Father’s Day with Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks is one of the defining actors of the last half-century. Today, we return to one of our favorite conversations with the beloved performer and writer. We begin by discussing his debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/599504/the-making-of-another-major-motion-picture-masterpiece-by-tom-hanks/ (5:58), his nomadic upbringing across California (13:28), and the Stanley Kubrick film that made him want to be an artist (19:40). Then, we talk about his early work at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (24:00) and moving to Los Angeles for his television debut in Bosom Buddies (28:30), before pivoting to dramatic roles in films like Philadelphia and Forrest Gump (32:44). On the back-half, Hanks describes the transformative, eight-year process of making Cast Away (39:00), receiving an AFI Lifetime Achievement award for his work at age forty-six (41:35), the vital performances that followed (42:40), and his insatiable desire to reflect the human experience (46:23). To close, Hanks reflects on the kinship he found with Yankee hall of famer Joe DiMaggio (59:08), his formative friendships with actor Holland Taylor (52:30) and the late Nora Ephron (54:40), and the Cecil B. DeMille story he hopes to keep telling (55:50). Original air date: July 9, 2023 Subscribe to our new YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. As always, our email: [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:15Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:32Sam Fragoso?

  Today, we return to my conversation with actor Tom Hanks. Tom and I sat down last summer around the release of his debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. The book is a love letter both to movies and the people that make them, a deep dive into the complicated process of creating a film, from scripting to casting to production and beyond. It's a system Hanks is incredibly familiar with and wanted to celebrate after four decades in the industry, with over 80 films and two Oscars to his name. If you're curious to check out his book, it's now available on paperback wherever you do your reading. As you'll hear in our conversation,

• 1:13Sam Fragoso?

  after all these years, Tom's curiosity has not faded away. In fact, if anything, Hanks, who just turned 68 years old, is more interested than ever in telling a range of stories that reflect how we move through this world. So today, we walk through the makings of Tom Hanks, which begins with his nomadic upbringing in California, his early love of Stanley Kubrick films, his defining work in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, the transformative process of making the iconic movie Cast Away, and how the writing of the late Nora Ephron stays with him today. Tom Hanks has done a whole lot of interviews, as you can imagine.

• 1:54Sam Fragoso?

  He's even been on a few different podcasts, but I have to say, if you've ever heard Tom Hanks on a show, I promise you, today's conversation is going to sound a lot different. To his credit, Tom sat down and from moment one was open and vulnerable and gracious and frankly, honest in his assessment of his life and his work. And so I want to thank Tom again for coming on the show and for being such a good sport about it all. And to you listening, whether it's your first time here or you're back for a re-listen, thank you. I hope the summer is treating you well.

• 2:33Sam Fragoso?

  I hope you enjoy this very special conversation with the one and only Tom Hanks.

• 2:54Sam Fragoso?

  Tom Hanks, what a pleasure to have you here. How are you doing?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I'm all right, Sam. It's nice to be chatting with you. We're just kicking off the week-long "Let's Not Work" until after the 4th of July.

• 3:08Sam Fragoso?

  Am I your last work obligation?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  This is not work.

• 3:12Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, good.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  This is what we do all the time, you know, down at the office. All we do is lean in each other's doorway and say, "Hey, I read this goofy thing yesterday. I saw this crazy nutty thing." I said, "What'd you think of that? Do you have any opinions of it?" That's all we do. We don't do any real work at the office. We just compare opinions and then try to decide if it's going to be Pizza Thursday or not.

• 3:35Sam Fragoso?

  You know, it's funny you say that because I have read a funny goofy thing recently, and it is your debut novel, "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture."

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Masterpiece, you got it. Don't forget masterpiece in there.

• 3:49Sam Fragoso?

  Beautiful correction. It's called "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece."

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Key word there.

• 3:56Sam Fragoso?

  And that's what this conversation is going to be, by the way. Just a masterpiece in the making. And I want to start here because as I understand it, you are someone who wakes up every morning with, quote, "stories in my head and questions that I want to ask." So as you woke up each day over these pretty turbulent past few years.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:18Sam Fragoso?

  What were the stories and the questions that you wanted to work through in the novel?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  There is nothing more interesting, and there is no better way to turn a stranger into an acquaintance than asking them how they do what they do for a living and why. Even if people hate their jobs, that's hours of conversation there, man. And when I took on this task, I woke up over the last five or six years trying to figure out what the verbiage, what the more common language is going to be that would somehow communicate this odd way of making a living. So the stories that I wanted to tell, when they were focused on writing the book, are

• 5:07Speaker 01

  not that different from the ones I just wake up with in the generals. How does anybody get by in this cuckoo world when it's just one damn thing after another? No matter what the theology is or whatever the formula is, they so rarely take into account the basic human condition of wanting to have significance and connection and sincerity and presence. And that's what I did, and I will say that's what I do in preparation to Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso.

• 5:35Sam Fragoso?

  You saying the title of the show, it's very strange.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Can I just, do you have those interstitials? Can you just run with this and just say in three, two, one, you're listening to Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. Can you just put that in every now and again?

• 5:53Sam Fragoso?

  We've never done it, but if we were to start doing it, it would be with you. Although I think you have to tag it at the end saying, this is Tom Hanks. So maybe you want to, do you want to do another take of it?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, I can do that. You want to do that?

• 6:06Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, I hate to direct you, but okay.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure, ready?

• 6:09Sam Fragoso?

  And action.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  You're listening to Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. I'm Tom Hanks, and we'll be right back.

• 6:16Sam Fragoso?

  Wow. I'm never gonna have to do a mid-roll interstitial again. You just saved me hours of time to the next year.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 6:27Sam Fragoso?

  You know, the thing that you're hitting on. About there's nothing more interesting than talking to someone about how they do what they do is basically the premise of this show. And so I want to sit with an early passage in the book.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:43Sam Fragoso?

