitted that this was a mistake during a 2018 appearance on Busy Philipps' "Busy Tonight" (via Just Jared ).

"I'm like, 'Listen, if I'm going to be playing a mentally challenged person, I got to be the lead, I can't be no mentally challenged sidekick,'" Grier said. "So I read 20 pages and I said, 'Listen man, I'm not going in on this. He's talking about shrimp the whole damn movie.'" Despite learning from his agent that Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis both wanted him to join the cast, he still passed. "I screwed that up," Grier conceded.

Brad Pitt (Apollo 13)

After back-to-back hits in "Philadelphia" and "Forrest Gump," Tom Hanks made it three in a row with Ron Howard's "Apollo 13." The harrowing space drama is based on the true story of the Apollo 13 crew, who had to return to Earth early after an explosion in one of the service module's oxygen tanks created a short circuit. They were some 200,000 miles from Earth at the time, and some clever improvisation was needed to get them all home. The main astronauts are played by major actors of the 1990s: Tom Hanks is Commander Jim Lovell, Bill Paxton is Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise, and Gary Sinise is grounded pilot Ken Mattingly.

Kevin Bacon rounded out the headliners as Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert, though he wasn't the first choice. Before Bacon was hired, producers approached Brad Pitt about the role, who turned it down to star in David Fincher's gripping thriller "Seven" alongside Morgan Freeman. Pitt revealed this during a 1995 chat with The Morning Call , saying: "I was talking to my mom the other night and she said, 'I just saw the best movie called Apollo 13.' She said, 'You have to do more movies like this.' I said, 'Mom, I turned that down for 'Seven.'" Of course, this wasn't necessarily a bad move — "Seven" dropped to critical acclaim and is still highly thought of to this day.

Billy Crystal (Toy Story)

1995's "Toy Story" represented a lot of firsts. Not only was it Pixar's debut feature film, but it was also the first time that Tom Hanks had voiced an animated character on the big screen. Today, he's well known for the role of Woody, a cowboy doll who tries to get rid of newcomer Buzz Lightyear, a spaceman action figure who threatens to replace him as owner Andy's favorite toy. Tim Allen, star of the hit sitcom "Home Improvement," was given the chance to voice Buzz after Billy Crystal turned the role down.

After casting Hanks, producer John Lasseter approached Crystal, convinced he had the perfect voice to breathe life into Buzz. He quickly passed, and after "Toy Story" was released (becoming the top-grossing film of 1995), he regretted it. "I'm the schmuck who turned down 'Toy Story,'" Crystal told Yahoo! Entertainment , revealing that he didn't think he was right for the role. "Tim Allen is great, he has this resonant, big voice for this character who's full of himself." A few years later, Crystal would eagerly sign up for another Pixar buddy movie, voicing Mike Wazowski in "Monsters, Inc."

Debra Winger (A League of Their Own)

One of the biggest box office hits of 1992, "A League of Their Own" is a period sports dramedy about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a women's sports league that began operating during World War II. The film attracted huge audiences because of its star power: Madonna, Rosie O'Donnell, and Lori Petty feature as some of the players of the Rockford Peaches, with Tom Hanks playing grouchy coach Jimmy Dugan. However, the addition of one big-name member of the cast is precisely why another major performer gave up the lead role in "A League of Their Own."

Debra Winger — star of massive '80s movies like "Urban Cowboy," "An Officer and a Gentleman," and "Terms of Endearment" — enthusiastically signed up for the movie and spent three months in rigorous baseball training with the Chicago Cubs. Winger was ready to film her scenes as catcher Dottie Hinson, until she learned that director Penny Marshall had cast Madonna in the film. And with that, Winger was gone. She told The Telegraph that she felt like the movie had evolved into a pop star showcase akin to an "Elvis film." In the end, Geena Davis played Dottie instead.

Shaquille O'Neal (The Green Mile)

Shaquille O'Neal is, of course, most famous for his career as an NBA superstar, but his personality and popularity transcended sports, so much so that he made many inroads into entertainment. He's appeared in dozens of commercials over the years and starred in a few movies, including "Kazaam," "Blue Chips" and the DC superhero flick "Steel." O'Neal has also popped up in a bunch of Adam Sandler movies . However, what some people don't know is that he also could have appeared in the smash hit Tom Hanks film "The Green Mile."

Based on a bestseller by Stephen King , the film ultimately received four Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture and one for best supporting actor for Michael Clarke Duncan. The late actor played John Coffey, a towering, gentle, and innocent death row prisoner in the 1930s with supernatural gifts. This is the role that was initially offered to O'Neal. "That was my role in 'Green Mile,' I turned it down," O'Neal said on the "Marchand and Ourand" podcast (via CBS Sports ). "I didn't want to play the down south African-American guy during slavery. I didn't want to play that role. But the guy who played it, Michael Clarke Duncan, did an excellent job."

James Gandolfini (Catch Me if You Can)

"Catch Me if You Can" boasts a pretty enormous level of talent. Based on the memoir of con artist Frank Abagnale Jr. (which, according to more recent findings, is in itself a con, being full of apparent fabrications), the 2002 movie is directed by Steven Spielberg. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale, with Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, and James Brolin in minor roles. Tom Hanks plays Carl Hanratty, the perpetually foiled federal agent who almost manages to catch Abagnale several times during his criminal escapades. As it turns out, plenty of Hollywood big shots just missed out on being a part of "Catch Me if You Can."

Gore Verbinski was set to direct "Catch Me if You Can" at one stage, but delays on the DiCaprio film "Gangs of New York" caused a backlog and production temporarily ceased. Due to other scheduling commitments, previously signed-up actors had to bail, including Chloe Sevigny, Ed Harris, and "The Sopranos" star James Gandolfini, who was supposed to play an FBI agent named Joe Shaye. When "Catch Me if You Can" resumed production with Spielberg in the director's chair, Gandolfini was out. The role of Joe Shaye would be rewritten as Carl Hanratty and offered to Hanks.

Kathleen Turner (The Money Pit)

After the one-two punch of the sitcom "Bosom Buddies" and the fantasy romcom "Splash" made him a household name in the mid-1980s, Tom Hanks starred in a series of broad and agreeable comedies, including "Big," "Bachelor Party," and "The Money Pit." This 1986 relatable everyman farce stars Hanks and Shelley Long (of "Cheers" fame) as young couple Walter and Anna. They purchase what they think is their dream house, only to find that everything that can go wrong with it does, resulting in all kinds of destructive mishaps and costly repairs.

Before Long signed on to play Anna, filmmakers had another (more reliably bankable) actor in mind: Kathleen Turner, who was coming off a string of memorable performances in "Body Heat," "Romancing the Stone," and "Prizzi's Honor." Around the same time that she got an offer for "The Money Pit," the filmmakers behind "Romancing the Stone" approached Turner about a sequel, "The Jewel of the Nile." According to the Chicago Tribune , she initially found the script subpar and she was hesitant after being unhappy about her pay on the original picture. However, Turner eventually decided to make "The Jewel of the Nile," turning down "The Money Pit."

Ricky Gervais (The Da Vinci Code)

Around the mid-2000s, comic actor and writer Ricky Gervais was in huge demand in the U.S. and U.K. entertainment industries after co-creating and starring as cringe-inducing boss David Brent on the original BBC version of "The Office." He followed that elevating project with another TV series, "Extras," and starred in the big screen comedies "Ghost Town" and "The Invention of Lying." Gervais also played some smaller roles in films like "Night at the Museum" and "Stardust." At one point, he also entertained an offer to play Rèmy Jean (assistant to Ian McKellen's villain Sir Leigh Teabing) in "The Da Vinci Code," the big screen adaptation of Dan Brown's bestseller.

Directed by Ron Howard, it ended up being the first of three films starring Tom Hanks as mystery-solving professor Robert Langdon. Ultimately, the role of Remy went to French actor Jean-Yves Berteloot. But why did Gervais turn down the chance to work with Hanks? He explained his decision during a typically hilarious interview with the Daily Mirror. "I was offered the part of the butler," Gervais said (via DigitalSpy ). "I told director Ron Howard, 'I will ruin your film. The number of times I've sat down for a great film by a great director and a British actor pops up and ruins it for me — I don't want to be that bloke.'"

Kevin Bacon (Forrest Gump)

Robert Zemeckis' "Forrest Gump" made waves in Hollywood back in 1994, becoming the second-highest grossing movie of the year behind Disney's animated smash hit "The Lion King." The film seemed to come out of nowhere, and even its star Tom Hanks wasn't sure anyone would care about "Forrest Gump." Thanks to Hanks' sublime performance as the titular character and a sensational supporting cast, the film scooped six Oscars, including best picture and best actor in a leading role for Hanks.

A character that's widely remembered from the story is Lieutenant Dan Taylor, the Vietnam War platoon leader who loses both of his legs. In the film, the irresistible Gary Sinise portrays Lt. Dan. However, the part could have gone to Kevin Bacon, according to casting director Ellen Lewis. Speaking to HuffPost , Lewis revealed the following detail: "I was working on 'Forrest Gump,' and the role of Lt. Dan, Robert Zemeckis very much wanted Kevin Bacon to play the role, and for whatever reason he passed on that."

