What’s up with Tom Hanks?

CINDY PEARLMAN

NYT SYNDICATE

IT’S a warm fall morning in Beverly Hills, and Tom Hanks is bubbling over. The 56-yearold two-time Oscar winner doesn’t simply walk into a hotel suite, he bounds into it with the boyish energy he displayed a quartercentury ago in Big (1988).

He’s smiling, practically laughing, as he buzzes around the room, fiddling with the air conditioning and finally exuberantly throwing open the French doors onto the patio.

Yes, his new movie, the incredibly ambitious Cloud Atlas, has gotten some great reviews, but there’s got to be more to it than that.

What’s up with Tom Hanks? “The kids are out of the house,’’ says the actor, who is the father of 35-year-old Colin, 30-year-old Elizabeth, 22-year-old Chet and 17-year-old Truman. “I’m telling you, all the kids are gone and it’s the greatest thing that has ever happened to Mr and Mrs Hanks. Of course the greatest thing was having the kids in the first place, but ..
Holy smokes! “When the kids are gone, it’s like you’re dating again.’’ Hanks looks fit in a white shirt, dark slacks and a thin mustache that he’s grown for his role as Walt Disney in the upcoming Saving Mr Banks, a movie about the making of the classic Mary Poppins (1964). He’s here to talk about Cloud Atlas, and Cloud Atlas – set to open nationwide on October 26 – is a movie that takes some talking about.

Based on the best-selling novel by David Mitchell, the film has a huge cast and three directors in Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski. It tells six separate stories, all mixed together to explore the bigger meanings of life and human connections.

Its lead characters include an elderly musician in 1930s Belgium, an investigative reporter trying to bring down a sinister energy company in 1970s California, an elderly book publisher stuck in a retirement home in contemporary London, a genetically engineered woman in 2144 Korea on the way to her doom and a goatherd living in the post-apocalyptic remains of Hawaii. Hanks plays six different characters, including the goatherd.

The movie had to get outside financing because its distributor, Warner Bros, considered it too risky to put up the production money, given that it’s a not-especially commercial theme told in a three-hour movie with a remarkably convoluted story line.

“I think it’s as risky as Inception (2010),’’ Hanks says. “You saw that one the first time and said, ‘How many movies are in this thing?’’’ Hanks embraced the project precisely because it was unusual and risky, however.

“It’s original and creative,’’ he says. “I loved that it wasn’t going to be simple for audiences. Lord, doesn’t that sound beautiful? A film that is original, creative and makes you think. That’s what movies used to be.’’ As for playing six different characters, Hanks says that it was a ball.

“They were all a lot of fun to play,’’ he says. “I especially liked playing an actor in a TV movie. I kept asking, ‘Is it a lousy TV movie? Am I a good TV actor?’’’ He worked primarily with the Wachowskis, who he says were a calming influence amid a potentially chaotic shoot involving six complicated stories, hordes of actors and side-by-side sets with different directors on each one.

“They wouldn’t let us panic or let us be freaked out about any individual choice,” Hanks says. “I loved it that they were honestly happy to see us each day and the vibe was like they were letting us play in their rep company.

“They had faith in us, but steered us to some degree,” he continues. “I remember the moment I was slashing someone’s throat and went too far when it came to vengeance. Lana was on me and said, ‘Tom, it can’t be that.

You can’t be the guy who is seeking retribution.

Otherwise the whole story will be blown.’ “This movie had a message about humanity,” Hanks says. “At that moment I got it. I knew I had to pull back, and did during that scene.

“At the same time,” he adds, “the Wachowskis could have thrown down their headsets and said, ‘No, no, no!’ But they were gentle about it.” Co-star Jim Sturgess, who shared a number of scenes, was impressed by Hanks’ approach to the intricacies of Cloud Atlas.

“Tom pulled all the pages out of the script and organized them in a different way,” Sturgess says in a separate interview, “so that he could focus on all the stories separately, like he was making several short films.” The film offers a bleak vision of the future, but also the promise of reincarnation and the gradual evolution of the human spirit, ideas that resonated for Hanks.

“I’m a historian by nature,” he says.

“I want dates and motivations. I’ve always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is the connection between person-to-person and idea-toidea.

For me this movie actually gives a vocabulary to that idea that I found to be quite profound.

“At one point in the film,” Hanks adds, “we’re told that truth is a singular version of the truth. Holy smokes! That’s the deepest version of anything that I’ve ever heard.” Another scene in Cloud Atlas had particular meaning for him.

“I also like when Susan Sarandon’s character says, ‘Womb to tomb, we’re all connected and your choices are reverberated through eternity,”’ Hanks says. “I finally got it! That line actually supports this embracing of the mysteries of life, but with a common thread.” Hanks was born in California, the son of a chef and a hospital worker.

His parents divorced when he was young, and as a result he moved often during a childhood which he has called “fractured.” Acting filled a void for him, and he started doing community theater before opting for a career in television and film. His big break was the television farce Bosom Buddies (1980-1982), in which he and Peter Scolari played men disguised as women in order to get the only apartment they can afford.

The young actor had made his bigscreen debut in He Knows You’re Alone (1980), but really made his first splash with, well, Splash (1984). The success of that Ron Howard fantasy led to such films as Bachelor Party (1984), Big, A League of Their Own (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Apollo 13 (1995), Saving Private Ryan (1998), You’ve Got Mail, (1998) and Cast Away (2000).

Hanks won back-to-back Oscars for his performances in Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994).

Almost as impressive as his two Oscars, by Hollywood standards, is his 24-year marriage to actress Rita Wilson. The two met when she gueststarred in an episode of Bosom Buddies, but did not become a couple until they co-starred in Volunteers (1985). They married in 1988, and remain together to this day as spouses and as partners in their own production company, Playtone.

“Listen, I knew it from the get-go that she was my soul mate,” Hanks says. “I met Rita Wilson and said, ‘It’s all over.

Something is really different now.’ I knew that I had fallen in love and things would be profoundly different from that moment on.

“You hear about that sort of thing, but I’m here to say that it happens,” he says. “You’ve just got to be lucky enough to stumble across it.” His upcoming slate of films includes Saving Mr Banks, Paul Greenglass’s Captain Phillips and Michel Hazanavicius’ In the Garden of Beasts, as well as Toy Story 4 and The Lost Symbol, his third go-around as symbologist Robert Langdon, the role he played in the hit The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels and Demons (2009). It’s an impressive slate for a man who has starred in only four films in the past five years – especially if you factor in that in March he’ll make his Broadway debut, playing real-life tabloid reporter Mike McAlary in Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy.

“Each movie feels new to me,” Hanks says. “It’s like starting out again. It seems like I’ve taken a few years off from acting, but the truth was that I was doing a lot of producing and writing.” Given his long marriage and the fact that his children are grown – he became a grandfather in 2011 – Hanks rarely arouses the interest of the paparazzi. That doesn’t mean that he’s happy with the current state of tabloid journalism or its current focus on celebrities’ children, which he witnessed firsthand with his Cloud Atlas co-star Halle Berry.