  That explains how films are made. I have your book right here. Do you have a copy near you?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Hold one, hold one second.

• 6:51Sam Fragoso?

  All right.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  No, wait a minute. Here. Wait a minute. Rather than having to go somewhere, how about if I just buy one right now? How about that? That'd be kind of helpful, wouldn't it?

• 7:03Sam Fragoso?

  Does the money go right back to you?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Well, the problem is, is yes, it does, but.

• 7:12Sam Fragoso?

  That's a problem?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  I've spent it. So I've already spent it on the, on the book. So one second, one second. And there you have it.

• 7:22Sam Fragoso?

  Ready? All right.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossamer at others. Slow as molasses on a Wednesday, but with a gun to the head deadline on the Friday. Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by musicians, supervised by executives fresh out of business school to be piloted by wannabes with attention deficiencies. What are the chances that such an aeroplane is going to soar? There you have the making of a movie, at least as I saw it, at the skunk works.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  What that is, is a description of how a civilian, meaning somebody who has never made a movie before, if they were to visit the set, they went on to say, what is going on? And the skunk works, of course, is a reference to a test facilities where a lot of experimental aircrafts were built and crashed.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Killing everybody that was on board and dashing the hopes of everybody had anything to do with the building of it.

• 8:33Sam Fragoso?

  As you were reading that, I was thinking about all the films you've made over the last 40 years and how it's a miracle that any of them turned out as well as they did.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  It is.

• 8:47Sam Fragoso?

  I think all movies are some kind of miracle.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  You know, it starts at the very beginning. I heard long ago that George Lucas said that all movies are binary. They're either double zeros and they do not work, or they're zero one and they work. And that divide begins at the inception of the movie in the brain of whoever first comes up with it. Hey, you know what I think would make a good movie? And then every step of the way, that is always a coin toss between zero zero and zero one. Everything about it, the movie is made so many different times and you start fresh every single day. I've been incredibly fortunate because, you know, I'm look, I'm gonna say,

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I think I'm probably batting, you know, in the high 300s.

• 9:35Sam Fragoso?

  That's a Hall of Famer.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, maybe, excuse me, did I say 300? Excuse me. I'm gonna take that back. I'm gonna walk that back. I think, I think I'm, I'm batting like 295. And if I have a good enough season, maybe I can get, get above 300. It's a huge alliance of collaborations that go into it. And that's why long-term directors always work with the same people because they can finish each other's sentences. They know the type of stuff that they're going to get. As Bob Zemeckis once said to me, when we were sitting on a park bench in Savannah, Georgia, wondering if this story of this goofy guy was going to mean anything. And he just said, we're, we're walking a minefield, Tom. We're walking

• 10:17Speaker 01

  a minefield. We have no idea if we're sowing the seeds of our own destruction. And that sounds pessimistic, but actually it's not. It's actually incredibly pragmatic to understand that all you can do is follow your instincts and not walk away satisfied with what you have. I think a lot of the days ending up making a movie is you sort of want to upchuck behind the stage door because you don't think you really nailed it.

• 10:45Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I promise that we will get into all of that upchucking in a little bit.

• 10:52Sam Fragoso?

  But you know, in both this novel of yours and your latest film, Asteroid City, there's a kind of nesting doll structure at play. And while the book and the movie are certainly different, they both seem bound by this love of storytelling, which I think for you begins like most things at the beginning. You're born in Concord, California, 1956. By the time you're five years old, your parents divorce and become what you've called pioneers of the dissolution laws for the state of California.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Marriage dissolution laws, yeah, yeah. My parents got divorced when one of them had to up and establish residency in Reno, Nevada, which my dad did for six weeks. And one night, he showed up and three out of the four Hanks kids were hustled up to go live in Nevada with a whole new group of very nice folks, as I recall, for the better part of three years after that.

• 11:49Sam Fragoso?

  Well, by the time you're 10 years old, you've lived in 10 houses in five different towns with two sets of families. And it's around then that you begin taking trips to and from a small northern California town called Red Bluff, where you'd visit your mother. Now, was it on that Greyhound bus in the window seat where you discovered this passion for storytelling?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  I discovered the escape of being completely alone for a big chunk of finite time. A bus ride from Oakland to Red Bluff took somewhere between four and five and a half hours. I might have had a couple of comic books. I might have had a pen and a notebook, but mostly what I had was a window seat that looked out on the entire passing human condition. I would look out that window. And saw moments of humanity flash by. We might pass a car that would be loaded with a family and they'd have, you know, pillows and blankets and food all around and we'd

• 13:01Speaker 01

  pass trucks and because the Greyhound bus was up high, we could, I could see into their cabs and I could see burly guys with mustaches or incredibly skinny guys smoking cigarettes. I could see things dangling from their mirrors. We would pass pretty girls in Volkswagen Beetles who would be talking and waving their hands with each other and they couldn't see me. And I would see the countryside roll by and sometimes it would be city corners in places like Vallejo or Sacramento and other times it was just lonely clapboard houses that would be out on a piece of land. And there might be a wading pool in the front yard that was kind of gone to moss. There might be kids' bicycles or boats up on blocks.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  And so I would get all these kind of gestalt moments in which naturally I would envision the longer stories, the backstories and what was coming down the pike for all those people. Where are they going? Where does that guy live? Who lives in that house? How can there's no kids in the pool right now? I did that four times a year between the ages of seven and 17. So I racked up a lot of downtime by myself and I, I didn't look upon it as a chore or it was never boring. It was actually always fascinating.

• 14:17Sam Fragoso?

  With all those stories, you moving outside the window, living in the world as a young pre-teen, in and out of different schools and towns. You said before that you would unleash what you've called some sort of inner charm monster when meeting new classmates. Was that some sort of self-defense mechanism? And if so, why did you feel you needed to employ something like that?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Well, it certainly was a self-defense mechanism, but it was also combined with, I had no fear walking into a new classroom.

• 14:52Sam Fragoso?

