New York Times Tom Hanks

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Credit...Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

This Tom Hanks Story Will Help You Feel Less Bad

Hanks is playing Mister Rogers in a new movie and is just as nice as you think he is. Please read this article anyway.

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Nov. 13, 2019Updated 10:39 a.m. ET

Here is a list of stories about Tom Hanks I’ve heard over the last few miserable months, as it appeared that politeness and civility and manners were facing an extinction event in this country.
Once, in 2008, when he was shooting “Angels & Demons” in Rome by the Pantheon, a bride and her father couldn’t approach the chapel because of the hullabaloo, so Hanks stopped filming to escort them to the altar.
Once, in 2015, he stopped by a table of Girl Scout cookies and bought some boxes, donated an additional $20, then offered selfies to passers-by as an enticement to buy. That same year, he found a young woman’s student ID in a park and used his charming Twitter feed, which is filled with found items, to get it back to her.
Once, in 1997, before shooting “Saving Private Ryan,” Steven Spielberg sent Hanks and other cast members out to do military training in the woods with a former Marine. After spending time in the rain, they all voted to quit the training, except for Hanks, who chose to obediently perform the job he was hired for and spurred the other men to stick with it as well.

These are the regular-nice acts of a person who holds the mantle of Everyman in our movie star culture. But lately they have signified more than simple good deeds. They’re something like the embodiment of a gold standard of menschiness, which is not just gone from the culture at large, but now plays like a parody of it.
There’s more. Spielberg once said about him, “If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would paint a portrait of Tom.”
Quick, who is your favorite president? Is it Abraham Lincoln? Well, you’ll never believe this but Tom Hanks is related to him. The maiden name of Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, was Hanks, and yes, it’s the same Hanks.
Quick, who is your second favorite president? If it’s Barack Obama, here’s what he said about his true-life friend Hanks at the Kennedy Center Honors reception in 2014: “People have said that Tom is Hollywood’s Everyman; that he’s this generation’s Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper. But he’s just Tom Hanks. And that’s enough. That’s more than enough.” Two years later, Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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President Barack Obama awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Hanks in 2016.Credit...Cheriss May/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

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Hanks escorts a bride and her father to the altar after filming scenes for the movie “Angels & Demons” by the Pantheon in Rome in 2008.Credit...Elisabetta A. Villa/WireImage, via Getty Images
The day after Hanks’s new movie, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” in which he stars as Mister Rogers, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, he was sitting on a bench in a hallway outside a conference room, making jokes to a group of publicists, waiting for me ahead of the appointed time. That does not really ever happen, an actor waiting for me ahead of the appointed time, versus clearly dreading me two hours past it. “I think a long time ago, I learned how important it was to show up a little bit early,” Hanks told me. “Be ready to go, you know? And to respect the whole process, and I think that you could respect the whole process even when the other people don’t.”

So Tom Hanks is as nice as you think he is and exactly what you hope him to be, which is great unless you are someone trying to tell a good story about him, with elements like an arc and narrative tension. “Saintly Actor Playing Saintly Public Television Children’s Host Mister Rogers Is Saintly” is not a great story. But what am I supposed to do? He sat facing me, cheerful and focused and willing. Maybe this could just be a story that makes you feel better.
An hour later, he sat on a panel with the filmmakers and other actors, all of whom seemed giddy to put a Mister Rogers movie out into the world, relaying all the stories they’d heard about him. Tom Junod, who wrote the 1998 article in Esquire that the movie is based on, would talk about the way his interactions with Fred Rogers changed his life. You sit there and you listen and it’s hard to believe that those stories are real.
In our first interview there in Toronto, Hanks sat back in a chair with his left ankle pressed against the top of his right patella. He was wearing clear-plastic framed glasses and a beard for shooting “News of the World,” which is set in the aftermath of the Civil War. In our interviews, he says “oh dear” and “geez” and “for cryin’ out loud.” He is a history enthusiast. He is an information enthusiast. He is an enthusiasm enthusiast. At one point, I can’t remember why, he recited the Preamble to the Constitution.
In the panels after the premiere, some of the questions seemed to be based on the notion that Tom Hanks is so wonderful and Mister Rogersy that he just had to show up and read some lines since hey, they’re both essentially the same: easygoing nice men with graying hair.
This created as close to a crisis as the people who made this movie will probably have: It has been 24 years since Tom Hanks won an Oscar (two in a row for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”); it has been 18 years since he was even nominated, even though he has had an unrelenting leading-man career that includes the last three devastating minutes of “Captain Phillips.” So while other movies this year opened to PR disasters around the offscreen behavior of their stars or directors or producers, it was this that the “Beautiful Day” team felt they had to get in front of: the notion that Tom Hanks wasn’t acting when he was playing Mister Rogers.
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At a panel, a journalist suggested that he’s actually playing Tom Hanks, but just “slower.” But the slowness of Fred Rogers — the un-self-conscious, considered slowness — was hard, Hanks said. It felt ridiculous when he first tried it out. He studied hours of tapes, because sometimes he couldn’t imagine that he was supposed to go this slowly. “When you get over that there is some point where you just go, oh dear lord, this just has to be slower, and it’s not dumber. It’s a combination of procedure and behavior that was singularly Fred Rogers.”

