Before meeting Tom Hanks, I meet Tom Tykwer. He’s directed the Oscar-winning star’s latest film, A Hologram for the King, and says casting Hanks as the failed salesman Alan Clay was subversive. During his career, the actor behind Forrest Gump has sold the idea of success or, at least, determination. Don’t give up on that desert island. There is something else to achieve. Clay, however, is depressed, running away from his broken family in Boston as he tries to flog tech to Saudi Arabia. He’s arrogant, but, as Tykwer says, has a “Hanksian twinkle”, which makes you like him no matter what.
“Everybody loves this guy,” the director says. “There’s really no person on the planet who doesn’t like Tom Hanks.”
So, I ask Hanks in London the next day, is it true? He laughs, shakes his head. “I could fill a room with any number of them,” he says unconvincingly. He’s the loudest person I’ve ever met —at a constant high level that booms on occasional words, as if his remote is on another sofa and someone accidentally keeps sitting on the volume button. But there’s an old-fashioned graciousness in how much effort he puts into this, probably his 9,856th interview of the decade.
“I’m very good, actually!” he yells when I say he seems delighted, despite being on a junket slog. “Often this is an inhuman process, but our movie’s small. We don’t have a bunch of sweaty studio people who might lose their job if things don’t go perfectly.” When he compares the pressures of the forthcoming Inferno (“You know, another Robert Langdon Dan Brown thing”) with A Hologram for the King (“Low budget, low hassle”), it seems that his imminent seventh decade — he turns 60 in July — will consist largely of the latter indie-style fare.
“I’m at a fabulous place,” he says, chuckling so loud he wakes up America. “I really have to be intrigued by a part. It is like saying, ‘I’m going to give up, go off, form my repertory company in Cleveland, Ohio, and do plays I’d like to be in.’ It’s not unlike that, and it’s nice. Some people are in show business for twisted reasons. Power. They want to get laid. The money is good. But when I stumbled into this, I did it because it was fun and I’m no good at anything else. To get paid to make movies? This is the greatest gig in the world.”
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To put it really simply, what does Hanks bring to a film nowadays? “Well, if it was mathematics, it would all balance out,” he replies. “Hit film times popularity over subject matter equals box office. But movies, no matter who’s involved, are binary entities. They’re either a zero or they’re a one. They either work because of the mixture of everybody that’s involved, or they don’t.”
He starts to tell me an anecdote, leaning forward until he’s within an inch of touching my leg. It is about a trip to London, “not long after Rita [Wilson] and I got married”. He was excited to see that Judi Dench was doing The Cherry Orchard. “I said, ‘Oh my God! I hope we can get tickets.’” They did, but as they got to the theatre, Hanks said, “‘We must be early. There’s hardly anybody here!’” He thought they had the time wrong, but as the lights dimmed, the house was only half full. “I was thinking, ‘They can’t start. Not everybody’s here.’” But, he says, still baffled, it turned out not a lot of people wanted to see Dench in The Cherry Orchard. “Are they insane? This is Judi DENCH. Doing CHEKHOV.” Those caps are vital. He’s still that incredulous. “It’s the way it is,” he shrugs. No matter who you are, nothing is guaranteed.
A Hologram for the King is based on a novel by Dave Eggers. I tell Hanks that I think it tackles three key political topics. First, an unwanted American in the Middle East (“Yeah”). Second, back in the USA, Clay outsourced labour to China and everything went wrong (“Right, yes”). Third, a Muslim love interest suggests that whatever religion people are, they are separated only by the “tiniest filaments”. He picks up the third point and agrees that it is a positive message for an election year in his home country, which is riven by noisy division.
“Yeah, the circus is in town in the United States,” he says with a compere’s bellow. He’s a Hillary Clinton supporter, and I ask if he’s optimistic about November. “Sure. Here is what happens. Every four years, the circus comes and everybody wants to see the wild animals. Everybody participates, then November comes around and — guess what? — the day after the election, it all turns out to be shouts, murmurs, innuendo and lies. The circus is in town, man. They put up the big top. You go in, you come out, then you drive home.”