  No fear?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  None. I had no problem outside of sizing it up pretty quick. Essentially, once I said something out loud that somebody reacted to, then I, it was Katie barred the door. I was fine. And I was funny. I was outgoing. I was loud. I never wanted to skip school because there was action there. And I think I developed some sort of chops. I remember Jay Leno used to have this thing. He said, I was always a comic. I wanted to be a comic, you know? And it's like, I'd be funny in school. And the teacher would say, well, Mr. Leno, if you are so funny, perhaps you'd like to get up and entertain the class. And so Jay Leno said, yeah, so, you know, I was in fifth grade, so I got up, I did a solid 10 minutes, you know? So that's kind of like the way

• 15:38Speaker 01

  I looked at it. There was action at school.

• 15:41Sam Fragoso?

  Did you have any material that you would do in front of classmates?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  I would take stuff that, I would take stuff, funny voices, take stuff that my brother would do in the quiet of our own home and take it to school. I remember at one point I did, I, he, we were briefly going to the same class and he heard me say something that made everybody laugh that he had said the night before.

• 16:02Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  And he said, hey, that was my joke. But he didn't have the courage to do it in front of everybody. And, and I did, you know? Look, I just wanted to have a good time myself. I just wanted to experience joy. And if that meant spreading it as well, then I'm your man.

• 16:16Sam Fragoso?

  I heard that you would even take your brother Larry's tape recorder and record different sort of bits on there for him to find later.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I'd do stuff, I'd do stuff. I'd It's coming. The tidal wave is coming. We recommend that you all get to high land as quickly as possible. People, it's coming. The tidal wave is Yeah, I would do that, you know? Just, part of it was just to hear my own voice, but also to write the material, you know?

• 16:45Sam Fragoso?

  They gave you a SAG card right then and there. I'm, I'm certain of it.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Oh, they should have. I should have been doing voiceovers even back then with my squeaky voice. And also was, you know, a Craig reel to reel tape recorder. This was a miracle. Who had tape recorders in their house? You had to be a rich kid. I don't know where my brother even got this. For all I know, he shoplifted it from some cheap electronics store.

• 17:06Sam Fragoso?

  You know, we're trying to pinpoint the beginning of your love of storytelling. But I want to try to identify the beginning of your desire to be an artist, which I think happens at around 13 years old. You're lying in bed, trying to fall asleep the night before you go to see 2001 A Space Odyssey in the theater.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  That was it. I viewed it all as a very romantic quest, the idea of sailing across space in spacesuits and helmets. I was not enthralled in the adventure of it as much as I was, sort of like in the beauty of it. And I had actually seen this book prior to seeing the movie itself. It's called The Making of 2001 A Space Odyssey, which I couldn't understand because I hadn't seen the movie yet, but it had photographs in it of the making of the movie. And knowing that I was going to see it. Now, I understand in 19, I'm going to say this was 67, I guess, 67, 68?

• 18:03Sam Fragoso?

  The movie came out in 68.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is in the fall of 1968. We went down to the Cinerama domes. It was a big deal and had lobby displays and what have you. And it was the first time I was in a theater where I noticed that the sound system was the most advanced I had ever heard. It wasn't just coming from the screen. It was coming from all around us. And there was actually an overture. So I walked into the theater and it still lit up, but Leggett's Overture is playing. And when it began, I was used to movies as they had always been. John Wayne movies and Kirk Douglas movies and movies that you saw on Charlton Heston, you know? Movies had dialogue and they had bad guys and protagonists. You never really, there was very, very little irony or mystery.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Everything was spelled out for you. And here this movie unspooled, and there isn't a word of spoken dialogue until about 27 minutes into it, when a lady says, here's your level, sir. And prior to that, we saw the entire history of humankind played out via Stanley Kubrick's vision. Now that was, I'm 13. And I see finally and understand that cinema is this combination of light and image and performance and procedure and behavior. And I was able to figure out that what we were looking at was man learning how to use a tool in order to beat his way into getting what he wants.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  And then from that comes the greatest time cut in the history of cinema in which a bone is thrown up in the air. And when it comes down, you're 30,000 years into the future and man has conquered space and is flying to the moon like it's relatively routine. And I can't say that I understood any of that movie when I saw it, but I knew that it was great and I knew that it had blown the back of my head off as far as consciousness wise, but I reveled in every small, tiny detail of it, so much so that I went back the next week by myself in order to see it again. And I've been looking at it ever since because there is a story about as big as you're ever

• 20:17Speaker 01

  going to get that it that that is that is still nothing more than odd dialogue. I mean, there's no narrator that says, and it was at that moment that moon watcher realized. There's nothing like that in there. The only, the only supers are, you know, beyond the infinite. That's it. There's, there's nothing in there that makes it easy for you to comprehend what's going on outside.

• 20:42Sam Fragoso?

  After you saw the movie, you said once, I started asking this question, how do I find the vocabulary for what's rattling around inside my head?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that the thing about being an actor is you're speaking with somebody else's vocabulary, but it goes through the sieve of your own consciousness. I gravitated to acting because I could get up in front of people like it was nothing at all. Other people can't do that, you know, I realized that was a difference. And the vocabulary of communicating ideas by way of the first, of course, the words of a playwright. Well, it's one thing to learn the dialogue, but it's something totally different to understand what the heck you're saying at the same time, what it is that you're trying to communicate. In some ways, all you need to do is trust the language. But something

• 21:34Speaker 01

  else happens that I learned about seven years later when I was 20 and found myself doing Shakespeare. Dan Sullivan, who at the time was directing us at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, got mad at all of the professional actors in the room because they were hung over from a party the night before. And he said, "Look, you guys have to show up on time and you have to know the text and you have to have an idea." I understood showing up on time because we'd get yelled at if we were not up on time. That's true. I didn't have a lot of lines to learn because I was pretty much carrying a spear and only had really one scene as an actor. But nonetheless, you had to know that. But the thing that he said about "and have an idea," that was new. I thought, "We're told what to do, we're

