(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sticking rigidly to one specific type of movie is the easiest way for an actor to get pigeonholed and typecast, which has never been an issue for Tom Hanks. For the last four decades, the star has been effortlessly weaving between mediums without losing a shred of his star power of popularity.
Of course, there have been multiple exceptions to the rule throughout Hollywood history, whether it’s the volume of westerns in John Wayne’s filmography dwarfing everything else or Jason Statham spending the last 20-odd years repeatedly making slight variations on the same film, but it’s worked for them.
Hanks, on the other hand, loves to mix it up. Sure, he’s played over a dozen real-life figures to make the biographical drama the dominant force in his back catalogue, but those characters have spanned centuries and included heroic airline pilots, Elvis Presley’s manager, astronauts, Civil War veterans, wholesome television hosts, and newspaper editors.
The first years of his career were spent largely in comedy, but after he spread his wings and cracked the A-list with back-to-back Academy Award-winning performances in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, Hanks has been willing to try his hand at almost anything.
He’s done dystopian sci-fi, globetrotting mystery escapades, animated fare, sports comedies, prison dramas, literary adaptations, espionage thrillers, live-action remakes of Disney classics, and several World War II stories. Still, there’s one subset of cinema that nobody is ever going to see him in, and it’s entirely by design.
For the most part, the biggest names in the business make at least one gun-toting action flick. It’s a rite of passage for anyone with designs on maintaining longevity at the top of the Tinseltown totem pole, and the highest-grossing actors of all time tend to have at least one explosive actioner under their belt. That said, despite boasting a list of credits that have accumulated almost $12billion at the box office, Hanks has never and will never lend his name to, or even watch, a violent action movie.
“We got into another era where it becomes the kind of glamorous take on how gorgeous it can be to fire guns and blow up buildings and stuff like that,” he told The Mail. “And I understand that to a degree, but when I was young, I wanted to see films that somehow reflected my world or the world as I understood it or an authentic take on how complicated we all are.”
“And while there’s always room for a fabulous James Bond movie with a great action sequence in it,” Hanks continued. “There is, without a doubt, another type of film out there that is not interested in it; there is no moralisation that goes on, and I simply don’t choose to see them.”
It’s an ironclad take, so the bad news for anyone hoping that Hanks will be roped into his own version of Liam Neeson’s Taken or Keanu Reeves’ John Wick to join the ranks of older action heroes is that there’s no chance it’ll ever happen.
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