Always vocal about issues (gay marriage in particular) that stir him up, this seemingly teddy bear-like actor has, subtly, from Philadelphia to Captain Phillips, also picked a film career that hits politics head on. “We have to reflect the world we live in,” he says sombrely. “You make alliances in cinema, but there are decisions that come down to you alone, and they are, if you are going to make [the film] or not, and, if you say yes, there is some philosophical statement you are making.”
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So what is your philosophy? “I’m attracted to artistic enterprises that say differences are what make us stronger. What is usually lacking in discourse is understanding. You don’t have to agree with them. You can disagree with them vehemently, but if you don’t respect their right to have that opinion, then it’s just conflict.”
“I’m going to be 60 in July, so I realise you can’t play a 32-year-old. You don’t buy it
Returning to A Hologram for the King, he mentions an app he had on his phone during the shoot in Morocco. An alarm would ring before the muezzin was due to call the city to prayer, and Hanks makes a wailing sound similar to the one emitted by the loudspeakers. I’m not entirely sure of its relevance, but it’s fun. It’s Hanks calling in an approximation of Arabic. Is there anything he can’t do?
Back in 1988, during his Big year, when he played the boy who wakes up in an adult body and has implied sex far earlier than he should, he was asked where he would like to take his up-to- then largely comic acting. “What did I say in 1988?” he asks nervously. “There’s no reason for me to play a psycho killer who butchers people with razor-sharp hubcaps.” That’s what. In Road to Perdition, he was an assassin, but he was sort of nice. How far can Hanks go? “Look, I’m kind of goofy-looking,” he says. “I have a squeaky voice, so can only get away with so many things, but if there is an organic reason for a role ...”
His ideal baddie is Iago. “When I was younger, everybody said, ‘Mr Goody Two-Shoes, why don’t you play a bad guy?’ And I always said, ‘If someone offers me Iago, I get it.’ He’s mad because he got passed over for promotion. I get that. But to play evil Lord Gorp from the planet Zarkon who has come to turn us into food for his people? What do you get from that?”
He is annoyed by scenes in films that feel forced. “Your average scene of people in love,” he says. “People don’t say, ‘I want to have a conversation with you.’ People don’t do that.” I tell him characters in films stand up in arguments far more than people in real life. “And always know exactly what they’re going to say!” He mentions narrative fallacy, and how the “catch-all for motivation” is that somebody has killed somebody’s wife. It’s annoying.
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“But nobody killed Iago’s wife,” he says, back to Othello. “She’s right there. He’s just pissed off because this little f****** prick got his job. But nobody’s ever offered me Iago. Now I’m too old. Iago’s only 28.”
A Hologram for the King isn’t Hanks’s best performance (my top five: Turner & Hooch; the opera bit in Philadelphia; every Toy Story; the quiet moments in Saving Private Ryan; and Captain Phillips’s final minutes), but it is his most vulnerable. He looks old and is ill. While there have been complex characters before (in films such as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Green Mile — “The Nineties!” Hanks jokes), he hasn’t played one so downbeat. Cast Away, for all its isolation, was about a determination to escape what felt inevitable. We can expect more like this new one.
“You carry with you the weight of your years and the experiences of your circumstances,” he says. “I’m happy to get older in these roles. I’m going to be 60 in July, so I realise you can’t try to play a 32-year-old. You don’t buy it. The other stories I’ve told are guys, my age, who look like me, who suddenly find themselves in circumstances that are extraordinary.” The appeal of Alan Clay, he says, is that everything that has happened to him is his own fault.
Hanks is a sharer. He has posted a photo of a grandchild’s foot online and talked openly about his son Chet’s drug use. When he and Wilson went to an Adele gig recently, he giddily snapped like a superfan. Grainy photos are on the internet. He’s a man born in California who carries that sunny glow with him, and everything in his past is up for discussion, but, impressively, it’s his future that interests. You don’t get that feeling with fellow 1980s kid Tom Cruise.
As he leaves, he shows me his iPhone. On Twitter, he puts up lost property he has stumbled upon, hoping to reunite it with its owners. Gloves. Socks. A lost fork in the sea. Have you found anything in London? This was last Tuesday, and the answer was no, not yet. He wants to go out looking. “The best source for that is when the snows melt,” he says, and, fittingly, as if on cue, it starts to snow. It rarely does that in April.
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A Hologram for the King is in cinemas on May 20