• 22:19Speaker 01

  told when to move, we're told what..." No, no, no. He was actually saying, "You have to come in with something grander than is what is just written down on the page." And I didn't even know how to do that for another 15 years or so. But I understood that that was the difference between doing it professionally and doing it for the Parks Department. You had to do, you had to do something more than just read the play and learn the lines. You had to study some aspects of human need and human behavior and the particulars. I'm going to tell you right now, I played Fabian in Twelfth Night, and Fabian, I believe, is the worst role ever written in Shakespeare. And he is in one scene in which he and somebody

• 23:02Speaker 01

  else sits in a tree and laughs as Malvolio reads a fake letter. And Fabian has this line, the worst line in Shakespeare is this line, "Souter will cry out on it, though it be as rank as a fox." Sam Fragoso, do you have any idea what that means? Souter will cry out on it, there would be a rank as a fox.

• 23:22Sam Fragoso?

  Sam Fragoso doesn't.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  I'm not sure what it means either, but I was instructed to say it as though it was the funniest retort you could possibly imagine saying, and we had to laugh our asses off after we... The story that you have to come up with, the idea that you have to have in your pocket has to be able to make sense out of saying a line that bad.

• 23:43Sam Fragoso?

  So, that's you at 20 years old. I want to understand about the ideas and questions rattling inside your head, looking for a vocabulary. A vocabulary of what?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  It was the vocabulary of...

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Of playing it by ear, if that makes sense. I think I...

• 24:04Sam Fragoso?

  Not loneliness?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Well, I filled up loneliness by being that guy who happily walked into the room. I did. I mean, I... But there's a combination between being, "Why are you lonely? Are you lonely because no one has paid attention to you?" I can't say that was the case. I think I was... My loneliness came about because of confusion, because no one ever really explained to me where we were going or why. Outside of a couple of teachers and the parents of friends of mine, I'm not sure anybody ever put a shoulder or a hand on my shoulder and said, "You know what? This has nothing to do with you, and you're gonna be okay, and all you have to do is trust your instincts." I just figured out that I had to trust my instincts. I knew people that would rationalize away any possible move or anything that, "Well,

• 24:50Speaker 01

  I can't do that because I have a job," or "I can't take this gig because of that." I was a bit of a blank canvas when it came down to people coming up to me, particularly at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, in which people were telling me, based on their observation of me. They said, okay, if you want to be an actor, here's what you need to do. I never addressed the first part of their advice, which is, do I want to be an actor? Is it even possible to be an actor? Who's an actor in this world? Well, they were. And they were telling me, you are too. And so here's what you need to do. You need to go to New York City. Going to New York City is only things that Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds did in motion

• 25:35Speaker 01

  pictures. I didn't go to New York City. I was from Oakland, for goodness sake. Maybe I'll get drafted or something like that. But so the vocabulary I was looking forward to was, I think, the vocabulary of options beyond the ones that were immediately around me. Realizing that, oh, I can do that. The vocabulary of saying, well, let's see what's going to happen.

• 25:56Sam Fragoso?

  Well, here's a little bit of what happened. I'm going to do a bridge run through here for us.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Of my fascinating life?

• 26:04Sam Fragoso?

  You bet.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Bring it on. I'd love to hear it.

• 26:07Sam Fragoso?

  So you do move to New York City after a formative run at the Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland. Then you do two seasons of Bosom Buddies in Los Angeles, where you're kind of doing a riff on Tony Curtis from Some Like It Hot.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

• 26:24Sam Fragoso?

  You then get a big break in Ron Howard's Splash, followed by a string of films that I'm not going to pass any judgment on whatsoever. By the time 1988, 1989 rolls around, you said once that, "I had experienced enough bitter compromise that I had overcome. There was stuff that should have destroyed me." What should have or could have destroyed you that didn't?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Any one of those jobs coming to an end, quite frankly. How I blundered into being put on a TV show with Peter Scolari, I have no idea, but I bow down in humble submission to divine providence.

• 27:05Sam Fragoso?

  Or dear Holland Taylor.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  And Holland Taylor. I mean, Holland is still one of my dearest friends on the planet Earth. Yeah. We lost Peter last October, unfortunately, my bosom buddy. And then when it's done. You have to put it all behind you and never ever look back on that as being the be all and end all. You have to only look at it as the vehicle that got you to this morning. There were money issues that I had. By that time, I had a family. I had, when Bosom Buddies was over, I had two kids, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that I was going to be able to keep my house. I had a sense of responsibility that was really always about,

• 27:49Speaker 01

  what do I have to do and be, and what do I have to create in order to get the next job? And an awful lot of that comes down to two things you have to do. You have to wait, and you have to be ready. And a lot of people can't wait, and a lot of people can't be ready. Somehow, I was able to do both those things. But you know, look, this all happened for me ridiculously fast, and there was all sorts of serendipity that went into it, not the least of which, other people not taking jobs. I mean, Ron, when he directed

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Splash, he was just getting started as a director. He was Opie Cunningham. He'd been on Mayberry and Happy Days, and he wanted to be a director, and who in the world was going to trust him? And so that meant everybody who was really an A-lister at the time would have, wouldn't give him the time of day. And he had a movie to make, and so I came along, and I had waited, and I was ready. The bitter compromise then comes around to that same challenge of, am I creating art? Am I being authentic? Are my ideas good enough in order to propel this along and make it unique? And all the rest of the world catches up. Your life, believe it or not, San Fragoso is one damn thing after another. And you don't know if you're stepping down into a bear trap that's going to, you know, clamp

• 29:15Speaker 01

  down on your leg and give you blood poisoning, or if you're skipping through a field, you know, to over where your car is parked and you get to go home.

• 29:25Sam Fragoso?

