Q&A Hollywood
Q: Has Tom Hanks ever done any singing roles?
A: Not many.You pretty much have to be filmmaking great Robert Zemeckis, and then to hire composing greats Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, if you want to get Tom Hanks (“Forrest Gump,” 1994) to do a proper singing role.
Famed writer and director Zemeckis (“Back to the Future,” 1985) directed Hanks in “Polar Express” (2004) and again in “Pinocchio” (2022), and those are pretty well the only times Hanks has done musical numbers on screen. And the songs he performed were all written by Silvestri and Ballard.
Cinemablend.com asked Silvestri and Ballard pointblank what the secret is to getting Hanks to sing on screen. Rather than just saying something along the lines of, “You have to be us,” Silvestri talked about the importance of the song to the film.
“If there’s a secret, I think it’s something to do with is this piece of material really deserving to be in this film? And I think you can depend on Mr. Hanks to honor the intent of the film.”
Hanks admits he’s reluctant to sing on screen. But, because he is who he is, he did it in a charmingly selfdeprecating way.
He produced the film adaptation of the classic stage musical “Mamma Mia” (2008) and joked on “The Graham Norton Show” about auditioning for a role. “I wanted to hire myself, but my singing voice would have scared the children.”
You can catch snippets of him singing in some of his other films — he plays a ukulele and sings while stuck on a raft in “Joe Versus the Volcano” (1990), and does a pretty cringy rap on the soundtrack of his big-screen adaptation of “Dragnet” (1987). But the moments are brief, so they don’t amount to a singing role (and what he does in “Dragnet” definitely isn’t singing).
Q: I know she's done a lot since “Community” ended, but how did Alison Brie get her start?
A: Early ‘10s NBC sitcom “Community” never quite made it to hit status — it became an icon of the “bubble-show” phenomenon, a show always on the cusp of being cancelled — but those who liked it loved it, and it launched a lot of careers.
Alison Brie, who played the somewhat mousy Annie, has had one of the best post-“Community” runs. She starred in another critically beloved sitcom, Netflix’s “GLOW,” and embarked on a big-screen career including starring in and producing her own films, such as “Horse Girl” (2020) and “Spin Me Round” (2022).
All this success has nearly eclipsed the fact that, prior to “Community,” she had a regular role on one of the most respected drama series of all time: AMC’s “Mad Men.”
In her only major pre“Community” role, she played Trudy Campbell, wife of central character Pete. She was on the show from its launch in 2007 and continued to appear as a part-time cast member after “Community” debuted in 2009.
As a quietly suffering wife in the show about the hypocrisies and small tragedies of 1960s America, the role might not seem like a natural step towards a sitcom gig, but it certainly offered a preview of the meatier work Brie would do after “Community.”
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