TOM’S NEW WAR
After defeating COVID, he hits the high seas
Tom Hanks’ latest movie is set nearly eight decades ago, but he says the struggles the characters experience in it feel as relevant as ever.
The actor, who suffered and recovered from COVID-19 in March, sees similarities between the state of the world in his new Navy drama “Greyhound,” set during World War II, and what people are going through today with coronavirus.
“No one has anything other than a best educated guess of when the world is going to be through with this, when COVID-19 is going to have run its course, and been either tamed or conquered or banished from our lives or from the world,” Hanks said during a virtual press conference Tuesday.
“So what do we have that we can look towards there? All we can really do is our part, the same way … all those guys on the ship, on board Greyhound, all they can do is what’s expected of them and hope for some combination of providence and serendipity to see them through.”
Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, both 63, announced in March that they had COVID-19, making them among the first celebrities to test positive for the virus.
The Oscar winner said Tuesday that they’re both doing well. He also stressed the need for people to follow the necessary protocol in fighting the pandemic.
“There’s really only three things we can do in order to get to tomorrow: wear a mask, social distance, wash our hands,” Hanks said Tuesday. “Those things are so simple, so easy, and if anybody cannot find it themselves to practice those three very basic things, I just think shame on you.”
The actor stars in “Greyhound” as Ernie Krause, a first-time Navy captain in charge of leading a convoy of 37 ships carrying supplies and soldiers across a violent stretch of the Atlantic Ocean occupied by Nazi U-boats during the early 1940s. The film is inspired by the real-life Battle of the Atlantic.
Hanks also wrote “Greyhound,” which is set to premiere on Apple TV+ on July 10. The movie, a longtime passion project for Hanks, is adapted from C. S. Forester’s 1955 book “The Good Shepherd,” which the actor just so happened to come across seven or eight years ago.
In this case, it was a good thing Hanks judged the book by its cover.
“I was attracted to it because it has this original cover on it,” Hanks said. “It was of Ernie Krause, gray-haired, undone, exhausted, uniform flapping in the wind, ship sinking and burning on the horizon as one of his crewmen is tapping out a signal. I thought, ‘That man is exhausted. That man has been through a degree of hell.‘ ”
Hanks quickly saw the potential for Krause as a film character.
“About page three, I realized that this was an entire story told through the mental perspective of its protagonist,” Hanks said. “Ernie Krause is not the captain that you would anticipate being in charge of the safety of all these ships. Not long after that, I had a very, very strong mental image of the DNA of the story and how it could possibly be a screenplay of a movie.”
The action-packed film, which was shot in part on the real Navy destroyer Kidd Naval in Louisiana, follows Hanks’ character at every turn as he attempts to navigate his ships through repeated enemy attacks.
“Tom just has this gift of kind of inviting people in,” director Aaron Schneider said Tuesday. “On top of his skills as an actor, he’s just very easy to identify with and kind of penetrate. In terms of what the movie was about and how the camera was going to explore it, he was sort of the perfect actor for it.”
It’s the latest World War II film for Hanks, whose illustrious list of film credits includes the Steven Spielberg-directed “Saving Private Ryan” (1998).