  Well, through bear traps and maybe not so great films.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Let me tell you something about being in not so great films. I'm a 295 hitter without a doubt. That means, you know, struck out a lot, a lot of pop flies, a lot of ground outs. But you never stop, you never, you, every day you learn something. And granted, sometimes what you're learning is what not to do. But you also experience those moments in which, holy cow, that happened without my even having to think about it. How was it that that came down the pipe? And all you do, you try and try and try and you work and you work and you work. And if you're smart, you don't let your own personality get in the way too much. And if you're lucky enough, you have somebody that comes around and says to you, why don't you knock it off? And why don't you concentrate on the work at hand if you consider yourself a professional? It's like you gotta have, you gotta have those people in your lives, too.

• 30:16Sam Fragoso?

  You know, when you were mentioning, you were referencing the, am I making art? Am I being the artist that I want to be? I get the sense that that really came into focus for you. After you're nominated for big in 89, then you make a league of their own. And after that, you have this conversation with your agent, Richard Lovett, in the early 90s, where you say what?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  I said, I don't want to play, I don't, now, I'm going to use a word here that has two different connotations. And I'm doing the non-anatomical version of it. I said, I don't want to play pussies anymore. And by that, I meant, there was a whole school of economic motors of types of movies about the goofy guy, you know, who's trying to fall in love and he has adventures. And I, I, that was coin of the realm and an awful lot of development in motion pictures. Light comedies, sometimes they were good movies, but more often not, they were, you know, they were just kind of like grade B, kind of like passes. Almost a type of formula that I always thought there was enough stuff in there in order to make it worthwhile doing. But I also just said, look, I'm an actor and they're asking me to be in a movie.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And I believe my job as an actor in movies is to make movies. And so I, I threw myself into stuff again and again because, hey, I can show up on time. Hey, I'll know what the text is and hey, I got some ideas for these moments. But the truth is, what did we say at the beginning of this fabulous talk? We said, movies are binary. They're either double zeros or they're zero and one. You can't change it after the fact. You just, you, you just really can't. So number one, I got older. Secondly, I ended up having more kids. I met Rita on a movie and we've been married for over 35 years now. But in order to be Joe DiMaggio, you had to start having a different type

• 32:05Speaker 01

  of demands of yourself. You had to stay out on the field a little bit longer and work a little bit harder and also say a word that is very, very, very hard to say. Sometimes you had to say no. Saying yes to something is easy. You'll make a lot of money. You'll get to work with somebody great. You get to go shoot somewhere and they'll pay you and you'll be done and it'll come out and be fun. It's very hard sometimes to say no in that this is not going to scratch the itch that I am feeling and in order to maybe to stay on point. This isn't going to teach me any new vocabulary. I wanted to be a different type of actor and I also wanted to be a different type of artist that would start bringing

• 32:49Speaker 01

  even more to that binary formula, double zero, zero, one.

• 32:56Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Tom, you want to take it?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  You're listening to Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. I'm Tom Hanks and we'll be right back.

• 33:12Sam Fragoso?

  Around this time every year, I noticed my travel becomes a bit scattered. One weekend for work, another to see family, and then a wedding. Sometimes it's a live show, especially the last couple summers. I've been on the road to tape conversations with people like Julie Louis-Dreyfus, Sam Rockwell, and Patricia Clarkson. And whenever I leave town, I just have my place be vacant. But lately, I started thinking differently about all of this. In my absence, why not let my home work for me? That's why I've considered listing my space on Airbnb. It's a simple way to earn some extra money while someone else enjoys their time in Los Angeles. What I like about it is really just the practicality. You're not changing your plans or taking on a second job. You're simply making use of a space

• 33:55Sam Fragoso?

  that would otherwise remain vacant. And then whatever you make can go towards something else, a vacation, a restful weekend when you're Return, whatever you'd like. During the summer, especially when so many people are on the move and traveling, there's even more opportunity to make the most of the time when you're away. If you've ever thought about hosting, now could be a good time to start. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host. When you're starting a new business, nobody really warns you about the amount of hats that you're gonna have to wear to start it. You might begin with the project you actually care about, the idea, the creative work, but sure enough, after a while, you're also thinking about marketing, customer service,

• 34:39Sam Fragoso?

  analytics, operations, all the responsibilities that come with building something that lasts. I've spent the last decade making Talk Easy, and while the interviews are what people hear, the part I personally enjoy the most, there's a lot of infrastructure under the show that keeps it all going. That's why I understand the value of a partner like Shopify. Shopify is the e-commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US. From household names like ALO and Heinz to brands that are just getting started. What I appreciate is that Shopify helps simplify the parts of running a business that can become overwhelming and taxing. You can build a beautiful online store with hundreds of ready-to-use templates using

• 35:23Sam Fragoso?

  their built-in tools to help write product descriptions and page headlines, while creating email and social campaigns that actually help customers find you. Then, as your business grows, Shopify helps you manage everything from inventory to payments to analytics, all in one place. And if you get stuck, Shopify offers award-winning 24/7 customer support. When you're trying to build something for the long haul, having that kind of expertise, that kind of help, really does make all the difference. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing... Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com/talkeasy. Go to Shopify.com/talkeasy. That's Shopify.com/talkeasy.

• 36:13Sam Fragoso?

  I think a lot of us are gonna spend the next few weeks looking for gifts online. And while I like finding something thoughtful for the people in my life, the process can get a little ridiculous. You've got a dozen tabs open, you're comparing prices, and you're trying to remember which store had that one thing you saw that has a deal, and you flagged it, and you saved it, and now you can't find it. Anyway, that's what I like about Shop. Shop brings all kinds of stores together in one place, so you can search for what you're looking for across different brands while discovering new ones along the way, plus tracking all your orders without jumping in between websites. And just in time for the holidays, they're celebrating the AllNewShop.com with a pretty extraordinary giveaway.

• 36:54Sam Fragoso?

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• 37:30Sam Fragoso?