Bacon appeared in two films in 1994, the basketball comedy "The Air Up There" and the thriller "The River Wild." It would have been interesting to see what he would have done with the role of Lt. Dan, but Sinise proved to be more than a worthy replacement here.

Senta Berger (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)

Vienna-born actor Senta Berger remains a treasured name in European cinema. She also crossed the Atlantic to experience the glitz and glamor of Hollywood once upon a time. However, Berger preferred to stay closer to home because of the belief that her accent prevented her from securing better parts in the '60s. However, that didn't stop the offers from coming in. In a 2012 interview with Tagesspiegel , Berger revealed that she had been offered a part in the Tom Hanks movie "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" — she didn't reveal which role was on the table, only that she turned it down.

The 2011 Stephen Daldry-directed film is inspired by the 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. As such, Berger wanted to get familiar with the source material before agreeing to appear. The actor explained how she asked her casting agency if she could read the book before giving her final decision on the part. However, her agency responded with shock and surprise, pointing out that she would be on screen with Hanks, which apparently should have sold the idea to anyone. The seasoned actor wasn't star struck — she had worked with the likes of Kirk Douglas, Dean Martin, and Charlton Heston earlier in her career, after all — and declined the opportunity out of principle.

Diane Lane (Splash)

In many ways, Ron Howard's "Splash" feels like a live-action adaptation of the classic fairy tale "The Little Mermaid," as Tom Hanks' Allen Bauer falls in love with Daryl Hannah's mermaid character, Madison. The 1984 film is a beloved and whimsical entry in Hanks' impressive filmography. What some people don't know, however, is that the Oscar-winning actor could have appeared alongside a different co-star here: Diane Lane.

Speaking to Time about her career, Lane revealed that she turned down the part of Madison in "Splash." The reason? Nudity. "I was insecure about the nudity involved in playing a mermaid," Lane told the magazine. In hindsight, not taking the chance to star opposite Hanks probably hurt her career ("she tripped up her transition to better parts by turning down the comedy," Time noted), but her hesitation is understandable: After all, there are plenty of actors who came to regret filming nude scenes .

Julia Roberts (You've Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle)

Considering that their rise through the Hollywood ranks happened at around the same time, it seems strange that Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks haven't shared the screen more than they have. Early on, Meg Ryan took parts earmarked for Roberts in two of the biggest rom-coms of the '90s: "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail." Speaking to InStyle (via ABC News ) in 2014, Roberts revealed that she had "been offered 'Sleepless in Seattle,' but couldn't do it." However, she commended the chemistry between Ryan and Hanks, comparing it to what she and Richard Gere had in "Pretty Woman."

In 2023, Roberts appeared on "Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen" (via Variety ) and discussed other roles that she had turned down, revealing how she said no to "You've Got Mail," as well. She doesn't regret turning down these films, as she believes that everything happens for a reason in Hollywood. In fact, in a strange twist of fate, Roberts only got the part of Shelby Eatenton Latcherie in "Steel Magnolias" because Ryan was busy making "When Harry Met Sally." It became a breakout role for Roberts, helping to establish her as a bankable star in Tinseltown.

Maggie Gyllenhaal (Elvis)

Baz Luhrmann's hip-shaking biopic "Elvis" stars Austin Butler as the King of Rock and Roll, with Tom Hanks playing his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out in a review of the film, "History takes a dim view of the man, and so does 'Elvis,' which topped the weekend box office and impishly casts Parker in the role of indignant, none-too-reliable narrator." At one point in time, Maggie Gyllenhaal was attached to the role of Gladys Presley, Elvis' loving mother. However, the role ultimately went to Australian actor Helen Thomson. But why did Gyllenhaal turn the role down? Well, according to Thomson, the COVID-19 pandemic played a part in this major casting shake-up.

"Elvis" was filmed in Australia in 2020. The virus was sweeping across the globe at the time, with many countries shutting their borders to curb the spread. With all the uncertainty, Gyllenhaal apparently didn't want to risk being away from her family for an extended period, especially since nobody knew what would happen next or for how long. "The role was initially cast with Maggie Gyllenhaal, and then Tom Hanks got COVID and Maggie pulled out because she was worried about being stuck here," Thomson told Cinema Australia . "So they had to look around for another Gladys and I got the part."

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Published 2022-05-21T15:36:14.025Z Updated 2024-03-26T14:52:38.804Z

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Collection: Don’t Travel With Tom Hanks

My personal ranking of feature films that showcase the risk you take when traveling with Tom Hanks. As I see the films on the list, the rankings will change.

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Author Interviews

Tom hanks is obsessed with typewriters (so he wrote a book about them).

David Greene

Tom Hanks speaks at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Governors Awards in 2016. His first book is called Uncommon Type. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images hide caption

Tom Hanks speaks at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Governors Awards in 2016. His first book is called Uncommon Type.

Uncommon Type

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Actor Tom Hanks has made us believe he can be anyone and do anything on the big screen.

Now he's taking us on a journey on the page: Tom Hanks has written a book.

It's a collection of short stories, with varied subjects: a World War II veteran on Christmas Eve in 1953, a California surfer kid who makes an unsettling discovery. There's time travel. In every story, Hanks sneaks in the machine he's so obsessed with — the typewriter.

"I have too many typewriters, David," he says, beginning a riff. "You want one? I should have brought one for you and the staff, just to help out, man. I don't want these to be a burden to my children when I kick the bucket. I don't want them to say, 'What are we gonna do with dad's typewriters?'"

Sometimes the typewriter is a plot device; sometimes it really does feel almost hidden. Fittingly, the book is called Uncommon Type . And in talking to Hanks, you learn that his thing with typewriters is not a gimmick – more like a love affair.

"There's something about – I don't know, it's a hex in my brain – there is something I find reassuring, comforting, dazzling in that here is a very specific apparatus that is meant to do one thing, and it does it perfectly," he says. "And that one thing is to translate the thoughts in your head down to paper. Now that means everything from a shopping list to James Joyce's Ulysses . Short of carving words into stone with a hammer and chisel, not much is more permanent than a paragraph or a sentence or a love letter or a story typed on paper."

Interview Highlights

On the story 'These Are The Meditations Of My Heart'

That's actually the story of how I got my first typewriter. A friend of my had gotten a new Olivetti electric that was gorgeous – state-of-the-art typewriter for 1973. ... He gave me his old typewriter. But I used it for about a year-and-a-half or so, and I just wanted to get my typewriter serviced, just like the girl [in the story] did. What happens to her in the shop is almost verbatim the conversation I had with the old man.

That guy altered my concept of the place a typewriter can hold in your life. It is equal to a wooden chest that your great-grandfather carved, or the perfect set of doilies that your grandmother hand-stitched themselves, or a quilt that your mom passed down to you, that she made for you when you were 5 years old. A typewriter is — you can carry it around, it can go with you anywhere in the world. Even the biggest one you can put in a box and lug if you're dumb enough to try to get through airport security with something like that.

On people-watching others as a celebrity

One is, you just show up. You don't have the black SUV and the guys in suits that are opening the doors and clearing the way for you. But if you're not working — you're just a guy in a pair of pants and a sweatshirt — and you just go in, and some people might notice you, but you'd be amazed at how often you can hide in plain sight.

Danny Hajek and Shannon Rhoades produced and edited this interview for broadcast, and Patrick Jarenwattananon and Sydnee Monday adapted it for the Web.

Movie Interviews

'it is neither nor, it is both': tom hanks finds no easy answers in 'the circle'.

Tom Hanks Says Self-Doubt Is 'A High-Wire Act That We All Walk'

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A huge image of an astronaut on the moon in The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks.

The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks review – a gobsmackingly huge space spectacle

Lightroom, Kings Cross, London This potted history of Nasa’s space exploration featuring gigantic and crystal clear footage is invigorating if slightly hampered by its school science tone

T om Hanks is the narrator and co-writer of this colossal and immersive multimedia family entertainment event or next-level school trip, about Nasa’s historic Apollo moon landings and the planned new Artemis missions. It’s taking place at Lightroom, the innovative new digital art performance venue at London’s Kings Cross – recently the site of Bigger And Closer , an immersive show about David Hockney. With the audience gathered in the darkened arena-type area, seated on little upholstered double-stools dotted about, Tom Hanks’s likably folksy and nerdily enthusiastic voiceover booms out telling us that this floor space is the size of Mission Control, Houston. Soon, gobsmackingly huge photo images of the moon’s surface and our own planet Earth are flashed up around the walls, also great film footage of the astronauts bouncing and floating, and all with the cathedral vastness and crystal clarity that they have probably always deserved but never before got from TV screens or even movie screens.

