“If the movie is on, I will get up and leave the room before that scene comes on.” Tom Hanks said that about one moment in Cast Away, the 2000 film that earned him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.
The scene is the reunion between his character, FedEx employee Chuck Noland, and his girlfriend Kelly Frears, played by Helen Hunt, after Chuck escapes the island where he was stranded. During it, he hands back the pocket watch she gave him before he was marooned.
Hanks, 69, told The Rest Is Entertainment podcast what bothers him. “All it is is a turnaround on me, but I do this gesture that I just think is false and is me and is not Chuck,” he said. He called the moment “painful.”
Moments he missed
The question came up when he was asked about mistakes in his career. Hanks said he thinks of most of his films as “profound experiences,” whatever they earned at the box office. Still, he said, every film has spots where he feels he did not fully land the emotion.
That is why he seldom sits through one of his movies twice, because “they never change.” As he put it: “There are movies that have moments in it that I cannot watch because I didn’t get there. And sometimes these are the big moments.”
Toy Story 5 press run
Hanks is currently promoting Toy Story 5, in which he returns as Woody. The film, directed by Andrew Stanton, opened in theaters on June 19 and holds a 93% critics’ score and a 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. At the UK premiere last month he told The Hollywood Reporter about a scene that hits hard, when a little girl is upset by what people are texting about her and “doesn’t understand why.”
Cast Away is streaming on AMC+ and Hulu.
