There were a lot of edgy executives at DreamWorks and Fox before the American release of Road to Perdition, the dark period drama starring Tom Hanks and directed by Sam Mendes. Would Americans accept Hanks, the Everyman for the Gap generation, in the kind of role he had always avoided before, as a cold blooded hit man? Even Mendes, in New York for the premiere of his second film - his first was the Oscar-winning American Beauty - seemed jittery and felt it necessary to address the “Hanks plays a baddie” issue head on. “He’s our moral weathervane,” the director said of his star, who had never killed anyone in anger before on screen. “And it’s very appropriate that, post- September 11, he should be playing this character who’s not all good, who’s dealing with a violent world and trying to make sense of it.”
Never mind that Road to Perdition had been conceived and filmed well before September 11. The silver-tongued Mendes was spinning what could have been a big problem for American audiences, and for the billion-dollar box-office franchise that is Tom Hanks, although Hanks flatly denies he ever thinks about such things. “I can’t worry about that because otherwise I’d just be in love with blonde girls every time I’m in a movie,” he insists. “I don’t know if the audience will accept me as a guy stuck on a desert island. Or as a guy who wants to go to the moon and doesn’t get there. Or as a captain on Omaha Beach, or as a gay man who dies of Aids. If you’re going to ask that question, you’re doomed.”
In fact, he would have been doomed long ago if he didn’t worry about his audience. As Hollywood’s most lucrative brand name, Tom Hanks doesn’t just have his finger on the pulse of his audience, he’s got it jammed into its aortic artery. Road to Perdition, which is close to breaking the $100m mark at the US box office, has been one of the hits of the summer. Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, a hit man for a 1930s Chicago mob boss, John Rooney, played by Paul Newman (the first time Hanks and Newman have been paired on screen). When Sullivan’s family is attacked, he and his elder son are forced onto the run and Sullivan feels compelled to seek revenge. But this is vengeance Hanks-style: retribution as redemption. Sullivan’s uber-purpose is to stop his son from making the mistakes he has made. As Hanks says: “I am doing bad things for good reasons.”
For a man who insists he has never planned his career, Hanks hasn’t made too bad a fist of it. The squishy-faced star is the most successful film actor of our era, practically owning Hollywood in the 1990s. He has enjoyed an astonishing unbroken run of success in that time, playing a series of antibacterially moral characters who represent “the sensibilities of my generation”, as he puts it. He scored back-to-back best actor Oscar wins, for Philadelphia in 1994 and for Forrest Gump in 1995, and has been nominated three other times. He starred in other powerful Hollywood dramas, including Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile and Cast Away, which he also produced. As if that weren’t enough, he was also one of the decade’s most successful comedy stars, especially when teamed with Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.
All this has made Hanks an extremely rich man, although he has always managed to obscure the issue of his immense wealth with the cloak of his apparent modesty and cheap clothes. Yet Hanks has personally banked more than $200m in the past decade, including $40m for Saving Private Ryan and as much as $70m for Forrest Gump, when his share of the profits of those films are included. Oh, and he pocketed the odd $5m for doing the voice of Woody in Toy Story 2. What on earth does someone like Hanks do with all that money, other than buy the manual typewriters he collects?
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As inexorable as the rise and rise of the “Tom Hanks” brand now seems, on the cusp of the 1990s it looked as if it was going to be very different. After starting out as a cross-dressing advertising executive in the short-lived television series Bosom Buddies in the early 1980s, Hanks had two bona fide movie hits: Splash in 1984, and Big in 1988. But he then made a string of five box-office or critical stinkers: Punchline, The ‘Burbs, Turner & Hooch, Joe Versus the Volcano, Bonfire of the Vanities and Radio Flyer. By 1990, his career was plummeting with the terminal velocity that was dooming other big 1980s stars such as Steve Guttenberg and Jeff Daniels.
So Hanks did what many people in Hollywood do when their careers are on the slide: he fired his agent, teaming up with Richard Lovett, who now runs CAA, the film industry’s most powerful agency. (CAA also represents Tom Cruise, the only other big star to emerge in the 1980s who has had a comparable career, although Cruise, appearing in independent films such as Magnolia, has taken greater risks.) When Lovett sat down with Hanks to ask him what he wanted to do differently in future, Hanks said he didn’t know specifically, but that he knew what he didn’t want to do. “I don’t want to play pussies any more,” Hanks told him.
