It has been 30 years since Tom Hanks knew the desperation of being hard-up, unemployed and facing the prospect of losing his home.
Now one of the wealthiest actors and producers in the world, with two Academy Awards and a host of other trophies, he still vividly remembers those days of struggle and hardship.
“There was a period of time in Los Angeles when I wondered if I was just going to lose everything,” he recalls. “My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn’t ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn’t know if I would be able to keep my house.”
He has incorporated those long-ago concerns, combined with experiences from his college days, into Larry Crowne, a romantic comedy-drama which he co-wrote, directed, stars in and produced on a £20 million budget.
Hanks, 54, plays Larry, an amiable and loyal box-company worker who is “downsized”. Out of work, struggling with the financial toll of a divorce, with a large mortgage and few prospects, he enlists as a student at his local community college to begin again. There he reinvents himself and becomes involved with his public-speaking teacher, played by Julia Roberts, who previously appeared with Hanks in 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War. I really like her and have great respect for her and I called her up and asked her if she was interested in playing the part and if she could have faith in me as a director,” Hanks recalled. “Fortunately, she said yes.”
Larry Crowne is a story that had been germinating in Hanks’s mind for many years, and throughout his acting career he continued to make notes and build mental scenes as he reflected upon the emotional toll of unemployment and the idea of what would happen to a man who starts all over again at a point in his life where many would find the concept unthinkable.
“He has to completely reinvent himself not because of some midlife crisis but more like a midlife disaster of epic proportions that completely changes his life, so when he gets fired what does he do?” asked Hanks rhetorically, when we talked in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills.
“Much like I did when I left high school, he enlisted at junior college, where nothing is expected of you except what you put into the day.
“I went to junior college because I had absolutely nothing else to do and nowhere to go. I didn’t have the grades or money to get into a real university or the skills to join the marketplace. It was a big community and people from all over the area were there. There were people twice my age, mothers whose families had grown up and they were going back to continue school, guys who were divorced, and a lot of servicemen who were just back from Vietnam, so it was common for me to walk into a class and be in the exact same educational Zeitgeist as people who were 30, 40 and even 50 years old. So out of my experience in junior college came this character of Larry Crowne.”
In the early drafts of the screenplay there was no question of Larry losing his home, but while Hanks was working on the script with Nia Vardalos, with whom he collaborated as a producer on the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the global recession hit and as people were losing their houses across America it became more feasible that Larry, too, should lose his.
It has been 15 years since Hanks last wrote and directed a movie, the comedy That Thing You Do!, and he believes that in the interim he has become more patient and less anxious.
“When I did That Thing You Do! I was so pent-up with trying to capture the image of it that I probably gave up on some things I shouldn’t have given up on and rushed through some things, but now I am much calmer because at the beginning of the day I say, 'We are going to take our time. I am going to have the patience to get what I truly want today.’ ”
Like Larry Crowne, Hanks, who was born in northern California, rides a motor scooter around Los Angeles, where he has lived for the past 35 years. He has a 33-year-old son, Colin, and a 29-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, from his first marriage to his college sweetheart Samantha Lewes, which ended in 1985, and two sons, Chester, 20, and 15-year-old Truman, by Rita Wilson, whom he met on the set of Volunteers and married in 1988. As well as being an actress – she appears in Larry Crowne – she writes for Harper’s magazine and is an editor at the Huffington Post.
“People say, 'Geez, it must be hard to stay married in showbusiness,’ ” he said. “I think it’s hard to stay married anywhere, but if you marry the right person, it might work out. We give each other a natural sense of support for whatever the other wants to pursue.”
Although his father wanted him to go into the fast-food restaurant business, the young Hanks received encouragement in his acting ambitions from one of his drama teachers, whom he later famously thanked in his 1994 Oscar acceptance speech for Philadelphia.
He went on to study at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Ohio under the guidance of the Irish director Vincent Dowling, and made his professional acting debut with the troupe in 1978 in The Taming of the Shrew.
Two years later he landed the co-starring role in the short-lived cult television comedy Bosom Buddies and then a guest appearance in an episode of Happy Days led to Ron Howard casting him as the male lead in Splash opposite Daryl Hannah.
The 1988 movie Big won him his first Oscar nomination and, after a string of so-so comedies, he won the best actor Oscar for portraying a homosexual lawyer with Aids in Philadelphia.
He won another Oscar the following year for Forrest Gump and followed that with the role of real-life astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13. After trying his hand at writing-directing with That Thing You Do!, which turned out to be a modest success, he returned to acting with Saving Private Ryan and The Road to Perdition. He provided the voice of Woody the toy cowboy in the three Toy Story films and he flexed his producing muscles with two award-winning television mini-series, From the Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers, as well as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and, with his wife, the film version of Mamma Mia!
He has not acted in a movie since appearing with his son Colin in 2008’s The Great Buck Howard, although with his company, Playtone, he executive-produced the Emmy-winning mini-series John Adams and with Steven Spielberg produced another Emmy-award winning mini-series, The Pacific.
He has spent the best part of the past three years working to bring Larry Crowne to the screen.
“Acting is almost like a vacation compared with the workload that a director has,” he said. “Also, the skill sets are totally different because an actor really only has to show people what he’s thinking while a director has to start having meetings eight months before the first day of shooting and continues having meetings nine months after it’s all over and you’re constantly talking, explaining, begging, asking. It’s like an actor is a dog running through a park, while the director is a dog trying to herd 6,000 sheep over Cattleman’s Pass. It’s a lot of work, but if it’s a personal mission like Larry Crowne, it’s not like work.”