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Hanks as the children’s television host Mister Rogers in the film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”Credit...Lacey Terrell/Sony Pictures, via Associated Press

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Fred Rogers, the real Mister Rogers, during a taping of the TV show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” in Pittsburgh.Credit...Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

It wasn’t just about pace, though. It was about a specificity of cadence, and an intention. When Hanks watched those tapes, he saw that Mister Rogers was “always talking to a single kid, a single person two feet on the other side of the camera screen. They said when you were talking to Fred, you felt as though you were the only person in the world that mattered to him.”
Performance aside, it’s not hard to see why the director, Marielle Heller, wanted him so badly for the role. He bears a somewhat passing physical resemblance to Rogers, which was a good start. He is most often cast in roles that need what Robert Zemeckis (who directed “Forrest Gump,” among other Hanks movies) calls “that classic Everyman quality.” Over my reporting, many, many people told me what an Everyman he is.
But Mister Rogers wasn’t an Everyman. It didn’t hurt that whereas Mister Rogers was the closest thing my generation had to a living saint (even Mother Teresa got canceled, eventually), Tom Hanks was the closest thing we had to Mister Rogers — an uncomplicated-seeming, scandal-free man with a long career who never had to issue a public statement that included the phrase “It was a different time.” In other words, having Tom Hanks cast as Mister Rogers removes a layer of suspension of disbelief that is the burden of a movie depicting a real-life person.
Hanks had read the script years before, but while Mister Rogers is the hero of the story, he’s not necessarily the protagonist of it, and so it felt like just another midlife crisis movie about a man dealing with a fraught relationship with his father. But by the time a revised script got to him, circumstances had changed. Back in 2015, Hanks read a story on female directors in The New York Times Magazine and had decided he wanted to make an effort to work with some of them. That week, at his granddaughter’s birthday party, he met Heller, who had been featured in the story. He went home and watched her debut, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” and told her that he wanted to try to make something work. A few years later, now attached to “Beautiful Day,” she sent the script over to him and here we are.

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The director Marielle Heller and Hanks on the set of ”A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”Credit...Lacey Terrell/Sony Pictures
“I think it’s an essence thing,” Heller told me of Hanks’ portrayal, which, she insisted on that panel and to me, was a performance. “It’s something in the energy and the essence and behind the eyes that you feel the same way looking at him as you feel looking at Mister Rogers, and that was what was so important to me. I never wanted him to be doing an imitation.”
A week after our first interview, a member of Hanks’ team would call to plan our second interview, and she would casually bring up that he was actually acting as Mister Rogers, and that yes, he was nice, but he was very much more than that and please maybe I should not tell another story in which Tom Hanks is simply depicted as nice. And then she told me a story about a time she was with him en route to the airport and was feeling a little nauseous in the car. She was trying to make sure he didn’t notice, but he did and he changed seats with her so that she could sit the way she needed to in order to feel better. (I then told her the story of the time I interviewed an actor in a hotel lobby, where I was so sick that a member of the hotel staff came over and asked if I needed painkillers or a doctor, and the actor not only hadn’t noticed, but continued to not notice even after this happened.) What she was saying was that playing any role successfully takes talent and work; what she was also saying is that being nice is a choice.
In “Can You Say … Hero?,” the magazine article that “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is based on, the writer Tom Junod follows Fred Rogers as he interacts with children and commits acts of kindness and empathy that are simple yet totally astounding. But the protagonist of “Beautiful Day” is not named Tom Junod; he’s named Lloyd Vogel. In the movie, Lloyd (Matthew Rhys) is an Esquire writer with a bad reputation whose broken relationships with his father and his new son have led to anger and despair. His editor assigns him a short piece on Mister Rogers that changes his life. (The movie veers into science fiction when it features a female editor in chief and a 90s-era Esquire staff filled with people of color.)
In the last part of the article, Junod prays with Fred Rogers at Rogers’ behest, and he writes that his “heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella” — that just being around him was enough to make him see the world differently, and then, to be loved by him, was enough to make him a completely different kind of journalist and a completely different kind of person.
But neither the movie nor the magazine article tell the real back story of the meeting: Junod (who is a friend of mine) profiled Fred Rogers after writing a story in 1997 in which he, in effect, outed Kevin Spacey (who only recently revealed that he is gay, after a #MeToo scandal). The story briefly made Junod something of a pariah in Hollywood, and flung him into soul searching about the kind of writer he wanted to be. He’d had a ruthlessness to him, he told me in Toronto. He didn’t want to be ruthless anymore.