In particular, Hanks believed Bonfire of the Vanities, which had all the ingredients to be a hit, had been a disaster because his character, Sherman McCoy, was a “big fat pussy”. In the American vernacular, of course, calling a guy a “pussy” doesn’t just mean that he’s as cuddly as a cat. “Wimp” is an equivalent, but that was not the word Hanks had in his head. That same word was still there, a decade later, when, giving an interview about the somewhat darker character he plays in Road to Perdition, Hanks said: “At least they don’t call me a pussy!”
Why would someone like Hanks, who also says he’s irked by the nice guy image he has so diligently cultivated over the years, on screen and off, continue to worry so much about something as schoolyardish as that? Perhaps because on the two occasions when we have been privileged to view a display of unvarnished, unmediated emotion from him - his two Oscar-acceptance speeches - he has blubbed like ... well, like a pussy, really, earning himself the unwelcome sobriquet Tom Hankies.
Up close and personal, Hanks has to be the most immediately engaging Hollywood name you could hope to meet. The consummate professional, he gives great “star”. Sitting in a hotel room in Chicago just before the American release of Road to Perdition, he’s crackling with energy, very funny, very sharp, very bright. He wins you over immediately with an apparently indiscreet attack on the studios and the suits who run them - “lawyers” and “account executives” - for making films devoid of “the authentic emotional experience”. Which is pretty disingenuous coming from someone who always works within the studio system. And he talks easily about himself, about his family, his children, his relationship with his father. His lively light blue eyes still offer that eager, gung-ho boyishness that has been a significant element of his enduring appeal. He must make a great friend, you think.
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It is unsettling, then, to discover that the people who know him best say he is nothing like as immediate and open and forthcoming, as charming really, as he comes across as when he’s turning it on for professional reasons. “Reticent” with his emotions and affections is how some describe him. “Chilly” say others. “Tom doesn’t find it that easy to open up and talk”, says his older sister Sandra, who lives with her policeman husband in Bournemouth. “I can pretend to be very good friends with people,” Hanks once admitted in an unguarded moment, “and then not have anything to do with them for 18 months.”
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, to learn that Hanks does not really have very close friends. Nor does he have “a best friend”, he admits. Rather, he says, he funnels what emotional energy he has towards his family, at least to-wards the family he has married into. His wife is the actress Rita Wilson, with whom he has two children, Chester, 11, and Truman, 6. (He has two children from a previous marriage to the actress Samantha Lewes: Colin, 24, who is also an actor, and Elizabeth, 20. That marriage broke up in 1984 after Lewes disclosed in court papers that her husband “repeatedly verbally abused and humiliated me”.) Hanks’s relationship with his own family, his mother and his three siblings - his father is dead - is not close. “Terse” is how he describes it. And even though his ageing mother has tried to get closer to him in recent years, Hanks has kept her at a distance. “Mom, you didn’t raise me,” he tells her. Which is true, if unkind. His father, a hotel kitchen manager, snatched his four children from home in the middle of the night when Hanks was five; he was raised by his itinerant father and a succession of stepmothers in low-rent apartments across California and Nevada. Hanks was constantly having to win over friends at new schools and leave old friends behind without a trace. Today, he won’t countenance the possibility that he might have had an unhappy childhood. “Whoever had an absolutely ideal childhood?” he snaps.
But Sally Field, who knows Hanks well, having worked with him on Punchline and Forrest Gump, believes Hanks has found a way to mask his more uncomfortable emotions with his apparent niceness. “Underneath there’s somebody else,” she says. “Somebody dark... a man who I sense has a lot of anger in there.”
So did Hanks, who was briefly in therapy after his divorce, see playing the hit man Michael Sullivan as an opportunity to try to access, even exorcise, some darker part of himself, a part he has always been hesitant about showing on screen before? Hanks holds up his hands. That’s a path he won’t go down; he refuses to see his choice in psychological terms. For him, it’s simply a professional issue, a career choice, a matter, in the end, of protecting the immensely valuable franchise “Tom Hanks” has become. “I never said I was hesitant about playing a bad guy,” he insists. “What I said was that I would play a bad guy when I could understand his motivation. Every movie I’ve ever done I’ve tried to imbue with a brand of logic I think is understandable to the audience in the first two nanoseconds of the film.” Tom Hanks may know his audience better than he wants to know himself.
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