SMALL TALK

TOM HANKS

When you make movies, do you miss doing theatre? What I love about the theatre is when you’ve done it 86 times and you’re on stage and you hear somebody say a line that you’ve heard for months — you go, “He says that there? I never heard that before!”

Your latest movie, The Post, is less than two hours — much shorter than most awards-season movies. I think the best movie is the one that goes by in 45 minutes. Sometimes a three-hour movie will do that. Sometimes a three-hour movie will seem like four-and-a-half hours.

You famously love typewriters. Is the film typewriter porn? I test typed on every single machine in the newsroom. I picked up one of the Royal Desktops and I now have that machine. It will last me a thousand years.

What’s been your best audition? It was for a touring production of Grease. I don’t sing but I went to an audition with a terrible cold. They said, “Come back in two days.” After two days, I still had a cold, so they kept postponing me. On the last audition, I was only halfway through Alone At A Drive-in Movie and they were like, “Thank you!” But I view it like this: I got two callbacks for a Broadway musical!