Of course, Tom Hanks isn’t the last good man left in Hollywood.
But it sometimes feels that way, given the many seeming good guys who have been revealed to be major (alleged) creeps in the post Harvey Weinstein-fallout.
Since the Weinstein allegations first broke two months ago, it feels like American has been hit with almost daily revelations about how once-respected icons privately harassed or abused subordinates and vulnerable young people, and then used their powerful positions to enforce silence.
But then there is the Concord-born Hanks, long known as one of the nicest people in Hollywood. During an actors roundtable organized by The Hollywood Reporter, Hanks acknowledged that there are people who go into the entrainment industry because they get off on having power.
But the two-time Academy Award winner, who stars in the upcoming film “The Post,” said that most people pursue careers in film and TV for the right reasons.
“Making a movie is a life experience that can create an awful lot of joy,” said Hanks, who has worked on a number of acclaimed films in his career (“Forrest Gump,” “Philadelphia,” “Apollo 13,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Captain Phillips”).
He said, “You can meet the person you fall in love with, you can laugh your heads off, you can make the best friend you’ve ever had, you can work with one of your heroes. That’s the good stuff that can happen on a movie.”
But he said, “The bad stuff can happen on a movie as well.”
Hanks continued, “There can be that type of predatory aspect on a set because you think, ‘Well, we’re in the circus and we’re on the road, so therefore, do the rules really apply? They don’t really apply.’ There’s the other aspect of it is that, ‘Come try to get this job from me. You want me to give you a job? Come on. Come. Come prove to me that you want this job.’”
Besides acting, the one-time student of Oakland’s Skyline High School and Hayward’s Chabot College has also earned numerous Emmy awards for his role as an executive producer for the company Playtone.
In that role, he’s been the boss and presumably the person to set the cultural tone on a film or TV set and to address sexual harassment allegations that come up. From the way Hanks talks, it sounds like he has little patience for the “boys club” and no tolerance for predatory behavior.
He describes such behavior as “a sin,” “against the law” and the kind of “predatory behavior that goes against an assumed code of ethics.”
“We produced a project in which someone said, ‘There’s an element of harassment that’s going on here.’ And as soon as we heard, you’ve got to jump right in. You talk to everyone, the guilds and you find out what happened.”
But Hanks is optimistic about the future. He said it’s never too late for the industry to make some important and necessary changes.
“It’s never too late to change things,” he said. “It’s never too late to learn new behaviors.”
In the Steven Spielberg-directed “The Post,” Hanks plays former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee alongside Meryl Street, Sarah Paulson and Bob Odenkirk. The film follows the real-life story of how The Washington Post challenged the government by publishing the leaked documents of the Pentagon Papers. The film hits theaters on Dec. 22.