The Lightroom is filled with coloured images

In this vein, we get a celebratory potted history of Apollos 11-17 with tasters of the Artemis project, and all with marvellous visuals – though you have to keep rubbernecking to ensure you’re not missing something behind you. The effect is something between video art display at a gallery and the hour-long science-themed films of the early days of Imax.

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The passion and idealism of the Apollo missions are inspiring and as always it’s invigorating to be reminded of this extraordinary adventure – and at such scale. The descriptions of the astronauts handling moon rocks composed of matter unchanged over three-and-a-half billion years – a pre-prehistoric time scale – are awe inspiring. But it must also be said that the school science project tone of the proceedings can be limiting and there is sometimes a kind of ahistorical naivety to them. We see JFK’s famous speech but hear nothing more about the cold war dimension of what is often called the “space race” – and although Yuri Gagarin and Soviet cosmonauts are given a generous namecheck, I would have liked to hear a bit more about how the USSR just seemed to give up this race once the American project got into gear. And if only to silence the conspiracy weirdos, creeps and bores, it would have been good to hear exactly how and where the video camera was fixed outside the lander to get the footage of Neil Armstrong emerging for the first time.

Tom Hanks poses at The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks immersive show, in London.

But the strangest omission is the lack of any mention of Apollo 13, the near-disaster rescued with magnificent ingenuity and resourcefulness by the astronauts and ground crews, which Tom Hanks himself almost single-handedly turned into a key moment of American history with his performance as astronaut Jim Lovell in Ron Howard’s film . Apollo 13 is, after all, why Tom Hanks is narrating this. Apollo 13 is the reminder of what was at stake in these terrifyingly dangerous missions and Hanks’s voiceover does keep telling us how very dangerous it was. There is a weird moment when a gallery of scientific discovery shows us what each Apollo crew found on the surface: panels showing Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 14 …. etc. An odd way of conceding one rocket never made it down there. Is Apollo 13 an official embarrassment nowadays? Surely not. Well, it’s quite a spectacle – and how incredible again to see that rickety landing craft apparently covered in bronze Bacofoil, bearing humanity’s hopes for the future.

At Lightroom, London, until 21 April

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How Tom Hanks Became Tom Hanks

The actor—and now novelist—reflects on how he got here, and the other lives he might have lived instead.

color photo of Tom Hanks resting his chin in his hand

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There is a particular circumstance deep in Tom Hanks’s past that he thinks may explain something significant about the person he is now. One that suggests how, before all of this—before everything he would achieve and come to represent in the world, before he had even begun to work out what talents he might have and how he might best use them—he was already well on the way to becoming who he would be.

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As a child, several times a year, Hanks would take a long journey on a Greyhound bus, heading to and from the small Northern California town of Red Bluff. He was often alone, and he always sat by the window. In Red Bluff, Hanks would stay with his mother, Janet; after his parents’ marriage ruptured when he was 5, he never lived with her, but on holidays he’d visit. And so, from when he was 8 until he was 17, four or so hours each way, he’d take this ride.

black-and-white school portrait photo of smiling boy with short dark hair

Those journeys, they released something within him. Sometimes he read a little, maybe a comic, maybe a book, but mostly he’d stare out into the passing world. He’d watch the broken sine wave of the telephone lines, looping on and on and on for miles, then veering away, then rejoining the bus’s path. He’d see a barn, wonder what was on the other side. A house would flash by; he’d imagine who lived in it. Some figures standing outside: What were they doing? A plane up in the clear sky: All those people, where were they going and what were they thinking? The couple in that car as the Greyhound passed, the guy by himself in the truck, that station wagon loaded up with kids in the back, that locomotive on the train tracks …

In his mind, all of these questions and thoughts would mix with what was already sloshing around—the movies he’d seen, the stuff he liked to read about space exploration. Sometimes it would coalesce into a narrative. He’d see himself flying a jet, being an explorer, winning the day, gaining revenge, getting into a fistfight. Sometimes it would just flow and flow, as the day’s light faded and his destination edged nearer. A boy by a window, imagining what was and what could be.

Half a century later, Tom Hanks meets me in the lobby of Claridge’s hotel in London, clutching the rectangular stick of a negative COVID test in one hand. When he and his wife, Rita Wilson, contracted COVID in the anxious early days of the pandemic, it made Hanks, in his words, “the celebrity canary in the coal mine.” Back then, his infection seemed disproportionately unsettling . If he describes being a little taken aback by the attention it drew—“When your name appears in a chyron on CNN as breaking news: ‘Oh, I guess we’re a bigger part of the zeitgeist than we anticipated’ ”—well, perhaps he is not as invested as the wider culture is in the idea of Tom Hanks as some kind of cherished symbol, benignly treasured in a way few public figures are. “An avatar,” as The New York Times put it last year , “of American goodness.”

Looking back, we might imagine that this idea of Hanks built up gradually, emerging through the years as he accrued status and dignity. Not really. Here’s a representative sample of ways he was already described in the 1980s: “a funny and vulnerable Everyman,” “an affable soul without a visible speck of vanity in his makeup,” “more like the nice neighbor next door than a movie star,” “regular guy as star,” “the everyguy,” “an unshakable nice-guy image.” By 1988, he was delivering a Saturday Night Live monologue that morphed into an extended skit satirizing the cliché of how relentlessly nice he is. How he is seen now is pretty much how he has been seen for a very long time.

Hanks, who is 66, appears lithe and sprightly, almost as though he has too much energy for such a slip of a body. He is in town to shoot a movie, Robert Zemeckis’s adaptation of Richard McGuire’s Here , a graphic novel in which every frame takes place in a single living room in a house. This will be the fifth collaboration between Zemeckis and Hanks, an irregular series that began with Forrest Gump and Cast Away . But the occasion for our talk is something more immediate: the publication of Hanks’s first novel.

He’s keen to talk about that, and plenty else besides. Hanks is at his most animated when the words coming out of his mouth are something along the lines of “I just learned recently why there’s so many covered bridges in America. You know why there’s so many covered bridges in America?” And he’s off. A while after we sit down, he declares, “I’m not on any schedule,” and more than four hours of conversation pass before he suggests that perhaps he should spend some time with his family.

Whenever Hanks walks around New York City, he says, there are certain kinds of things he finds himself curious about. “Like, you know the guys that are running the soda stands?” he says. “I always want to ask, ‘Dude, you got to go to the bathroom at some point. How do you do it? Where do you do it?’ I’m literally interested in: How do you do your job? What time do you show up at work? When do you have to start loading this stuff? Who drives you here and drops you off? How long have you been doing it?”

What do you think it is, I ask him, that your brain wants to understand?

“You know, I’ve never had any real other job than being an actor,” he tells me. “I mean, I was a bellman on weekends ; I washed dishes for a while.” And so, he says, he’s always wondered: If he weren’t making movies, what might he be doing instead? “What skills do I have? What service could I render? And I always think, What if that was it? What if I was the guy who did that ? ”

A cab driver, for instance. “I would want to be the most entertaining, fabulous cab driver on the planet Earth. I’d want to be the tour guide and everything.” This reminds him of the way his late friend Nora Ephron once summed him up. “She said something that was really true: I would have made the greatest park ranger in the history of the national parks. I would have loved the uniform. I would have run the campfire talks. I would have known the history of it all, and I would have weaved the perfect story … I would have loved going to work.”

Read: Nora Ephron: prophet of privacy

If that’s all sounding just a little too tidy and wholesome, this might be a good moment to point out that one of the fascinations of a Tom Hanks story is that it’s sometimes rather different than you might expect a Tom Hanks story to be. Later, he expands on his spell as a hotel bellman (at the Hilton Oakland Airport when he was a teenager), a story offered not as early-life biography but as an illustrative tale about effective problem-solving. “I had a guy who I checked into a room,” Hanks says, “and he had pictures in his wallet, and he showed me a picture. He said, ‘Does anything like this go on in this hotel?’ And it was a guy giving another guy a blow job. This guy was saying, ‘You want to come up later and give me a blow job? I’ll pay you.’ And I said, ‘No, actually, I don’t think anything like that does.’ I solved the problem, gave the guy an honest answer, and left him to his own.”

And then he’s off again, spelling out the career trajectory that a young bellman good at fixing problems might have had ahead of him: next step, working at the front desk; then sales; then management, until “next thing you know, you’re running the International Garden Suites in Coral Gables, Florida”; then, further down the road, “move to the Bahamas.” Spinning one more story about one more life he might have lived if he hadn’t turned out to be Tom Hanks instead.

Hanks’s public image is so entrenched that it can eclipse who he really is, and the far scrappier tale of how he came to be. As a boy, Hanks had a disorderly home life. One go-to quip in old interviews was that his parents, who both divorced multiple times, “ pioneered the marriage-dissolution laws for the state of California .” He found some kind of solace, and maybe latent possibility, in the stories that filled his head on those long bus journeys to and from Red Bluff. “I was the third kid,” he says. “I was just like a leaf blowing in the wind. No one did anything because I wanted it. I wasn’t in control of nothing. Somebody else was always telling us what to do.” Focus and ambition came gradually. He was well into his high-school years before he discovered drama class and with it one possible shape of a life ahead.