  MUBI is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world and to you. Everything at MUBI is handpicked, with an emphasis on visionary filmmakers and movies worth discovering. One new movie is called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, from writer-director Jane Seanbrin, who made the film I Saw the TV Glow. The film stars Hanna Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. It follows a young director tasked with resurrecting Camp Miasma, a once-beloved slasher franchise that, after years of sequels, has fallen out of favor. Looking for inspiration, she visits the reclusive actress who starred in the original film. But what begins at an attempt to revive the franchise soon pulls the two women into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.

• 38:14Sam Fragoso?

  It's a world-expanding, genre-bending movie for one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com/talkeasy. That's MUBI, M-U-B-I dot com slash talkeasy, for a whole month of great cinema for free.

• 38:45Sam Fragoso?

  In that decade that follows, you do say yes to a handful of projects. And by my estimation, it's one of the best decades an actor's had in the history of motion pictures. From Philadelphia to Catch Me If You Can. No, I think it's true. I think it's true.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:03Sam Fragoso?

  And I want to know, at this point in your life, which film best captures your spirit as an artist and a storyteller? That makes you go, this is why I do the work I do.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I will tell you, if I had to, and by the way, this is a pressure, I would never do this on my own, but I will do it for the sake of our talk, Sam. It was Cast Away. Cast Away completely came out of our own shop. And it was an incredibly deep throw from the get-go. Because I read a story about FedEx. And I did not know this when I read this story, but I didn't realize that jumbo jets filled with nothing but letters and packages traveled from the United States to Australia every day, across the vast Pacific. And the first thing I thought was, what happens if one of those planes goes down? And from that came the story of FedEx. I was talking with Bill Broyles.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  He was one of the original co-writers of Apollo 13. We were talking about actually another project. And he said, so what else are you talking about? And I said, well, I had this idea about a FedEx guy and he crashes. And I only have kind of like the first act in my head. But the narrative would be hanging around on him staying alive with fire, water, shelter, and food. And then whatever else is necessary. And from that brief conversation, that was about eight years before the movie came out. So eight years of working on it constantly. And it also was a great trifecta because... I had the first act, Bill had the second act, and we did not have a third act until Bob Zemeckis came into the picture. And he said, well, you know what you guys are missing here?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  And from that came not only the movie as it played itself out, but also the way we made the movie. To answer your questions, I would say that was a handmade house that I designed myself, allied myself with a handful of other people. And out of that came the, not just the zeitgeist of the human condition that I wanted to examine, but also the deep throw of the type of movie and the movie making experience that I wanted to have. Well, we just said, no one had ever made a movie like that before, not without pirates showing up.

• 41:19Sam Fragoso?

  It's fascinating because this decade we're talking about, after Cast Away, you are celebrated in 2002, winning an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award at the age of 46. You're the youngest person to win this award. And I wondered, what did it feel like to be given a Lifetime Achievement Award when you're only halfway through your life? Like, they don't tend to give out two Lifetime Achievement Awards.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I sort of said, are you guys sure? I mean, I've had a pretty good run here, but I took it exactly as it was offered, that I think I had enough of a body of work that if I had gotten hit by a bus the day afterwards, would stand up on its own. I took it as a very, very wonderful night to get together with a bunch of people that I'd known for many, many years. We had a wonderful party right after that, that you could only get in if you had a personal relationship with me. And I took it in that brand of spirit. Hey, I've done enough good work in order to warrant a pretty good clip package. And at the end of the day, that's, that's nothing to sneeze at.

• 42:28Sam Fragoso?

  Almost in spite of that benediction.

• 42:32Sam Fragoso?

  You've spent the last 20 years writing, producing, performing, playing not the everyman, but instead, I think, the best of man. Folks like Sully, the pilot who landed the plane on the Hudson River, Ben Bradley, the fearless editor of the Washington Post, Mr. Rogers, I'm not going to do an inch on him.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:54Sam Fragoso?

  As an armchair historian, as you've called yourself, do you return to these figures because they fortify in you the belief that truth and decency matter? Do you return to them because they refuse to have their hearts calcified?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Truth and decency does matter. Not to everybody, but it certainly does. But the roles that you're describing right there, and also throw in Richard Phillips from Captain Phillips. They were all very good at what they did for a living. To get back to that, what do you do for a living? And what do you like about it? How do you end up in there? But they also faced a type of pressure that would snap the spine of lesser people. Not just the landing of the plane and Sully saving all those lives, but then also everything that went along with that after the National Transportation Safety Board was ready, was ready and wanting to find something other than a mechanical problem. He was fighting

• 43:53Speaker 01

  for his life and his career, like certainly as Captain Richard Phillips did. What was offered by way of playing Fred Rogers was, Fred Rogers seemed to be fighting a battle against everybody else in the world, particularly in the commercial television business that wants to make money off of selling toys to kids. All of those are some version of people who wake up in the morning and because of their chosen professions and because of

• 44:25Speaker 01

  The mode by which, that's sort of like the ethical codes by which they live. They do have to fight in some ways, the never-ending battle for truth, justice in the American way, and that's a noble undertaking. To me, it's what the great stories have always been about. I don't think it's a far cry from Hamlet to all of those people, or any of the other great heroes of ongoing literature. Every Jean Valjean has some version of a Javert that is, you know, chasing them down. And Javert's really good, and sometimes Javert represents the morals of everybody else in the world, you know? But I'm fascinated by people who stick to their guns, that are actually viewing some version of, "I can't live any other way unless I do it like this, and so I have to do it

• 45:09Speaker 01

  like this," and in that, it's uncompromising. And I think that there's a bit of a default setting of cynicism that goes around there in an awful lot of it. It says, "Well, come on, stop being such a goody-two-chews." And I don't view it that way. I actually view it, "Well, what would you do in this circumstance?" That's what I always ask myself when I see movies. "What would you do?" And I think that's the honorable question that those roles, and I think those movies, ask.

