Tom Hanks on his new role as a legendary journalist
Actor plays editor of paper that took on Washington in 1971
LOS ANGELES
In 1971, the American political landscape was on fire. In March, the Weather Underground set off a bomb in the U.S. Capitol. In April, half a million people marched on Washington to protest against the Vietnam War. In June, the Nixon administration battled with the New York Times and the Washington Post over the publication of the classified Pentagon Papers, which revealed years of deception at the highest levels of the government regarding the conduct of the war.
At the time, Tom Hanks wasn’t particularly aware of all this. He was a 14-year-old kid from Oakland, California, finishing up his run at Bret Harte Junior High, and he had things other than politics on his mind.
“I didn’t pay that much attention to what was going on,” Hanks recalled on a recent afternoon in Santa Monica. “I paid attention to things that 14-year-olds pay attention to: the Oakland Raiders and the California Golden Seals hockey team, and girls and stuff.”
Today, the American political landscape is again on fire. One of Hollywood’s most universally beloved stars, Hanks is now 61, though he still has a boyish, excitable quality — amplified by the double caffeine hit of a Diet Coke and a latte. This time, he is very much engaged with what’s going on.
In Steven Spielberg’s new period drama, The Post, coming soon to Victoria, Hanks stars as the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who, along with the paper’s pioneering publisher, Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), stepped in to publish the Pentagon Papers after the Nixon administration sued the New York Times to halt publication.
With critics lauding Hanks’s performance as the brash, charismatic Bradlee — portrayed by Jason Robards in an Oscar-winning turn in 1976’s All the President’s Men — The Post has placed the actor not only in this year’s awards-season chat, but in the thick of the political debate.
A history buff, Hanks marvels at the echoes between then and now as the Trump administration engages daily in its own battle with the mainstream news media. “All this time passes and nothing really changed,” Hanks said. “It was the same sort of language and almost the same subject then as what’s happening now — minus Twitter feeds and cable news.”
If anything, Hanks sees the situation today as even more fraught, the stakes even higher. “The Nixon administration waged almost a quaint assault on the First Amendment,” he said.
“The facts were understood then — it was the opinion you had of them that was up for grabs. The thing that’s happening now is almost a Bizarro Superman war on reason.”
As The Post was shooting last summer, Hanks found the historical resonances uncanny.
“There was one day where something had happened with the Russia investigation — it might have been [former U.S. national security adviser Michael] Flynn getting fired — and we were watching it on one of the period TVs in Ben Bradlee’s office,” he remembered. “Here we are, in these Nixon-era clothes, watching on a Nixon-era TV, and we all looked up, like: ‘What year is this? Is this a Rod Serling [Twilight Zone] episode where we have a magic TV that can see into the future?’ ”
Hanks met Bradlee, who died in 2014, and his wife, Sally Quinn, socially on a number of occasions through a mutual friend, the late writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron.
“He was a big personality,” Hanks said. “Everybody had an anecdote about Ben.” Diving into the research, Hanks keyed in on one quote from Bradlee that seemed to sum up his hard-nosed, yet idealistic, journalistic ethos: “You have to be cynical without being a cynic.”
The Post marks Hanks’s fifth time being directed by Spielberg, following Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal and Bridge of Spies. But the director says Hanks has never taken on a role quite like this one, in part because Bradlee himself was a unique figure.
“There was a kind of sexiness about Ben Bradlee in the way he led the newsroom and the way he tenaciously would fight for a story — even fight his own publisher or anybody who pushed back on him,” Spielberg said.
“There were big dimensions, big colours, that I don’t believe Tom has ever played before. There was a kind of machismo about Bradlee that Tom hasn’t brought to many other characters in his storied career.”
Spielberg and Hanks — whose working relationship goes back to the 1986 comedy The Money Pit, which Spielberg produced — have established a deep creative link. “We have a similar philosophy of less is more,” Spielberg said, explaining that he will often trim lines of dialogue to get more quickly to the essence of a scene, only to find that Hanks has independently marked the same lines with a red pen in his script.
But Hanks had never before worked with Streep, which neither can quite explain.
“Everyone asks why I had never worked with Tom before — it is something that I had always hoped would happen,” Streep said.
Then she added, half-jokingly: “But, as he is 61 and I am 68, in Hollywood that means I would only ever have been appropriately cast as his mother or his grandmother.”