At first, a very modest one. Not long after college, Hanks took his father, Amos “Bud” Hanks, who worked as a restaurant cook, to a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties staged by a repertory company that the younger Hanks admired. “I said, ‘I want to show you the thing that I’m aiming for’ … And when it was done, I said, ‘If I can work at a place like this in a few years, this is the apex of it all for me—to be in something this good, in a repertory company, that means I’d really be a true artist and an actor.’ ”

black-and-white photo of two costumed actors carrying scenery backstage

Hanks never had that repertory-theater career. Instead, after some struggling and a two-season sitcom, Bosom Buddies , he ascended into movie stardom. Maybe only two of his early films, Splash and Big , were truly memorable or impressive, but even the misfires didn’t seem to break his momentum or dent the sense that Hanks’s face fit. Notably, the one person who felt that something was awry was Hanks. He met with his people, and told them that he wasn’t happy with the kinds of stories he was telling.

Hanks felt typecast, forever some fantastical, hapless man-boy looking for love. He wanted to play adults who were complicated, who understood the bitterness of compromise. If need be, he’d wait until the right roles came along or until he could proactively nudge them into existence. The six movies he released from 1992 to 1995, his imperial phase, may have satisfied this requirement in very different ways, but every one of them— A League of Their Own , Sleepless in Seattle , Philadelphia , Forrest Gump , Apollo 13 , and Toy Story —was a critical and commercial triumph; for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump , he won back-to-back Best Actor Academy Awards . (Steve Martin once joked that Hanks “took a shortcut to becoming a movie star—he only made hits.”)

One itch palliated, others emerged. As an antidote to the seemingly endless and repetitive promotional demands of Forrest Gump , Hanks began to write a screenplay: a sweet tale of a one-hit-wonder band in the ’60s, That Thing You Do! , which he would direct and star in as well. He also started a production company in 1998, and since then he has spent much of his time developing projects, most distinctively prestige-TV series on subjects that interested him: the history of space exploration, the birth of America, World War II. But the stream of movies with Tom Hanks on the marquee has never sputtered. Just in the past two years, he’s been a stranded postapocalyptic survivor who builds a robot for company ( Finch ), a suicidal misanthrope who finds his better self in modern-day Pittsburgh suburbia ( A Man Called Otto ), a grieving old-world wood-carver ( Pinocchio ), Elvis Presley’s duplicitous manager ( Elvis ). This June, he appears in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City .

What I have just related is a condensed version of Tom Hanks’s rise, as it is generally understood. But there is a document—an early example, in fact, of Hanks’s writing—that allows for the possibility that far earlier, when he was still in school, a different side of Hanks already existed, one that was much more gung-ho about this movie-star world and the place he might find in it.

George Roy Hill was the director of such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting . Hill died in 2002, but many of his papers are in the collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Among them is a two-page, handwritten letter in blue ink from a teenage schoolboy, who, as the letter explains, is friends with two of Hill’s nephews and his niece; it swerves from praising The Sting into an impudent proposal:

It is all together fitting and proper that you should “discover” me. Now, right away I know what you are thinking (“who is this kid?”), and I can understand your apprehensions. I am a nobody. No one outside of Skyline High School has heard of me, but I figure if I change my name to Clark Gable, or Humphrey Bogart, some people will recognize me. My looks are not stunning. I am not built like a Greek God, and I can’t even grow a mustache, but I figure if people will pay to see certain films (“The Exorcist”, for one) they will pay to see me. Lets work out the details of my discovery. We can do it the way Lana Turner was discovered, me sitting on a soda shop stool, you walk in and notice me, and—BANGO—Im a star. Or perhaps we could meet on a bus somewhere and we casually strike up a conversation and become good friends, I come to you weeks later asking for a job. During the last few weeks you have actually been working on a script for me and—Bango!—I am a star.

I hand Hanks a printout of the letter. “Oh my God—that’s my bad handwriting,” he says. He reads the final section aloud, offering commentary as he goes:

“ All of these plans are fine with me, or we could do it any way you would like it. It makes no difference to me! Exclamation mark! But let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Hill. I do not want to be some big-time, Hollywood superstar with girls crawling all over me, just a hometown, American— Oh dear. This is a little too accurate, ain’t it? Just a hometown, American boy who has hit the big time, owns a Porsche, and calls Robert Redford ‘Bob.’ ”

“All right! All right!” he says, laughing. “Guilty!”

Hanks explains that after The Sting won an Academy Award, in 1974, everyone in his drama class wrote letters to Hill, congratulating him. “I just wrote a jokey one, you know.”

But was a part of you thinking, Maybe this will work ?

“Yeah, a little bit. I mean, you know.”

What do you think when you read it now?

“Well,” he says. “There’s something to it.” He doesn’t own a Porsche. He’s never, he says, “had girls crawling all over me.” But he thinks he can see what he calls his “work ethic” in that letter, for one thing: “Am I wrong? I’m, ‘Hey, we can do it any way you want it.’ ” A hometown, American boy who has hit the big time. An irreverent kid riffing funny, or someone imagining what could be?

Hanks flashes the kind of smile that is almost a shrug. “And by the way, I met Robert Redford, and I called him Bob.”

When Hanks reads something he likes, he is known to reach out to the author. Here in London, he tells me that he just finished Blitz Spirit , a book about everyday Britons’ lives during World War II, and has written to the author, Becky Brown, informing her, “You wrote the most fascinating book I’ve ever read.” The writer Ada Calhoun says that she and Hanks have periodically corresponded on literary subjects ever since she received a typewritten letter from him praising her book St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street . Hanks wrote, “You made me feel like I belonged to the neighborhood. I envy your growing up days.” ( Growing was mistyped gorwing , but Hanks, known for both his typewriter collection and his keen advocacy of their use , had hand-corrected it in pencil, indicating that the o and r should swap places.)

Even though Hanks had occasionally written movie and TV screenplays, and a bit of nonfiction, until about 10 years ago he’d sidestepped fiction. But after immersing himself in some New Yorker anthologies and reading uncollected early J. D. Salinger stories he found online, Hanks was struck with an idea for his own story about some people who launch themselves from a suburban driveway in a rocket that loops around the moon, then return to Earth. He wrote a draft “in a fevered two and a half days.”

What to do next? Hanks had been in the habit of sending his nonfiction to Ephron—a characteristic response: “Voice, voice, voice”—but she was no longer around. In her stead, he sent what he had written to Steve Martin with a single question: “Is this a thing?”

“There’s always a dread when a friend sends you something,” Martin tells me. Once, he says, a friend of his asked for feedback on something that he didn’t think was particularly good. “I said, ‘I think you should work with an editor’—that was my comeback on something I didn’t think was up to snuff.” To his evident relief, this story was different. “It was a surprising piece,” Martin says. “It was well written, it was charming, and it had flair.” The New Yorker ended up publishing the story, called “ Alan Bean Plus Four, ” and Hanks went on to publish a collection of short stories, Uncommon Type , in 2017.

After that, Hanks began to think about a novel. As he remembers it, his editor, Peter Gethers, was the one who suggested that he write about what he did for a living, and his first instinct was to resist the idea: “I said there’s nothing worse than hearing an actor talk about being an actor.” Then it occurred to him that there might be a broader story he did want to tell, one set in the world of moviemaking. Because, he says, “I have found that absolutely everybody assumes they know how movies are made, and nobody does.” Or, as he puts it to me more grandiosely: “Like all cumulative endeavors that require a collaboration among artists who are all operating at the absolute top of their game, making a movie is exactly like starting a business, waging a war, getting to the moon, figuring out how to treat a disease, or coming up with public policy in order to make a city work better … Making a movie is as unknowable and as complex as any great saga or odyssey that is wrought with many turns of fate.” Early on, he came up with a title. It would be called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece .

still from movie showing Hanks in Giants hoodie and sweatpants on child's bike in muddy park

In 2019, while working on the Reconstruction-era movie News of the World in New Mexico, Hanks began writing. As he proceeded, he would periodically send new fragments to those whose opinion he trusted. Title notwithstanding, the novel would evolve into something far more ambitious and expansive—weirder and more interesting, too—than the mere chronicling of a film’s creation. When Ada Calhoun received a first installment, about a boy in Northern California in 1947 being visited by his errant war-veteran uncle, she had no idea it was from the “movie novel” Hanks had told her about.

Another early reader was the novelist Ann Patchett. She had entered Hanks’s orbit after receiving an advance copy of Uncommon Type . Initially she ignored it—“It was just like, ‘Movie star … no’ ”—but, with a minute to spare at the end of a day, she figured she might as well read one story. To her surprise, she was captivated. “I fell into it. I immediately stopped thinking about him and who he was and what he was doing.”

Patchett, who owns a Nashville bookstore , later counseled Hanks when he was considering opening a bookstore himself; eventually, she offered to take a look at his novel in progress, reading each new section as it was completed. “I know I said at one point, ‘Okay, you’ve got to tone down the number of times you say ka-ching ,’ ” she tells me.

