It’s 10.30am and Tom Hanks is feeling jiggy. “I think I’m on my ninth coffee of the day,” he says. “So I’m a little … jiggy.” Jiggy? There’s a brisk, emphatic nod. “Yeah, you know. Jiggy. The way you feel when you’re on your ninth coffee of the day. Jiggy. That’s what I am.”
Which is fine. After all, when you’re Tom Hanks, who’s going to argue? So, he’s feeling jiggy; he’s carrying a delicate silver teaspoon (“I need something to do with my hands”) and sporting the first nervous tufts of an incipient moustache, half-grown for a role in Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Road to Perdition. Such is the prerogative of Hollywood’s favourite son. He leans in, poised and attentive. “OK. It’s a pleasure. Nice to chat with you.”
Or, in other words, to business: more specifically to Cast Away, his latest vehicle in which he reunites with Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis and in which he stars as Chuck Noland, a punctilious delivery man marooned on a subtropical island following a cataclysmic plane crash.
Hovering between arch-professionalism and outright lunacy, one-man-show Hanks threw himself into his role with a zeal not seen since the heyday of Robert de Niro.
First came colossal weight gain. “I was 18kg over. Just horribly fat.” Next three months of filming on the obscure Fijian island of Monuriki, home of little beyond the critically endangered crested iguana. Then nothing.
Nothing but a year to lose his excess heft and more besides; a year eating “miserly” portions and cultivating the unkempt Crusoe beard that left him wandering the awards ceremonies of Los Angeles like a hobo in Armani.
Finally, about 32kg lighter, he and Zemeckis (who spent the hiatus making the thriller What Lies Beneath) returned to Monuriki, only to be interrupted when a blister on Hanks’s knee, untreated in the heat, turned septic. Back to California; straight into hospital.
And then you remember that this is the man who not only gladly submitted to military boot camp for his role in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, but convinced his co-stars to stick with the assault courses when they threatened to mutiny. You can’t help wondering if there’s something telling in his attraction to method gusto and physical discomfort, as if the business of acting wasn’t enough for him without a frisson of cold, painful reality. Amused, if not entirely convinced, he toys with his spoon.
“Well, you do what the job calls for. But, in fact, with the fat and then the beard, it was a great freedom. Because you’re going to look terrible whatever you do. You no longer have a good side. So you get past the self-consciousness and say, “Well, this is what I look like because this is what is called for. You know? It’s like being squeezed through an hourglass. And you come out the other side and see this great opportunity to go and explore.”
And what he chooses to explore is the interesting part. Certainly, Cast Away is a remarkable piece of film-making in its use of something you never hear in movies any more: silence. In place of a voiceover or rousing soundtrack, there’s just the heavy swell of silence, broken after 60 noiseless minutes by Chuck’s conversations with a volleyball, rescued from one of his packages.
Hollywood’s first existential blockbuster?
“Oh yeah,” he says. “And that’s what we were trying to do from the start. But look, if we were to say to the studio, ‘Hey guys, we want to make this kind of ambiguous, Sisyphean drama’, they’re not going to jump up and down and say, ‘Gee Tom! That’s exactly the movie we wanna make too!’ You know? But yeah, we tried to break some rules.”
For his pains, he should – according to rumour – soon be making another of his famously ardent Oscar acceptance speeches. If so, it’ll be his third in a decade (following 1993’s Philadelphia and the aforementioned Gump), another gong in a career built on scale and prestige, on blue-chip movies to which he brings the promise of near-certain box office omnipotence. The man’s bulletproof.
With his benign sarcasm and uncertain facial hair, he could be an accountant from Kentucky or a cab driver from Oregon, in town on
vacation. Only he’s not. He is, by popular estimate, the biggest and brightest of them all.
So what’s it like, knowing an entire industry is waiting for the click of your fingers?
