How Marielle Heller persuaded Tom Hanks to portray Fred Rogers.
How director persuaded actor to play Fred Rogers
By the time she was 4 years old, Marielle Heller had already rejected “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” As the eldest of three, she saw her younger siblings watching the PBS show and felt she had grown “too jaded and cynical” for Fred Rogers’ brand of cheery positivity.
It wasn’t until decades later, when she became a parent herself, that the filmmaker gave Rogers another shot. When her son turned 2, the first television program she and her husband allowed him to watch was “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.” The animated kids series, which launched in 2012, is produced by Fred Rogers Productions and espouses many of the same values as the original Rogers show — teaching children how to deal with difficult emotions like anger, disappointment and loss.
“It’s like the parenting hack of all parenting hacks,” Heller said. “It makes you a better parent, I swear to God, because it gives you, like, tips on how to deal with your children. And there’s an episode for everything. When you’re potty training, there’s an episode that we all have sung and quoted a bajillion times that’s, like, ‘When you need to go potty, stop and go right away! Flush and wash and be on your way.’ ”
Heller was steeped in the world of Daniel Tiger when the screenplay for “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” came across her desk a couple of years ago. She’d worked with the writers of the script, Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster,
on Amazon’s “Transparent,” and they’d mentioned they were trying to get a film made about Mister Rogers. At the time, however, the movie already had a director attached, but Heller nonetheless asked: “Why am I not directing that?
“I said something very bold like that because it felt so up my alley, being a mom with a little kid,” Heller recalled with a laugh.
By the time she was offered the directing gig on “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” — which Sony Pictures will release on Nov. 22 — Heller had been anointed one of Hollywood’s top directors to watch. She made her directorial debut in 2015 with the critical darling “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” about a 15-year-old’s sexual awakening. Heller’s followup, last year’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” was even better received. The film, which earned star Melissa McCarthy an Academy Award nomination, told the story of an author who forged letters by famous artists to make ends meet.
And — to the surprise of the producers on the Rogers film — she had also formed a relationship with the actor most coveted for the lead role: Tom Hanks. Coming off a period in which he’d played a handful of iconic real-life figures, including Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Walt Disney, Hanks had already passed on the “Neighborhood” script three times.
Heller had become friendly with the actor after meeting him at a backyard birthday party held by his son, Colin Hanks. During the gathering, Tom Hanks mentioned he’d just read an article in The New York Times about female directors. Heller pointed out she’d been quoted in the piece. Upon learning more about her, Hanks promised to watch “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” He made good on his word and set up a meeting with the filmmaker, telling her, “We gotta find a way to work together.”
For years, Heller said, she and the actor would stay in touch, sending potential projects to each other. So when the team behind the Rogers film expressed how badly they wanted Hanks for their movie, Heller said she’d give it her best shot.
“So I called him and I described how I saw the movie — that I didn’t want it to be a biopic,” she remembered. “It was never going to be a prosthetics thing — it wasn’t going to be about trying to make him look just like (Rogers). It was really a character piece about manhood and what it is to be a good person. And he was like, ‘Oh, OK, lemme go read the script with all of that in mind,’ and signed on like a week later.”
“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is far from a Rogers biopic. In fact, Hanks plays the supporting character in the film, which stars Matthew Rhys as an Esquire journalist tasked with profiling the TV legend. Based on Tom Junod’s 1998 magazine article about Rogers, the movie explores the effect the star had had on the writer, revealing less about himself in interviews than expressing a genuine interest in the journalist himself.
Shortly after the movie was greenlit, Morgan Neville’s hit documentary about Rogers, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” was released in theaters. The movie collected $22.8 million in theaters, making it a huge box office success for a nonfiction film. At first, Heller admitted, “We had a moment where we kind of were, like, ‘Oh, is this a good thing or a bad thing?’ And then we thought, ‘Oh, more Fred Rogers in the world? This is a good thing.”
Before filming began, Heller visited Pittsburgh, where Rogers lived and worked for nearly his entire life. She visited the Fred Rogers Co., meeting with executives who’d worked there for nearly four decades and had been integral to the PBS show. She went to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Rogers’ hometown, where his archives are housed, sifting through the boxes of letters, photographs and emails he’d meticulously stored until his death in 2003.
She also met with Rogers’ widow, 91-year-old Joanne Rogers, who lent her late husband’s ties to the production and frequently visited the set during shooting.
What Hanks said he admired about Heller’s approach to conveying Rogers’ beliefs was that she made it a “slow-cooking recipe” without “fakery or trickery,” allowing the character to express his identity through his actions instead of words.
Rogers “was not introduced as: here’s the most important man there is,” the actor explained. “She captured who he was without trying to explain it. She showed it through his behavior and the behavior of others when they were around him.”