It was then that he met Mister Rogers, who prayed for him and his family every day, and who kept a file on Junod, which the screenwriters, Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, found in Rogers’ archives in Pittsburgh. In that file, he laid out four pillars of journalism that he hoped Junod would stick to: 1. Journalists are human beings not stenographers, human beings not automatons. 2. Point out injustice when you have to. 3. Point out beauty when you can. 4. Be aware of celebrating the wonders of creation.
It’s been a long time since a magazine article about a celebrity could sell tickets to a movie. But Hanks doesn’t mind doing interviews — “I hate doing disingenuous press. The stuff that you have to essentially perform through the whole damn thing”— though he can now smell the ones that are just trying to get something incendiary into a headline. Ones where the writer says, “Tell me about that divorce.” In 1985 he and his first wife, Samantha Lewes, the mother of his son Colin and his daughter, Elizabeth, split. Hanks then married Rita Wilson, who was his co-star in “Volunteers.” They’ve been married since 1988 and have two sons together, Chester and Truman. There has not been much drama in this marriage department. So he’ll say, “What? We got divorced!”

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From left, Truman Hanks, Elizabeth Hanks, Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Chet Hanks, Samantha Bryant and Colin Hanks on the red carpet at the State Department dinner for the Kennedy Center Honors in 2014.Credit...Kevin Wolf/Associated Press
What happens next confuses him more. “Then they’ll say, ‘Why won’t this guy let me really get to know him?’ It’s because we’re going to be spending altogether about two hours of my 63 years on planet Earth getting to know each other.”
I committed something akin to this line of atrocity when I asked him if he had a dark side. He said, “Yes, and finally, finally I’ll get to tell it to The New York Times.”
In our interviews, he doesn’t evade any questions, but he doesn’t spill either. He doesn’t appear to have a need to be known by his public, but he also doesn’t have the same strains of contempt for journalists that I’ve seen from other movie stars. Maybe that’s because he’s never been truly screwed by one, but just as likely it’s because he believes in the truth. “The best articles I’ve ever read that have come out have been an accurate reflection of the time I spent with that journalist,” he said.
That night in my hotel room I watched the Kennedy Center Honors from 2014. There’s a moment when the a cappella group Pentatonix sings “That Thing You Do!,” the title track from the movie Hanks directed and starred in about a boy band that is filled with the kind of wholesome, debonair, charming and witty characters that he tends to favor. At the ceremony, as the group sings, Hanks sits in the balcony with Wilson right behind him, waving his head in joyous, uncomplicated beat. For maybe two seconds, a second camera goes to the grown Hanks children in the audience, each of them singing along and bobbing their heads, too. Colin is an actor and owns a handkerchief company called, uh, Hanks Kerchiefs. Elizabeth is a writer. Chester has been chasing a rap career (with attendant rap controversy) and now plays a rapper on “Empire.” And Truman is working on film sets and, his father tells me, has a degree in mathematics from Stanford. I watched those two seconds at the Kennedy Center maybe 10 or 12 times.