“Well, perspective is the thing. And perspective is very gossamer. Very fragile. I mean, in terms of work, just because someone can get something done, that doesn’t mean it should be done. Sure, I could go into a studio and say, ‘I’d like to make a movie about coal miners’, and someone will produce a story about coal miners, and someone will direct it and we’ll make a movie about coal miners. And no one will care. But if there’s already a great story out there about coal miners, then maybe something could happen. The responsibility is to go into whatever it is full-bore. You can’t have a passing interest. Because once I give them a yes, the trucks start pulling up and it starts costing money.”
alking of which, I say, and he smiles. Because with the clout comes the money, and these days the money comes in $20-million bundles. Does that leave him feeling guilty? “Guilty? No.” Uneasy? “Sometimes. The most accurate representation of how I feel is that I’m incredibly lucky to be working in this structure where people get paid millions to read the news on TV. And, yes, it is insane. And there is nothing I can say beyond acknowledging my immense good fortune, and being aware that I’m blessed, and aware that it isn’t going to last forever. You know? The tricky part is making it stick.”
Making it stick. Despite his protestations, he’s made a fine job of it – and all without venturing too far from his time-honoured, well-honed persona. Cast Away may have its hopelessness and melancholy – unlike his nearest peer Tom Cruise’s actorly forays with Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia, it doesn’t oblige its star to attend orgies or use genital expletives. “Those movies are amazing things,” he shrugs. “But I’m attracted to what I’m attracted to. I’m not interested in doing something edgy with a capital E just so everyone knows, ‘Oh, OK, now he’s showing us he can do edgy.'”
So would he have done Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, thereby requiring him to masturbate, smoke dope and threaten his (male) boss with sexual harassment charges? “Oh, if I’d read it, I’d have done it. God, yeah. It’s like, uh, any movies you wish you’d made? Yeah – that one. That would’ve been nice.” Which, presumably, is why he’s working with the director on Road to Perdition, playing a fictional henchman of Al Capone? “Well, partly. I mean, I’ve known Sam a while.”
Hanks, to his fans, is more than just a face on a magazine cover. He’s one of them: an average Joe, an Everyman, the United States’s fondest self-image made flesh. Nice is how he’s routinely, inescapably described – nice to his co-stars, nice to autograph hunters, even nice to Monuriki, with the World Wildlife Fund thanking him for helping preserve the island’s flora and fauna (including the crested iguana).
And nice he is, genuinely so. Except nice belies his brightness, a presence of mind sufficiently acute to know that no one is quite as nice as Hanks is supposed to be. Which must constitute some serious pressure.
The awe-inspiring likeability has long fuelled earnest talk – though not from him – of an eventual move into politics. The presidency is often mentioned. A reliable contributor to Democratic funds (albeit one who regretted supporting Bill Clinton’s impeachment defence), he bridles slightly when you raise the subject.
“Well, I’m politically aware. I talk about politics all the time and I do so quite animatedly in the privacy of my own … salon. But actors with political views are a dime a dozen. And the only reason this comes up is that the New Yorker once ran a very funny article about me where their whole take was, “Here’s a guy that’s running for president.” And it’s insane. I’m not. Never have been. Never would. But once that gets out, there’s nothing you can do about it. And I’m not apolitical – I’m very specific in my politics. But a lot of the time it’s nobody’s business unless you’re over at my house having dinner.”
Which is exactly the sort of decent, eminently sensible comment you might expect. I tell him the concept of President Hanks probably holds so much water because he’s so obviously not the kind of guy who would ever want the job. Just like he’s not the kind of guy you typically find with Hollywood in the palm of his hand. There are, after all, plenty of nice, smart people working at McDonald’s. Yet, when you study his face for signs of how he made it from college drop-out to all-purpose icon, you come up blank.
OK. Just so we’re clear on this: there is no masterplan. Hanks does the parts he wants, and the parts he wants are the parts that interest him. Simple. In which case, what is it about those parts, besides their niceness and their perennial appeal to Oscar voters? Glance back through his career and the thread you find, running through Forrest Gump and Sleepless In Seattle, through Philadelphia, Toy Story and now – most definitively – through Cast Away, is loneliness. Loneliness and transience. And then it’s hard not to think of Hanks at five, being spirited away by his hotel chef father, Amos, to spend the rest of his childhood moving nomadically around the suburbs of California, with a different set of stepmothers and temporary siblings every six months. He takes another swig of water. Is there any correlation there?
“Sure, the work gives me a chance to re-examine that from the places I’ve been as a human being. But the battles against loneliness that I fought when I was 16 are very different from those I fought when I was 27 and those are very different from the ones I fight at 44.”