From the December 2012 issue: Ann Patchett’s bookstore strikes back

In one section, involving a character called Wren Lane, the female lead of the movie being made in the novel, Patchett advised that Hanks might need another character to interact with her. Hanks’s solution was to give Wren a twin brother, rather than what seemed to him the more obvious option. “I didn’t want to write a romance thing about a couple not getting along,” he says, “because I always think that story can be told in seven words: ‘He was an asshole.’ ”

You’ve got three words left, I point out.

Hanks liked the process of writing a novel. One thing that helped, on days when he was free to concentrate on this project, was a productivity trick he’d read about in The New York Times called the Pomodoro Technique , based on a discovery made by an Italian student: If he set a timer for 25 minutes and focused totally on work for that period, then broke for five minutes, then repeated it all, he would get far more work done.

Hanks also discovered, along the way, that a different kind of writing exercise would be required. The putative “motion-picture masterpiece” in the book is a superhero movie titled Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall ; Hanks realized that to tell his novel’s story, he had to know exactly what happened in that movie, and he could see but one good way to do that. So he paused writing his novel for a couple of months in order to write a real script for the fake movie whose filming his novel would document.

Prospective readers might presume that a book with a title like The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece would be a sly, satirical dissection of filmmaking: Come see what grand folly it is to throw together so many millions of dollars and so many hundreds of talented people under intolerable pressure to create some fragile sliver of entertainment. Even more so when they learn that the particular sliver under examination has a name like Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall . But Hanks’s book is not that at all.

Hanks seems perfectly capable of seeing the world through a sardonic lens—this is a man who has barely sat down when we meet before he tells me, “The truth is, we’re a business full of assholes”—and there are certainly moments, within his novel’s more than 400 pages, when he skewers some foibles and calls out some foolishness. But at its core, what he has written is a hymn to movies and those who make them. It’s a book written in the spirit Hanks invokes when he tells me that “the making of a movie is the same exact process of solving problems, dealing with assholes … or what have you. But the end result is something akin to the Brooklyn Bridge that you help make … And that’s where the noble endeavor—I might get a little weepy on it here—that’s the noble endeavor that you get to be a part of.”

Likewise, people might expect that a novel from a big mainstream movie star like Hanks would be one where everything is in thrall to a propulsive narrative. Again, far from it. Hanks’s story has a through line, and a certain amount of drama and tension and resolution, but it rarely feels as though plot is what matters most. The novel’s strength and distinctiveness—and maybe its weakness, too, for anyone expecting a breezy, streamlined surge of pure entertainment—lie in the way it is guided by Hanks’s relentless curiosity, and his apparent fervor to share what he knows or has seen or experienced. The book is not so much full of digressions as it is a compendium of overlapping digressions. Meet someone, and their rich backstory is usually only seconds away—often less because it’ll be necessary to know any of this later on than because it feels like Hanks just wants to know and generously assumes that you’ll feel the same. This extends beyond characters. There are no covered bridges in his novel, but if there were, odds are he’d tell you, in engrossing detail, that they were originally designed to avoid spooking horses by keeping the animals’ eyes on the road.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece also hews to significant parts of Hanks’s life in ways that might be less immediately apparent. Much of the book takes place in and around the fictional town of Lone Butte. Early in the story, it is where a boy named Robby, who ultimately writes the comic-book source material for Knightshade , grows up. Later, it is the filming location for the superhero movie, where the bulk of the book’s narrative takes place. Hanks confirms my suspicions that Lone Butte is a stand-in for Red Bluff, the destination of all those youthful bus trips to stay with his mother.

“Small towns in Northern California, essentially those were my summer camps,” Hanks says. “I had this kind of William Saroyan take on a small town at a time when living in a small town was not necessarily the same as being poor … Red Bluff, it had a Christmas tree in the middle of the crossroads at Christmas. It had department stores and local drugstores. It had a full Bedford Falls–ish kind of life: courthouse, State Theatre. And the life that little Robby has there, those were my summers … The house that is the basis of the house, that’s really a place that my mom rented for a while … Robby, growing up as he did in Lone Butte, that’s me playing on the porch.”

There is another story buried deeper in the same tangle of Northern California geography and history. This region was also where Hanks’s father spent his own childhood. Later in life, Hanks came to realize that his father had once wanted to be a writer—when Bud came home after serving in the Navy during World War II , he went to college on the GI Bill, and there, as his son understands it, he took a few courses as an English major. “My dad came out of the war with a desire” to write, Hanks says. And he thinks he knows why.

Hanks tells me that, when Bud was very young, he witnessed his own father get killed in a fight with another man; that Bud had to take the stand three times in court, but in the end “he did not get a sense of justice from it all, and he was darkened by that.” Hanks thinks the root of his dad’s desire to write was to have an “outlet for an expression that he never really got.” Hanks tells me that his dad never spoke with him directly about what had happened back then; he heard about it from his older brother, Larry.

I was already aware of the bare bones of this story before I met Hanks, after stumbling across a podcast interview he’d given a couple of years ago. There, Hanks said that the fatal fight his father saw took place in a barn with a hired hand. After listening to that, I spent some time searching local California newspapers from the 1930s, during the period of the murder and the subsequent trials. I was surprised by what I found. Is it strange—or, looked at another way, is it not strange at all, and maybe somehow telltale—that for all of Hanks’s deep interest in the stories of strangers, he seems never to have focused that same gaze on his own history?

I explain to Hanks that the story I found was rather different from the one he has told.

“To what Dad remembered?” he asks.

Yes, I say.

I ask him if he wants me to tell him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Yeah.”

black-and-white candid photo of woman in striped shirt next to taller boy in yard with tree next to house

It seems a very unusual role that I have somehow placed myself in, but here I am: sitting in a lavish London hotel suite one Friday morning in March 2023, telling Tom Hanks about how his grandfather was killed. It’s a story that not only diverges in key ways from Hanks’s version, but describes a tragedy of a more nuanced kind. According to newspaper accounts of the trials, the killer was not a hired hand; he was an old friend of Ernest Beauel Hanks—at 67, he was more than 20 years’ Hanks’s senior. The two of them had been hauling hay together, and the dispute—over some horses—took place in a field, not a barn. The older man testified in court that Ernest Beauel initiated the violence; the friend struck back twice with a pitchfork handle in self-defense. The misfortune of it all multiplied. Ernest Beauel was still well enough to begin driving the wagon home; when he was unable to continue, his friend took over, and eventually called a doctor. Ernest Beauel died later from a blood clot in the brain—according to one report, in his friend’s arms. The other man was charged with murder but ultimately acquitted. Although Bud Hanks did take the stand, he didn’t see the fight.

Hanks listens attentively as I sketch out this story’s arc, only occasionally commenting. “Yeah. The pitchfork was a big thing,” he says at one point. “Oh, is that right?” he says at another, surprised to hear that his father didn’t witness the actual violence. “Wow,” he says when I finish. After, he shares something he remembers his father saying—how much his dad hated that he was supposed to forgive the man who was responsible. Then Hanks relates something else he heard about the aftermath of it all:

“My brother told me this story—I didn’t hear it from my dad—that after the war, or sometime after all of that, my dad decided he was going to kill [his father’s attacker]. And showed up at his house with a shotgun, pounded on the door. The guy’s wife answered. And he says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ She says, ‘Yes, yes, you’re Bud Hanks.’ He said, ‘Well then, you know why I’m here.’ And he had a shotgun. And she says, ‘Look, my husband is very sick. He’s got cancer. He’s going to be dead very soon. Why don’t you just …’ And my dad left.” Hanks pauses. “That’s a lot of stuff to carry around, you know.”

Hanks doesn’t seem resistant to discussing any of this. But I get a sense that he’s talking about it at a distance, almost as though he’s found himself in a conversation about an author he’s never read or a country he’ll probably never visit. These are the kinds of extraordinary biographical details that you feel would fire his rapacious curiosity if he heard them about someone unconnected to him: He’d want to know all the minutiae, backwards and forwards, and he’d be thrilled to tell you about what he’d learned. Maybe he’s just deftly hiding his reaction to someone blundering into a topic too awkward or private or painful, though I do find myself wondering whether it could reflect something else. Perhaps, to develop into a person with a broad curiosity about the world that stretches far beyond one’s own experience, it can be useful to shut oneself off from the messy specificity of one’s past. But then again, maybe he’s just saving it for his next novel.

In considering the cultural mythology around Hanks—the nice guy, the avatar of American goodness, and the rest—it’s only natural to wonder how he feels about being routinely spoken of in these ways. At an event promoting Uncommon Type , he’d once mimicked interviewers talking to him about the book: “Tom, Tom, Tom … short stories … You present a vision of America that is so … American.”

Read: The joy of David S. Pumpkins

As for the most used word of all? “I might take nice as almost a pejorative now,” he says. At the same time, he clearly knows that people appear to detect something in him, and when I float the idea that he has become some kind of symbol of rectitude, he doesn’t entirely push the thought away.