• 45:33Sam Fragoso?

  In the spirit of sticking to your guns, I have to ask you something, because as you're saying this, it's hard to square away the hope you have, that I can hear in your voice, with the state of this country, where we have pockets of people throughout who've made it their life mission to restrict bodily autonomy post-Dobbs, to strip rights away from LGBTQ plus community, to dispose of history that they render inconvenient or self-incriminating. You've made work in some form or another about all of these subjects through the years.

• 46:15Sam Fragoso?

  And so I wonder, as we sit here, has your faith in this nation and the people in it, has it been shaken these past few years? Have you been shaken?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Not so much shaking. Here's something that will, can, may, always happen. You can have your heart filled with any type of stereotypical prejudice. You can be a bigot. You can hater off a lot of people. You can feel as though a victim from people who have taken advantage of you. You could feel stabbed in the back. You can feel as though you're on the losing end of every proposition that comes down. You could do it because of any number of reasons and any number of people. Now, cynicism, that's part and parcel to the cultural exchange that goes on. And it seems to be very, very loud at times. And we are always in a massive flux.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  There has never been a, you know, I spoke at a graduation not too long ago. And it's the, the, every graduating class has graduated into the most tumultuous times in the history of the world. There's always so much that has to be done. But here's what is, seems to has happened over the long course of things. It's gotten done. I think eventually tyrants fall. Sometimes they fall because of laughter. Sometimes they fall because of gravity. And I think at the end of the day, we do have a process that is in place here in which the vast majority of people that I know and have come across, give other people a fair shake at the end of the day.

• 47:49Sam Fragoso?

  At 66, you know, soon to be 67.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:54Sam Fragoso?

  Do you still feel the need and desire to be a reflection of us? The good and the bad?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. Because I go back to what I learned at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in 1977. I was backstage and I had to make an entrance right after Hamlet gave his advice to the players. And every night I heard Shakespeare, by way of Hamlet, say, "Hold the mirror up to nature." And that's my job. Human nature is what we reflect back to everybody. And it's some version of that same question. What would you do, given the same circumstances? I feel as though, sometimes you play a bad guy, but in that playing of the bad guy, you do hold a mirror up to nature because there are some people that are doing things for the wrong reasons that can be construed as being good. There's a lot, look, there's

• 48:47Speaker 01

  an awful lot of stuff I don't bother with. All sorts of stories and movies that I, that hold no interest to me because I don't necessarily buy the standard antagonist protagonist dynamic of an awful lot of stuff that's out there. But there is plenty of other stuff where, hey, people have different motivations and they have to be examined and they have to meet their natural ends or natural conclusions. So I remain, I must say, a type of artist slash actor that I think that is job number one when it comes down to doing, any story that I tell, any story that I'm involved with, is that life is one damn thing after another and it's, sometimes it's very, very hard to say, no, it's very hard to do the

• 49:28Speaker 01

  right thing. But there is some inner ticking clock inside all of us that they think more often than 70% of us will turn to a true north.

• 49:38Sam Fragoso?

  You know, you've said my name, I think, 17 times in this conversation.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  I think it's been 18, Sam Fragoso.

• 49:49Sam Fragoso?

  Well, in that reflection of us, Tom Hanks, you've made it look so goddamn easy, almost like you're Joe DiMaggio.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Sam Fragoso?

  Out there in center field.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  I met Joe DiMaggio. We were in a restaurant called Coco Pazzo. Rita's mom was alive. We were having dinner with her and some friends. I think our, one of our kids might have been there in a high chair as a matter of fact.

• 50:15Sam Fragoso?

  Are you asking me to confirm? You're looking at me like I should.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  No, no, you don't. And, and the maître d' came over and he said, "Excuse me, Mr. Hanks, uh, Joe DiMaggio was in the dining with us tonight and he wondered if you might come by so he could introduce himself." And I was out of my chair before I said that I, "Joe DiMaggio." So I went and, dude, Sam Fragoso, 19, I have, I met Joe DiMaggio. And he couldn't have been, he was very elegantly dressed. He said, "Tom, I always wanted to meet another Bay Area boy." Because he knew I'm from Oakland and he was from San Francisco. And we started talking a little bit and it said, "Oh, what a pleasure." I sat down very briefly with him. And at the conclusion of it, I said, "You know, Mr. DiMaggio." He said, "Oh, call me Joe."

• 50:59Speaker 01

  So you know, at one point, someone, I read, there actually has been written about me, some, some review that got a good review, and someone says, Hanks is like Joe DiMaggio out there and makes it look easy. And I said, there has never been a greater compliment that I've received than saying that like Joe DiMaggio in centerfield, I made my job look easier. And he said to me, ah, yeah, it looks easy. But then he held his hand over his heart. And he said, but it never was in here. And I understood exactly what he was saying. He was that guy, like I said, Joe DiMaggio, he did the work, he did the wind sprints, he showed up, he waited, and then he was ready. And in his own way, of

• 51:44Speaker 01

  course, that was an extraordinary moment, and also a bit of a challenge, isn't it? That he was not ready to rest on any kind of laurels. He would just said, dude, I worked my friggin ass off in order to make it look easy. And this, this I understand.

• 52:02Sam Fragoso?

  You feel that?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Oh, oh my, yeah. Now, here's the thing. I love it. Look, I still come home at the end of the day wondering, man, I wonder if we really got that or not. But I feel as though I've done all the work I can. Now, that being said, if they come back and say, hey, we'd like to reshoot what we did yesterday, I said, great, because I'm like another shot at it.

• 52:24Sam Fragoso?

  You know, yesterday, I had a call with our dear friend, Holland Taylor.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, Holland. Oh my.

• 52:34Sam Fragoso?

  From one dust mote to another.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Ah, dust mote 38, yeah.

• 52:38Sam Fragoso?

