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Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks is an actor, born 1956.

Tom Hanks was a comedian first, which people forget. He broke through as the man in love with a mermaid in Splash in 1984 and then as a twelve-year-old in an adult body in Big in 1988, and for most of that decade he was a fast, light, faintly manic screen presence in things like Turner & Hooch and A League of Their Own. The gear change was abrupt: consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor, first as a lawyer with AIDS suing his firm in Philadelphia, then in the title role of Forrest Gump.

After that he became the most trusted man in American film, and the trust became the material itself. Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away and Captain Phillips all run on one premise, which is that a competent ordinary man is put under pressure until something gives. His best scene in any of them is the last ten minutes of Captain Phillips, where the professional calm finally fails in front of a navy medic, and it is the least movie-star thing he has ever done.

He has made five films with Steven Spielberg and produced the miniseries Band of Brothers, which turned him into a director and producer as well as an actor. Woody in Toy Story is the other spine of the career, a part he has now played across four films and a quarter of a century, and it uses the same instrument as the dramas: decency plus anxiety. Later Hanks has been more willing to be strange, from six roles across six eras in Cloud Atlas to a grotesque, heavily prosthetic Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis. The formal honours are extensive, including the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Movies (109)

TV (27)

Where to start with Tom Hanks

Big is the correct entry point and the one people skip. It is a premise that should curdle within ten minutes and never does, because Hanks plays a child's logic completely straight and never once winks at the audience.

For the famous run, take Forrest Gump and Philadelphia together as the pivot, then Cast Away for the purest demonstration of what he can carry alone. Captain Phillips is the best acting of his later career and the reason to look past its poster. Catch Me If You Can is the most fun he has been in a Spielberg film, playing a dogged federal agent with no sense of humour about himself.

For the odd corners, Road to Perdition casts him against type as a mob enforcer and mostly gets away with it, and Elvis has him doing something genuinely bizarre under a pile of prosthetics. Then Toy Story, which is no lesser entry: Woody is one of the great American screen characters, built out of nothing but voice.

The Hanks films that built the trust

A run in the nineties turned a comic actor into the most reliable presence in American film. Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan are the two everyone names, Philadelphia is the one that changed what he was allowed to play, and Apollo 13 is competence under pressure done perfectly straight.

Hanks alone on screen, carrying the whole film

A specific kind of role he does better than anyone: one man, an impossible situation, and very little dialogue to hide behind. Cast Away is ninety minutes with a volleyball. Sully and Captain Phillips are the same trick applied to real events, and Finch is the late, quiet version of it.

Woody, and the animation that will outlive the rest

Thirty years of one character, and the performance gets sadder and better as the films go on. The first Toy Story is the technical landmark, the third is where the writing catches up with the audience that grew up on it, and The Polar Express is the strange, uncanny outlier worth seeing once.

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Genres Tom Hanks works in

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