“Rectitude?” he muses. “Fairness? Yeah.”

Nearly as old as the “Tom Hanks is the nicest guy in Hollywood” trope is the determination to search for Hanks’s “dark side.” The quest has typically borne little fruit. Nonetheless, in a recent, unfortunate turn of events, Hanks has become one of the key celebrity targets of QAnon conspiracy theories, and, in what seems to be a toxic inversion of his beneficent public persona, has been smeared with the usual parade of repugnant grotesqueries.

Asked how unpleasant this is for him, at first Hanks affects complete indifference.

“It’s not unpleasant at all,” he says. “It just is. You know, I don’t care.” A soft chuckle. A little later, though, he shares the slightly more nuanced reaction he had upon first learning what was being said about him. At some point he’d heard, he says, that “it was Hillary Clinton—I won’t say the other names—other famous people, me, involved in some sort of satanic thing. And for a moment, I said, ‘Oh my God, we have to do something about that.’ And I’m going to say for about 45 minutes, I was undone by this. And on the 46th minute, I said”—he laughs—“ ‘Oh, fuck. I’m going to fight this ?’ ”

But there was worse to come. Last October, a man who had posted about QAnon conspiracy theories online broke into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked her husband, Paul. The assailant told police he had a list of other targets. One of them was Hanks.

“Oh yeah,” Hanks acknowledges, and then exclaims, almost as though remembering something funny, “I got a call from the FBI!”

What happened?

“They had to do it on a Zoom, and they had to show me their credentials, and they just informed me: My name was on that list. And that’s all they were doing. They said, ‘You should know this.’ And I said, ‘Wow.’ ”

And that was all?

“That’s it. I said, ‘Really? Hey, wow.’ I thought, I’ll let everybody I love know. But again, what are you going to let control your life, for crying out loud?”

Hanks offers a corollary from wartime history, something he read in the William Manchester book Goodbye, Darkness —how General MacArthur, aware of huge pockets of Japanese forces and arms on various Pacific islands, deliberately decided not to attack them. “And so these Japanese soldiers essentially sat out the war doing nothing.” MacArthur just left them there. “And I thought, That’s friggin’ brilliant. You’re really smart in the battles you don’t fight. ”

Hanks realized long ago that he has no interest in a particular kind of story: those with a protagonist and an antagonist. “I always gravitate towards things where there is no antagonist,” he explains. In the stories that interest him, humanity can’t be so easily divided up; what distinguishes characters is that “some people have an opinion that doesn’t win the day.”

Yet you work in movies, a storytelling medium addicted to protagonists and antagonists.

“Even as a young kid, I never bought it. I never found it to be satisfying.”

Hanks remembers an observation that Gethers, his editor, made while he was working on Uncommon Type . “Peter said, ‘I’ve noticed something about these stories of yours,’ ” he recalls: that they’re “ ‘always about people helping people who might not have helped them normally.’ ” He asks whether I’ve ever read the “Metropolitan Diary” in the Times , with its quotidian tales from regular lives. “They’re almost always about some pleasant little moment, even if it’s just somebody saying the right thing.”

And you like that?

“Oh God, I can’t get enough of it.”

Sometimes, he wonders what it would have been like to be a different kind of person altogether. If, say, he’d turned out to be a quiet guy, like Larry, his older brother. L. M. Hanks is a respected entomology professor (a representative academic-paper title: “The Role of Minor Pheromone Components in Segregating 14 Species of Longhorned Beetles”), and also is, Tom says, “the funniest human being I’ve ever met.” But his brother “is dry and he is bashful … I’m loud; I’m totally different.” He tells me about his brother’s insect-collecting field trips in their youth—at a place near Red Bluff called Hogsback, Tom in tow—and how Larry’s bedroom was full of carefully mounted bugs. “And I wish I would have had that kind of specific focus,” he says, “as opposed to some sort of attention deficit disorder for me that is always jumping from one story to the next.”

At one point in our conversation, pressed into another way to explain himself, Hanks begins a thought with “In my writing—” then stops himself.

“I don’t like to say ‘In my writing.’ ”

“Because it makes it sound as though I’m”—he assumes a pompous voice—“ ‘Well, in my writing …’ ”

Which makes you sound like what?

“Like people who do it in order to say, ‘Well, you know, in my writing …’ I just do writing. I write because I’ve got too many fucking stories in my head. And it’s fun.”

I ask him what he thinks his talent is.

“Holding people’s interest? Does that make sense? In warranting their investment in listening to me.”

Don’t be misled by the modesty of Hanks’s language. I think he’s well aware that one downside of a graceful affability is that it can make what you do look effortless; it can tempt people to take you for granted.

One evening nearly 30 years ago, Hanks was eating with his wife, his mother-in-law, and a friend at a restaurant called Coco Pazzo when the maître d’ asked for a word. He said that Joe DiMaggio, who was dining alone, wondered whether Hanks might come over to his table. Naturally, Hanks jumped at the chance. They chatted for a while—it turned out DiMaggio knew that Hanks was from Oakland—and DiMaggio told Hanks, “I like your pictures.” Hanks told DiMaggio in turn that when reviewers said that Hanks made it look easy, he often thought of what people said about DiMaggio—that he’d made playing center field look like it was easy.

“And,” Hanks remembers, “he said, ‘Yeah, it looked easy on the outside, but’ ”—and Hanks imitates how DiMaggio clutched his hands over his heart—“ ‘not in here.’ ” Hanks repeats DiMaggio’s words: Not in here . “I’ll never forget,” Hanks says. “His hands—his hands were huge.”

And you’ve felt the same feeling, I say.

“I think that is one of the deep reasons why I wanted to do the book in the first place,” he says. “If I was going to say ‘What’s the theme of this?,’ it’s that doing this is not as easy as it seems. That doing this is so difficult that it breaks people wide open. You can look at all sorts of people that had the ability, had the credit, and then took the deep-throw shot, it didn’t work, and they were gone … It’s hard, man. It’s hard … And the joy and the fun have to come in spite of the fact that it’s difficult.”

The hotel suite we’ve been talking in is so big that it has rooms I never even see. On our way out, toward the door, is a baby grand piano. I guess that “Tom Hanks,” as the world imagines him, would reach out with both hands for the keys as he passed, almost without breaking stride, and release a ripple of discordant notes—just enough, maybe, to feel like it was a nod to Big ’s magical keyboard scene, or as though it simply needed to be done because it would be such a waste if you could have, but didn’t. And—given that the Tom Hanks you want him to be is, more often than not, the Tom Hanks he is—this is exactly what he does.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “The Making of Tom Hanks.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Times editors have handpicked 11 stories for you to enjoy. Welcome to The Weekender.

A view of a decommissioned homeless encampment site in Houston.

How Houston Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own

By michael kimmelman and lucy tompkins. photographs by christopher lee..

The nation’s fourth-largest city hasn’t solved homelessness, but its remarkable progress can suggest a way forward.

Storms washed away bridges and roads near Yellowstone National Park. See our photos of the damage.

By ava sasani.

From The New York Times Magazine

Tom hanks explains it all, by david marchese.

The iconic actor on his wild new Elvis movie, his faith in America and why his Oscar-winning movies might not have been made today.

How Cats Make the Most of Their Catnip High

By oliver whang.

A study found that the feline reaction to catnip and silver vine helps to stave off mosquitoes and other bloodsucking insects.

The designer Araks Yeramyan working on a new swimsuit design at her studio.

What makes a bathing suit so expensive?

By jessica testa.

A man on an industrial raft on the Ruki River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A 500-Mile Journey With Loggers Along the Congo River

By dionne searcey. photographs by ashley gilbertson..

Two Times journalists took a weeklong journey in the Congo Basin to explore the forces driving deforestation.

Nathaniel Glover, more widely known as Kidd Creole, during his trial this year in Manhattan.

The Fall of Kidd Creole: Inside a Rap Pioneer’s Tragic Descent

By jonah e. bromwich and john leland.

He helped invent hip-hop and spent the rest of his life trying to recapture that glory. Then, in seven minutes on a Manhattan street, it all came to an end.

Brittany Ruggiero and Justin Giuffrida inside their converted school bus in Santa Cruz, Calif.

When #Vanlife Meets the $300 Tank

By ariel felton.

Remaining in destinations longer, using gas apps and signing up for fuel cards allow nomadic travelers to stay on the road.

Elle Woodworth began flipping furniture during the pandemic to make some extra cash.

Furniture Flippers Will Take That Dresser You’re Done With, Thank You

By kelly dawson.

Fueled by the pandemic’s convergence of endless scrolling and supply chain woes, furniture flipping has become a D.I.Y. endeavor that, for many, is worth a try.

Happy hour at the 5 o’Clock Somewhere Bar at the Margaritaville Resort in New York.

As Some Workers Return, Happy Hour Sees a Comeback

By jesus jiménez. photographs by gabriela bhaskar..