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“I recognized in myself a long time ago that I don’t instill fear in anybody,” Hanks said. “Now, that’s different than being nice, you know? I think I have a cache of mystery. But it’s not one of malevolence.”Credit...Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times
Tom Hanks got his first typewriter when he was 19. He told me this at our second meeting, which was in Santa Fe, where he’s shooting “News of the World.” It was a Sunday, and he’d just come from seeing “Ad Astra” with his youngest son, Truman.
He’d altered his schedule that day for me. Santa Fe has an elevation of 7,200 feet, and I’d woken up breathless and had gone to an urgent care center for oxygen that morning. So after they’d gone to an earlier movie than they had planned, he met me in a conference room at a hotel ahead of schedule so I could leave town earlier than I’d planned. He walked in wearing a big straw hat and the same beard he’d had in Canada. Once, a person I was interviewing showed up four hours late so that our interview began at 11 p.m.
Hanks grew up in Northern California, in the era of the Zodiac Killer and Patty Hearst and the Black Panthers and the People’s Park riots. He was 5 when his parents divorced and he and his older brother and sister went to live with his father, while another brother lived with their mother. Both parents were in rough shape, just trying to survive. His father worked in a variety of small restaurants, remarrying again and again and moving every few months.
He and his siblings had the run of the house while their father worked long hours. They didn’t eat the frozen vegetables he brought home, and they mostly knew what time it was because of what was on television. “No one told me how to brush my teeth,” he said. “I never flossed until I was out of high school, because dental hygiene was handled by a filmstrip that we saw in second grade that said, really, try to eat an apple, and that cleans your teeth. So, hey, I had an apple last week, so my teeth are kind of clean.”

He was never angry at his parents; he’s still not. He saw how hard it was for them to function. They never explained things to him. Now he knows, “it’s because they didn’t have the verbiage. They didn’t have the vocabulary. And they were so racked with self-loathing and guilt and et cetera, all that stuff that went along, and there were four of us, for God’s sake, and they just, you know, couldn’t do it. Now, I’ve got four kids myself, and as soon as you start having your own kids, you go, like, oh, I get it.”
He remembers Oprah once asked him on her show about his dysfunctional family growing up, and he thought, “What’s that? Oh, that’s us.” He’d never thought of himself that way. But somewhere underneath he must have known that something was off because he had started accumulating a lot of typewriters. Hundreds of them. It was something about how he never got to keep the things he loved through all of his family’s moves. Now that he’s 63 and he’s thought a lot about it, he realizes that when he was young, he’d often have to move on a moment’s notice and was not in charge of packing, so he often lost things that were important to him. “I had nothing, actually, that stayed with me all through my life. I don’t have anything from when I was 5 years old. I don’t have anything from when I was 3.”
Like I said, he was 19 when he got his first typewriter. A friend gave it to him — “it was a hunk of junk — a toy,” he said. He went to get it serviced, and the repairman said to him, “This is a toy. Why are you using a toy?” The man sold him a Hermes 2000, which is now lost. So he invested in another. “I said, oh yeah, this is going to stay with me for a while, and I am soothed by it. I’m soothed by having it. I’m soothed by knowing that I can take it anywhere with me.”
Everyone I spoke with about him told a story about notes they received from one of his typewriters. Sally Field recently received a note from Hanks that conveyed how moved he was by her 2018 memoir, “In Pieces.” She was kicking herself because she has yet to convey to him how much she enjoyed his book of short stories, “Uncommon Type,” which she had read a year earlier. (She also told me about the weekly newsletter he wrote, on a laptop, on the set of “Forrest Gump,” about happenings among the cast and crew. A weekly newsletter.)

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Hanks and Sally Field in “Forrest Gump.” She calls him “Once in a lifetime Tom.”Credit...Paramount Pictures
He loves typewriters because “they’re brilliant combinations of art and engineering. But art, engineering, and purpose,” he said. “Every machine is as individual as a set of fingerprints. So, every time you type something on a typewriter, it is a one-of-a-kind work of art.” He even created a sweet little app called Hanx Writer that allows you to type and send a message rendered in typewriter style.
When he started collecting them he was married, but he was just as transient as he’d been as a child. He was getting gigs on “The Love Boat” and at the Great Lakes Theater outside Cleveland. He began to collect typewriters maybe because he finally had control over his belongings, even though he still moved a lot. When he thinks about that time, he said, “I start thinking about mistakes I made with my own kids and not explaining things or not being there for them. Or being so preoccupied with other things that are going on in our adult world. My son Colin was born when I was very young. As well as my daughter, but that means we have this gestalt understanding because they remember when their dad was just a guy trying to, you know, make the rent. My other kids, they were born after I had established a beachhead in every way. And so their lives were just different.”
I told him then that I’d watched his Kennedy Center Honors ceremony probably more times than is appropriate. His older children have weathered divorce and uncertainty. His younger sons have weathered a life of wealth and privilege and I wanted to know how you could be a transient person trying to ma