  And I asked, what is your shared connection? And she wrote just the greatest thing to me this morning over text. She said, Tom and I, we both celebrate the infinitely tiny place we hold in the universe. And our moteness, our status as specks, makes our marching gaily forth in the vast void, sort of majestic.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  She's saying, "The work we do is noble because we care so deeply. We don't want to just do it right. A lot of people can do this right, but there was inside that, this unquenchable, unstoppable, and actually, I think in a lot of ways, unaccomplishable desire to capture something in every line, in every moment, in a bottle, that no one else could ever have created or captured. It's an elusive task. And sometimes it happens by accident, sometimes it happens by magic, sometimes it doesn't happen at all. But what matters is the desire and the try."

• 53:49Sam Fragoso?

  You know, speaking of, you know, fuck, sorry, can I ask, at your age, after all you've done, you still want to do it right, don't you?

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Well, it's like, no matter how old your kids are, I want a long drive with them to be a fascinating time spent talking to one another, you know? Yeah, I just want it to, I do, I still want it to be magical and discoverable. And look, I will tell you that I worked with people who have remained at the top of their game. And I'll just say, because they passed away, and I always think I'm going to be able to go to New York and have dinner with Mike Nichols and Nora Ephron. They were all possessed by their desire in order to keep doing it, not just well, but keep doing it magically, to keep capturing something that no one else could, that only they saw.

• 54:39Sam Fragoso?

  She, of course, is in the acknowledgements of your book.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  I wouldn't be a writer if it wasn't for Nora Ephron. Nora Ephron told me that the work I was doing in preparation for Sleepless in Seattle, in which I was fighting and cranky and having suggestions and wanting, and always asking, "Is this enough? Is this enough? I don't get it. I don't get it." She put in something that had come out in our rehearsal process, she and her sister Delia. And when it was done, she said, "You wrote that?" And I said, "I didn't write that. I was just complaining during rehearsal, and you put it in." She says, Well, that's what writing is, isn't it? And so that was, and from then, I always would send her something and say, is this writing? And she would always come back and says, it is writing, but you ain't done writing it. So get back to work.

• 55:27Sam Fragoso?

  My last question, Mr. Tom Hanks, we're talking about specks of dust, the passing of time. What was that story that you like to tell about Cecil B. DeMille, about checking the gate?

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. When you use film, when you shoot on film, not digitally, you're literally talking about a physical process of when celluloid goes through, through the camera, and it has to go through, and it goes through the lens, and where it passes in front of the lens and actually captures the image as a photograph, it goes through the gate of the projector. And because it's film, because it's celluloid, it's made out of petroleum products, it's possible that part of the film can break off and get stuck in the gate. So you would shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot. And when you were finally think you were done with the scene, and this has happened on any number of kinds, they will say, check the gate. And the camera operator takes it apart, pulls the gate out, looks at it.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  There oftentimes is a splinter from the film that is in there, and so they don't know if the image is going to be a pure one. There could be a big hash mark in there, it could be a scratch. They say, no, no, sorry. They would call it a jam in the gate. No, there's dust in the gate, they will say, and they got to put the gate back in. And you have to redo all of that magazine, about 10 minutes worth of film, in order to recapture what you did somewhere. On the other side, if you've worked your, if you've worked like crazy, if you've made it look easy, and you are done, you have to say, okay, great, print that, check the gate. And the set is sort of on tenterhooks as the first camera operator, the focus puller,

• 57:10Speaker 01

  pulls the gate out of the camera and looks at it, holds it, has to hold it up to the light, and lots of time will have a flashlight, and go around the periphery. And when he says, all right, the gate is good, that means you're done, and you get to move on. And maybe you're done for the day, maybe you're done for the week, maybe you're done for the entire film, but nothing is finished until someone says, the gate is good. You're a lucky person if you can say, okay, I think we're done, check the gate, pause, pause, pause, pause, wait.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  The gate is good? Okay, then you're finished and you get to go. You don't want to have dust in the gate.

• 57:47Sam Fragoso?

  Well, we have looked back on a whole lot of good work, a life lived, movies that you made look easy when I know it was not. And I just want to thank you for leaning into that vocabulary of loneliness all those years ago, for making meaning through all these performances of yours, which in turn, I think, has given us a vocabulary and language to better understand ourselves. And I know there is no gate in audio, but I've checked it anyway.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  And?

• 58:27Sam Fragoso?

  The gate is good.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  The gate is good. You've been listening to Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. I'm Tom Hanks. Join us again soon for another episode of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. Hey, I enjoyed that. Thank you, my friend.

• 58:43Sam Fragoso?

  Tom Hanks, it's been an honor.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  It's been my pleasure. Thanks so much. I enjoyed talking to you, I truly did.

• 59:38Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:00:19Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:01:00Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:01:33Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening. If you want to go the extra mile, sharing the program on social media, writing a review on those platforms, all of it is really still the best way for new listeners to find the show. I want to give a very special thanks this week to Holland Taylor, Jodie Lee Leipes, Heather Fain, Aaron Hartman, Kristy Osler, and of course, our guest today, Tom Hanks. His debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, is available wherever you do your reading. If you'd like to learn more about Tom and his work, or check out our edited transcript of this episode, be sure to

• 1:02:18Sam Fragoso?

  visit talkeasypod.com. For more conversations with other great actors, check out our talks with Michael Shannon, Michelle Williams, Oscar Isaac, Matthew McConaughey, Laura Dern, Edward Norton, Tessa Thompson, and of course, Holland Taylor. To hear those and more podcasts, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy, or our vinyl record with writer Fran Lebowitz, you can do so at talkeasypod.com/shop. As always, Talk Easy is produced by Caroline

• 1:03:03Sam Fragoso?

  Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Our research and production assistant is Paulina Suarez. Today's talk was edited by Clarice Guevara and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editor is CJ Mitchell. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Shadoi. Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gabrizak, Ian Jones, and Ethan Sinica. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to a very special episode of Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with a new talk. Until then, stay safe and solid.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

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