Tom Hanks says acting was a cure for his childhood loneliness.
The fourth highest-grossing actor in Hollywood revealed he lived in 10 different houses in five different cities by the age of 10 after his parents divorced. In a recent interview with BBC radio, Tom Hanks revealed some personal details about his childhood, life and acting process.
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Hanks revealed that his father was a hard worker and was always interested in finding additional work to support the family: “My dad would get a phone call at 10 o’clock at night from a buddy of his who needs desperately a head chef and my dad would say ‘I’ll be there at 8am’ and we would pack up the car and Dad would start the next day.”
However, Hanks revealed that because his father was always working, he spent his free time watching plays alone at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, California. Hanks revealed that as a kid he struggled to communicate “the vocabulary of loneliness.”
It’s interesting to point out that a large percentage of Tom Hanks’ movies center around loneliness. In fact, the movie CastAway where Hanks played a FedEx employee stranded on a desert island for four years after his plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean epitomizes the entire struggle with surviving and being alone. Tom Hanks credits his acting abilities to making that “lightning bolt” discovery saying, “all the great plays are about loneliness”, he added: “I said, ‘That’s why I’m here – that’s why I went to the theatres by myself’.” Hanks described it as “the wow moment of my life, going from kid trying to find out what is interesting in this life to young man trying to be an artist”.
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But, it would be his first acting job in The Two Gentlemen Of Verona that taught him how to be professional. “It was drilled into me… that you had to show up on time, you had to know what you were going to say, and even if you did not like the people personally that you were working with, you had to respect their process.”
Via Express
