MOVIE NEWS – “I didn’t go as far as I could have gone,” said Tom Hanks, star of A Man Called Otto., adding that he won’t be seeing most of his films. “I wrestle with authenticity,” he added.

Although he basically made his name with comedies, Tom Hanks made a strong career shift in the 90s, which led him to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role two years in a row. Since then, he has been seen in several classics, and the actor still doesn’t think as highly of his career as we might think. He recently spoke about this on The Great Creators with Guy Raz podcast:

“I struggle with authenticity. I struggle with distinguishing between ‘lying’ as an actor in my roles and fooling myself as a human being,” he began, before explaining that he doesn’t even revisit most of his films because “I see lies in them and loss. I feel like, ‘oh shit, I missed this opportunity.’

And it’s not because I decided to at that moment; it’s because I realized I didn’t go deep enough after I was done with it. I didn’t put in as much as I could have. And then I ask myself, ‘Okay, but why?’ Maybe because I was satisfied with what I had delivered? Or was it because there wasn’t more in the script? Or maybe I didn’t have enough ideas? Or maybe because we were running late the day, we were shooting and only shot twice instead of six? These are the questions plaguing me when I’m overwhelmed by self-doubt.”

Hanks has previously stated that he’s been in a total of 4 films that he thinks are pretty good himself, and in the podcast interview, he brought up one of them, Forrest Gump, which he thinks he gave his all to at the time:

“For weeks we’d just put our heads together [with Robert Zemeckis, the film’s director], and Bob would say, ‘Well, what did we get out of this?’ We started at the beginning of the script and talked through everything. Even the scenes that I wasn’t in, because we needed to know what they meant for the script. And I’m not just talking about my own texts, but we had to know all of them, because the text is nothing but an interpretation of the theme, and the theme is what makes you do it. So I always ask myself: ‘Is the subject of the film good enough to be worth the time and energy to make it interesting and engaging for people?'”

Tom Hanks will be back in cinemas next week, on 12 January 2023, in A Man Called Otto.

Source: IndieWire