Julia Roberts says of her co-star: “He likes people more than anyone I’ve ever met,” and Hanks in turn has a reputation for being one of the nicest and most likeable men in showbusiness, although he does not suffer fools, and sometimes displays a sarcastic edge.
Even he admits: “Not everybody likes me. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find people who don’t.
“In my younger days I probably wanted everybody to like me, but that’s not necessary now. I am who I am.”
Larry Crowne is a story that had been germinating in Hanks’s mind for many years, and throughout his acting career he continued to make notes and build mental scenes as he reflected upon the emotional toll of unemployment and the idea of what would happen to a man who starts all over again at a point in his life where many would find the concept unthinkable.
“He has to completely reinvent himself not because of some midlife crisis but more like a midlife disaster of epic proportions that completely changes his life, so when he gets fired what does he do?” asked Hanks rhetorically, when we talked in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills.
“Much like I did when I left high school, he enlisted at junior college, where nothing is expected of you except what you put into the day.
“I went to junior college because I had absolutely nothing else to do and nowhere to go. I didn’t have the grades or money to get into a real university or the skills to join the marketplace. It was a big community and people from all over the area were there. There were people twice my age, mothers whose families had grown up and they were going back to continue school, guys who were divorced, and a lot of servicemen who were just back from Vietnam, so it was common for me to walk into a class and be in the exact same educational Zeitgeist as people who were 30, 40 and even 50 years old. So out of my experience in junior college came this character of Larry Crowne.”
In the early drafts of the screenplay there was no question of Larry losing his home, but while Hanks was working on the script with Nia Vardalos, with whom he collaborated as a producer on the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the global recession hit and as people were losing their houses across America it became more feasible that Larry, too, should lose his.
It has been 15 years since Hanks last wrote and directed a movie, the comedy That Thing You Do!, and he believes that in the interim he has become more patient and less anxious.
“When I did That Thing You Do! I was so pent-up with trying to capture the image of it that I probably gave up on some things I shouldn’t have given up on and rushed through some things, but now I am much calmer because at the beginning of the day I say, 'We are going to take our time. I am going to have the patience to get what I truly want today.’ ”
Like Larry Crowne, Hanks, who was born in northern California, rides a motor scooter around Los Angeles, where he has lived for the past 35 years. He has a 33-year-old son, Colin, and a 29-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, from his first marriage to his college sweetheart Samantha Lewes, which ended in 1985, and two sons, Chester, 20, and 15-year-old Truman, by Rita Wilson, whom he met on the set of Volunteers and married in 1988. As well as being an actress – she appears in Larry Crowne – she writes for Harper’s magazine and is an editor at the Huffington Post.
“People say, 'Geez, it must be hard to stay married in showbusiness,’ ” he said. “I think it’s hard to stay married anywhere, but if you marry the right person, it might work out. We give each other a natural sense of support for whatever the other wants to pursue.”
Although his father wanted him to go into the fast-food restaurant business, the young Hanks received encouragement in his acting ambitions from one of his drama teachers, whom he later famously thanked in his 1994 Oscar acceptance speech for Philadelphia.
He went on to study at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Ohio under the guidance of the Irish director Vincent Dowling, and made his professional acting debut with the troupe in 1978 in The Taming of the Shrew.
Two years later he landed the co-starring role in the short-lived cult television comedy Bosom Buddies and then a guest appearance in an episode of Happy Days led to Ron Howard casting him as the male lead in Splash opposite Daryl Hannah.
The 1988 movie Big won him his first Oscar nomination and, after a string of so-so comedies, he won the best actor Oscar for portraying a homosexual lawyer with Aids in Philadelphia.
He won another Oscar the following year for Forrest Gump and followed that with the role of real-life astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13. After trying his hand at writing-directing with That Thing You Do!, which turned out to be a modest success, he returned to acting with Saving Private Ryan and The Road to Perdition. He provided the voice of Woody the toy cowboy in the three Toy Story films and he flexed his producing muscles with two award-winning television mini-series, From the Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers, as well as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and, with his wife, the film version of Mamma Mia!
He has not acted in a movie since appearing with his son Colin in 2008’s The Great Buck Howard, although with his company, Playtone, he executive-produced the Emmy-winning mini-series John Adams and with Steven Spielberg produced another Emmy-award winning mini-series, The Pacific.
He has spent the best part of the past three years working to bring Larry Crowne to the screen.
“Acting is almost like a vacation compared with the workload that a director has,” he said. “Also, the skill sets are totally different because an actor really only has to show people what he’s thinking while a director has to start having meetings eight months before the first day of shooting and continues having meetings nine months after it’s all over and you’re constantly talking, explaining, begging, asking. It’s like an actor is a dog running through a park, while the director is a dog trying to herd 6,000 sheep over Cattleman’s Pass. It’s a lot of work, but if it’s a personal mission like Larry Crowne, it’s not like work.”
Julia Roberts says of her co-star: “He likes people more than anyone I’ve ever met,” and Hanks in turn has a reputation for being one of the nicest and most likeable men in showbusiness, although he does not suffer fools, and sometimes displays a sarcastic edge.
Even he admits: “Not everybody likes me. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find people who don’t.
“In my younger days I probably wanted everybody to like me, but that’s not necessary now. I am who I am.”
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