NOTABLE NEWSMAN,
Hanks stars as editor whose quest for truth transformed ‘The Post’
NEW YORK — For “The Post,” his third outing with Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks served as star, coach and informant.
“I knew how Steven worked, so I had that in my pocket,” said the Spielberg vet of “The Terminal” (2004) and 2015's “Bridge of Spies.”
Each day with the other actors, “We got together to go over some things because I knew that Steven has this great affinity for anything actors bring to the mix, and he does not rehearse.”
“Yeah, he didn't tell
me Spielberg doesn't rehearse,” co-star Meryl Streep said. “That was a shock.”
“Some days,” Hanks, 61, continued, “Steven would say, `I'm not sure how I'm going to shoot this scene.' But other days a lot of the work is done for you and you just have to step into the shot. That's just the man.”
“The Post” has Hanks as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who would transform the paper from being the city's cozy don't-make-waves daily to a national newsmaker synonymous with journalistic independence.
He worked closely with the Post's Kay Graham (Streep), who inherited the family newspaper after her husband's suicide.
In 1971, the Post was ordered by President Richard M. Nixon not to publish the Pentagon Papers, a classified, decades-long study of the Vietnam war that revealed every president knew it was unwinnable yet blatantly lied to the American people.
Bradlee and Graham had, Hanks said, “a true partnership, based on an ocean of respect and empathy. When you combine that, it's a version of love between the two of them.”
Bradlee “knew what his responsibility was: nailing down the truth despite an awful lot of cynicism in politics and media.
“He always knew what was at stake for (Kay), this anxiety-filled human being that had always been just `the daughter' or `the wife' of the forces that ran the paper.
“And when she became the force behind the paper, Ben Bradlee knows she's the only one who can make this decision to publish.
“Her decision could have cost her time in jail, the loss of the licenses for her television stations. It could absolutely ruin her in the face of this absolutely incomprehensible attack on the First Amendment by the president of the United States,” Hanks said.
“What a fulcrum of destiny that was for Katherine Graham.” (“The Post” opens Friday.)