The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Tom Hanks on COVID-19, ‘Greyhound’ and wartime mentality
Since contracting COVID-19 in March, Tom Hanks has been, by most measures, busy. He and his wife, Rita Wilson, flew home after recuperating in Australia, where he had been shooting Baz Luhrmann's Elvis Presley film. He hosted a from-home episode of "Saturday Night Live," an already distant enough memory that it takes a beat for him to remember it. And he saw his new World War II naval drama "Greyhound" steered from theatrical release by Sony Pictures to Apple TV+ — the streaming service's biggest movie yet.
But he's mostly been taking it day by day.
Before the pandemic, "Greyhound" was going to hit theaters in early June, smack in between "Wonder Woman 1984" and "Top Gun 2." "We were going to fight like the scrappy runt of a litter in order to get somebody to pay attention to us," says Hanks, chuckling.
Now, "Greyhound" will head straight into homes as a marquee event with little competition of similar scale or star power. A Tom Hanks-led, special effects-laden WWII movie is a weight class above most straight-to-streaming options in this strange summer movie season. Disney+ has "Hamilton," but Apple TV+ has Hanks.
The film, made for about $40 million and acquired by Apple for a reported $70 million, is a taut 88-minute naval drama about a lesser-seen theater of WWII, the Battle of the Atlantic. Hanks' character is a humble captain for the first time shepherding a convoy of boats across the Atlantic, guarding them from attacking German U-boats while traversing the "black pit" – the middle ocean territory bereft of air support. All heavy waves, faint sonar blips and evasive maneuvers, the film takes on almost mythical qualities.
"When everything went kablooey, we began to imagine: 'Well, we have this movie about the stasis of characters in the middle of something of which they have no idea how long it's going to last,'" says Hanks. "We didn't expect a worldwide pandemic to mirror the theme and the action of the movie."