Even as companies struggle to coax employees back to the office, some bars report that their after-work crowds are nearing prepandemic levels.

Traveling overseas as an American? Here’s how to get the most bang for your buck.

By elaine glusac, thanks for reading.

This edition of The Weekender was edited by Christine Chun.

Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, and Bruce Willis All Deeply Regret Making This Movie

It's rare that one movie sparks so much negative feedback from its stars, but Bonfire of the Vanities has done just that.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is universally disliked due to casting choices that didn't resonate with audiences or critics.
Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, and Bruce Willis all openly expressed regret and criticism of the film, along with other actors.
Despite being a disappointment, the movie still holds some value and has one of the best tracking shots of all time. But the cast's hatred toward it is astounding.

It's rare that one single movie would be the most regretful installment in the filmographies of so many people, but The Bonfire of the Vanities is just that universally disliked. It's odd, because it's not an offensively terrible movie (it even opens with one of the greatest tracking shots in film history). Instead, it's a movie that everyone thought would succeed, a film with a huge budget, helmed by the great Brian De Palma ( Mission: Impossible, Scarface ) and featuring major stars — Tom Hanks , Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis , Kim Cattrall, Morgan Freeman , Kirsten Dunst, F. Murray Abraham.

It's also based on an acclaimed novel by Tom Wolfe, so what went wrong? Well, according to most people, it all came down to casting. Nobody was right for their part (except, perhaps, Melanie Griffith, who is sexy and funny and a great femme fatale). And instead of leaving it to the audience and critics, the cast and filmmaker have essentially agreed on all points over the years. For instance, listen to Tom Hanks' simple criticism of the film:

It’s one of the crappiest movies ever made.

That's Hanks speaking to Oprah Magazine in September, 2001. Hanks elaborated with maturity and hindsight:

"If I hadn't gone through that experience, I would have lost out on something valuable. That movie was a fascinating enterprise from the word go. It was bigger than life, and for some reason it had a huge amount of attention on it. I can go to Germany, even now, and people will say, "How come you don't make good, gritty movies like The Bonfire of the Vanities anymore?" They have no concept of what it meant to be an American and have that movie enter the national consciousness . Bonfire taught me that I couldn't manufacture a core connection."

Hanks continued in the same interview, saying, "When I was playing Sherman McCoy [in Bonfire ], people stopped me on the street to say, 'You're not Sherman McCoy.' I was like, 'Oh, yeah?' I was going contrary to everything about the character and even the screenplay, but I kept telling myself, No, no, no — there's a way I can get into this."

Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis Tear Bonfire of the Vanities Apart

Bonfire of the vanities (1990).

Hanks isn't the only one with regrets. Morgan Freeman played Judge Leonard White in the film, and provides a serviceable performance, but with everyone piling on The Bonfires of the Vanities , he admitted to Entertainment Weekly , ” I knew that movie wasn’t going to work. I don’t think Brian De Palma had a clue .” He added:

Originally, they hired Alan Arkin to play my role. I thought that was perfect casting. But then they thought they had to be politically correct and make the judge Black. So they fired Alan Arkin and hired me. Not a great way to get a role.

"I never did get around to seeing the movie," said Freeman.

And he was hardly the only one. The very funny Bruce Willis , who played what amounts to Tom Wolfe's avatar, Peter Fallow, an acclaimed New York writer, had this to say about the film:

It was stillborn, dead before it ever got out of the box. It was another film that was reviewed before it hit the screen. The critical media didn’t want to see a movie that cast the literary world in a shady light.

This didn't stop the characteristically outspoken and delightfully honest Willis from countering all the critiques and reviews of the film which dismantled its casting choices. “In the reviews, they were recasting the film," explained Willis at the time. "They were saying, ‘If we were doing this film, we would cast William Hurt instead of Tom Hanks,’ or whatever. Well, if you were doing the film, then that might mean you had some f–king talent and knew how to tell a story instead of writing about what other people are trying to do.”

Ultimately, it is what it is — a weird moment where people thought that an intellectual literary satire could become a massive blockbuster. Nearly 25 years laters, Bonfire of the Vanities remains a bit cringe, but is honestly much better, bolder, and more entertaining than a lot of Hollywood films. You can rent or buy the film on digital platforms like YouTube, Google Play, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and through our link below on Prime Video.

Watch Bonfire of the Vanities

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'Band of Brothers,' 'The Pacific' and 'Masters of the Air,' Ranked

As an Amazon affiliate partner, Military.com earns from qualifying purchases.

"Docu-drama" used to be a dirty word among television critics, and even most audiences. We tend to forget that today, because our many streaming services are always ready to call up any number of historical dramas, about almost any period, on demand. What we used to call "docu-drama" -- a made-for-TV dramatized reenactment of a historical event, usually ripped from the headlines and hastily made -- is now relegated to the Lifetime Channel or late-night broadcast clearance bin.

This all changed in 1998, when Tom Hanks began adapting historian Stephen E. Ambrose's '' Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest " for the screen. HBO spent $125 million bringing this remarkable true story of World War II to life in 2001, raising the bar for the historical dramas that followed. The series also raised the bar for Hanks, who has since made two companion series about other theaters of the war, "The Pacific" and "Masters of the Air."

All three series are based in historical fact, using well-researched books that viscerally represent the turmoil of World War II and document the lives of real people. They're all also really, really good, demonstrating that a well-made TV show can help viewers experience history like no textbook ever could. But with three series spanning more than 20 years, did Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg ever outdo the original?

1. Band of Brothers (2001)

The short answer to the question above is "no." Not only was the author of the source material still alive and available to Hanks and his team, but so were many of Easy Company's veterans, including Dick Winters, Bill Guarnere, Frank Perconte, Ed Heffron and Amos Taylor. Most of the actors were able to at least speak with their real-world counterparts . It was far from perfect, but it was about as real as Hollywood gets.

In terms of accolades, "Band of Brothers" was nominated for 19 Emmys and won six, including Outstanding Miniseries. It also won a Peabody Award, which honors outstanding examples of powerful, enlightening and invigorating stories in all of television, radio and online media.

Creating a series that lived up to the book (and Easy Company itself) was no small feat. Hanks spent three years developing the 10-episode masterwork, which had nine different directors and a cast of dozens, all overseen by Speilberg. It also launched the careers of actors such as Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy, Colin Hanks, Simon Pegg and Damian Lewis. The producers spared no expense: At the time, it was the most expensive television series ever produced, costing an average of $12.5 million per episode ( it ranks as No. 13 today, behind the likes of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power," "The Crown" and even "The Pacific," among others).

The result was probably the most realistic, heartfelt and gut-wrenching story of World War II in Europe ever depicted on screen, one that is still just as riveting more than two decades later. In its dedication to accuracy in retelling the story of Easy Company, "Band of Brothers" showed that viewers could follow a complex web of characters and storylines. More than that, it showed in detail the horrors of war and the bonds that can form between those fighting it. In doing so, it not only preserved the memory of Easy Company for future generations, but the memories and deeds of everyone who fought in World War II Europe.

2. The Pacific (2010)

The second of Hanks and Spielberg's companion series is more violent in its representation of the Pacific Theater, which was one of the most brutal wars ever fought. "The Pacific" pulls no punches in its depiction of that kind of fighting, creating a brooding and, at times, unrelentingly dark picture of what fighting in the Pacific War was like -- and rarely lets up, which can be a problem for viewers.

It's not that the war against Japan wasn't depicted accurately. The series was based on the memoirs " Helmet for My Pillow " by Robert Leckie, along with " With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa " and " China Marine " by Eugene Sledge, both Marines and both depicted in the 10-episode, $250 million miniseries. This story follows troops from three different regiments within the 1st Marine Division fighting the Japanese between 1943 and 1945, a series of battles that included Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu and Iwo Jima.

In terms of audience, 'The Pacific' was a victim of media stratification, where Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime began killing cable with easily accessible movies and television. By the time this second installment aired on HBO in 2010, it only received a third of the viewership as "Band of Brothers," because the preceding nine years brought a seemingly unlimited number of shows, movies and social media for much cheaper than a cable package. Viewers had just begun to realize the power of streaming their old favorites for $4.99 per month.

That doesn't take anything away from this beautifully made, historically accurate and wholly engrossing series, which won eight Emmys in 2010, more than any other program (it also won a Peabody Award). But what "Band of Brothers" does better than "The Pacific," however, is develop not just the characters, but the bonds forged between them. In "The Pacific," the focus tends to be more on the war itself rather than those fighting it. The darkness of the war overshadows the bonds between U.S. service members that "Band of Brothers" established so well. Finally, perhaps because of the use of multiple sources of material, "The Pacific" can feel like separate stories -- which doesn't take anything from its value. The show is telling an important story about a huge war, but it feels almost like two shows until Eugene Sledge meets Merriell "Snafu" Shelton, R.V. Burgin and Bill Leyden. The series is at its strongest when it's developing the bonds between those Marines and doesn't really begin to develop those bonds until halfway through its run.

