Tom Hanks Turned 70 Without Ever Once Playing Cool
Tom Hanks turned 70 on July 9, and here is a test worth running: name another actor whose casting settles an argument instead of starting one. You can't. Hanks is the last movie star everybody agrees on, across generations, politics, and whatever the algorithm is doing this week. The strange part is the foundation. Forty-six years on screen, from a 1980 sitcom to two Academy Awards, and he never once played cool.
He arrived as a goofball and stayed one longer than the studios wanted. Bosom Buddies put him in a dress on network television in 1980. Splash paired him with a mermaid in 1984 and proved he could carry a picture. Big earned him his first Best Actor nomination in 1988 for playing a twelve-year-old trapped in a grown man's body, a premise that should curdle on contact and instead produced the most open-hearted performance of the decade. Actors his age were chasing danger. Hanks chased delight.
The turn came fast. A League of Their Own in 1992 let him play washed-up and mean, and audiences leaned in rather than away. Then came the run nobody has matched since: Philadelphia in 1993, Forrest Gump in 1994, back-to-back Best Actor Oscars. Only Spencer Tracy, in 1937 and 1938, had ever done that. One award was for a gay lawyer dying of AIDS at a moment when major stars would not go near the role. The other was for a simple man who out-decents the entire twentieth century. That pairing is the whole career in miniature.
The imperial phase held for a decade. Apollo 13 in 1995. Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Cast Away in 2000, ninety minutes of one man and a volleyball, good for another Best Actor nomination. Running underneath all of it: Woody in Toy Story, a voice he first recorded in 1995 and has carried through all four films, more than thirty years of the same loyal sheriff. The grosses made him one of the highest-grossing leading actors in film history. The parts made him something rarer, the man you want beside you when the ship, the plane, or the war goes wrong.
The late career is where the case for Hanks as an actor, rather than a beloved institution, gets easy. The final minutes of Captain Phillips in 2013, when the shock lands and his voice comes apart in the medic's chair, contain more raw acting than most complete performances. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood in 2019 asked him to play Fred Rogers, possibly the one American trusted more than Hanks himself, and he found the discipline underneath the sweetness. Elvis in 2022 handed him Colonel Tom Parker, a genuine villain at last, and he played the greed as showmanship. Even Catch Me If You Can, back in 2002, cast him as the square in the cheap suit chasing the glamorous kid, and he made the square the one you rooted for.
The consensus held because Hanks solved a problem most actors never attempt: he made decency dramatically interesting. Decency on screen usually reads as inert, a trait you hand the supporting cast. Hanks turned it into suspense. His characters hold the line while everything around them fails, and you watch to find out how much holding one ordinary person can take. Two Oscars, seven Emmys, and four Golden Globes later, the industry has stopped calling that a fluke.
At 70 he is still Woody, still working, still the answer to a question the movie business cannot answer any other way: who do we all still believe? Younger stars burn brighter and split the room. Hanks kept filling it, for forty-six years, by walking in as the least cool man in the picture and walking out as the only one everybody trusted.