3. Masters of the Air (2024)

"Masters of the Air" was also based on a precise history of World War II. This time, it was Donald L. Miller's " Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany ," a story about the 8th Air Force 's 100th Bomb Group over Nazi-occupied Europe. Hanks and Spielberg began developing this third installment with HBO as far back as 2013 , but it became so expensive, HBO decided not to produce it. Instead, Apple TV+ picked up the $250 million tab.

Writer John Orloff (who worked on "Band of Brothers") adapted Miller's real-world characters, skillfully portrayed on screen by Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle, Barry Keoghan and dozens more. Frustratingly, critics of the show were more concerned with the computer-generated air combat than its characters, accuracy or historical storylines. The problem with using actual B-17 Flying Fortresses for the show would be that only 10 are still airworthy and a number of crashes have led to museums ending their flying programs .

One of the most poignant reasons "Masters of the Air" is so good is because it's also so timely: It's a reminder that the number of World War II veterans still alive is dwindling rapidly. Though only four of the 100th Bomb Group's veterans were still alive during production of the series, none of them were depicted in the show. John "Lucky" Luckadoo, a member of the "Bloody Hundredth," attended the show's premiere at age 101, where he received a standing ovation .

Stories are about people, about characters. "Masters of the Air" tries to build the band of brotherhood between its characters. But a sense of pathos hangs over each as the show goes on; knowing they're all likely to be shot down and lost makes it difficult for viewers to really invest in any of them. The airmen also spend most of their time in combat behind masks, a necessary and historically accurate depiction to be sure, but the difficulty in identifying the characters' faces only adds to difficulty in identifying with their stories.

Finally, each episode feels less like a continuous story and more like an anthology, and not just for the characters. The episodes jump between genres, moving from action-adventure bromance, escape thriller and melodramatic tragedy and back again.

There Is No 'Bad' Show

What all three of these shows do best is keep the deeds and memories of the men and women who fought in World War II alive. Choosing which of the three series is "best" is an easy task, because the original idea was conceived and painstakingly executed to create "Band of Brothers." Producers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and (later) Gary Goetzman have created cinematic masterpieces in all three. The worst that could happen is that the Navy doesn't get the same treatment.

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Is CERN activating the world’s most powerful particle accelerator for the April 8 eclipse? No

Cern restarted its large hadron collider after a regular winter stop for maintenance. it is unrelated to the eclipse. .

As people around the country await the April 8 total eclipse, conspiracy theories about a Switzerland-based nuclear research facility have some social media users on edge. In their view is CERN, also known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

“Why is CERN being reactivated on April 8, the same day as the infamous eclipse?” asked a March 29 Facebook post , referencing what it called the group’s plan to activate “the large hadron collider” on the day of the eclipse. “My gut instinct is that something really big is being planned for that day… perhaps a total takedown of both the grid and society in general worldwide.” In another post April 1, a man in a baseball cap speculated that CERN is deliberately starting back up April 8 to “open up a gateway, a portal.”

(Screenshot/Facebook)

These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta , which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

It is not unusual for scientists to conduct research during an eclipse, when the sun’s corona becomes visible and areas in totality go briefly dark in the moon’s shadow. Total solar eclipses allow researchers “to study Earth’s atmosphere under uncommon conditions.” NASA, for example, is launching three sounding rockets on the day of the eclipse to study its effects on the ionosphere (a mission that also became a subject of misinformation ).

But CERN’s research is different. The primary research focus of CERN — an acronym derived from the French name “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire” — is particle physics , or “the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them.” The organization seeks to find answers about the universe’s fundamental structure .

CERN houses the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world , which measures around 16.8 miles (27 kilometers) in circumference. The collider’s aim, as Britannica explains , is to “understand the fundamental structure of matter by re-creating the extreme conditions that occurred in the first few moments of the universe according to the big-bang model.”

CERN spokesperson Sophie Tesauri told PolitiFact in an email that the collider’s activities have nothing to do with the April 8 eclipse.

“What we do at CERN is doing particle physics with accelerators such as the LHC, and this has little to do with astrophysics in a direct way,” Tesauri said. “So there is no link between the solar eclipse on Monday 8th April, and what we do at CERN.”

CERN has an accelerator complex composed of machines with “increasingly higher energies.” A beam of particles is injected by one machine to the next one, bringing the beam to a higher energy — and the Large Hadron Collider is the last element in this complex.

“Hadrons” are a group of particles that include protons and ions. In the Large Hadron Collider, two beams travel in opposite directions at nearly light speed and are made to collide. In 2012, Large Hadron Collider experiments led to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle , a particle named for British physicist Peter Higgs, who in the 1960s postulated about the existence of a particle that interacted with other particles at the beginning of time to provide them with their mass.

Tesauri told PolitiFact that the accelerator complex is restarted every year after a brief winter technical stop, when beam production ceases so that the accelerators can undergo maintenance. Restarting an accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider “requires a full commissioning process in order to check that all equipment works properly.”

“Now that all the checks have been performed, the LHC is ready to provide particle collisions to the LHC experiments, and first collisions for this year should actually happen today 5th April,” Tesauri said in her email. “This will mark the beginning of the physics run for 2024.”

The beams were initially expected to enter collision April 8, according to a March 14 report . It said, “Depending on how work progresses, this milestone may shift forwards or backwards by a few days.”

On April 5, CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider achieved its first stable beams in 2024, “marking the official start of the 2024 physics data-taking season.” The statement said that from March 8 to April 5, the Large Hadron Collider was set up to handle the beam and tested for any issues.

“Although the solar eclipse on 8 April will not affect the beams in the LHC, the gravitational pull of the moon, like the tides, changes the shape of the LHC because the machine is so big,” CERN’s announcement said. This phenomenon is not unique to an eclipse; a 2012 news release discussed distortions in the machine brought about by a full moon.

According to CERN’s frequently asked questions page, the Large Hadron Collider is expected to run over 20 years , “with several stops scheduled for upgrades and maintenance work.”

Conspiracy theories surrounding CERN’s work have been circulating for years . In a statement to Verify fact-checkers, CERN said that its research “captures the imagination of lots of people, which is why CERN has been featured in a lot of science fiction books / even movies, around the world.” CERN said works inspired by its research are fictional and “should not be confused with the actual scientific research.”

False claims about the group’s work are so common that the organization addresses some common theories on its FAQ page : No, it won’t “open a door to another dimension,” and no, it won’t “generate black holes in the cosmological sense.”

We rate the claim that CERN is activating its Large Hadron Collider in connection with the April 8 solar eclipse False.

Opinion | Newsrooms should treat the electorate like the hiring committee it actually is

At its core, the electorate is a hiring committee for public servants. Yet very few of the best practices for hiring are followed in the process.

AI is already reshaping newsrooms, AP study finds

Despite ethical concerns, nearly 70% of newsroom staffers recruited for an Associated Press survey say they’re using generative AI to create content

Donald Trump is wrong on Democrats’ abortion stance. They don’t support the ‘execution’ of babies

Willfully terminating a newborn’s life is illegal in every state and situations resulting in a fetal death in the third trimester are exceedingly rare

Opinion | Where did the sun go? A look back at a special day and the media coverage around it

News networks went all-in on coverage of what was just the second total solar eclipse visible from the US during the 21st century.

At nonprofit newsrooms, is good journalism but sparse audiences a recipe for irrelevance?

Nonprofits offer hope in a dire media world. But, at too many startups, disappointingly few readers actually see the work.

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“We Talked About Who Is The American Version Of David Attenborough”: Inside NBC Wildlife Series ‘The Americas’

By Max Goldbart

Max Goldbart

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Toby Gorman, who runs Universal Television Alternative Studio , labeled the show “the most expensive unscripted project in NBCUniversal’s history.”

He said “we talked about who is the American version of David Attenborough” before settling on the double Oscar-winner.

“When we embarked on this we wanted to go as big as possible and after some conversations we said internally that there was a list of one,” he added. “We wanted Tom, it just felt right. What we didn’t know is whether he would want to do it.”

Hanks joins a growing line of Hollywood stars who have narrated big natural history shows, following in the footsteps of the likes of Paul Rudd and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Americas employs revolutionary filmmaking technology that showcases the wonders, secrets and fragilities of the Americas – Earth’s largest landmass and the only one to stretch between both poles – and reveal untold wildlife stories that connect with millions around the world.

Attendees at MIPTV were treated to exclusive in-the-room footage including drone shots of bears and suction cameras attached to whales.

Producer Holly Spearing said the team “wanted to get to key habitats and find animals intrinsically linked to them.” She celebrated footage of the likes of seawolves and bison but said “some of the greatest joys came from some of the things we didn’t expect,” such as a hummingbird.

“Some of these places are so remote and you have to be there for a really long time,” she added.

“Low hanging fruit has been done”

“The low hanging fruit has been done and the difficult things have been left,” he added. “But that was our ambition. We have been able to deliver things in ways we have never seen before.”

The trio were speaking at MIPTV on Tuesday of the market. The Americas will launch next year.

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