NICEEST GUY
THE MOST-TRUSTED STAR PLAYS BELOVED CHILDREN’S SHOW HOST FRED ROGERS
HE’S been called “America’s Dad” and has topped multiple “most-trusted celeb” polls — beating out such stalwarts as Ellen DeGeneres and Clint Eastwood. The man tweets dad jokes and collects manual typewriters, for heaven’s sake. In other words, when it comes to likability in Hollywood, Tom Hanks seems to have a lock. On screen, in films from Bosom Buddies to Saving Private Ryan, he exudes a decency that’s made him beloved — and earned him two Oscars. “As the years passed, he told us, ‘There’s no crying in baseball,’ ‘Life is like a box of chocolates,’” noted President Barack Obama prior to presenting Tom with a prestigious Kennedy Center Honor in 2014. “He told Houston, ‘We have a problem.’And as a cartoon cowboy, he showed us we can always keep our faith in a little boy.”
CAST TO TYPE
Now, the 63-year-old is about to give viewers niceness overload as A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, about a cynical Esquire writer’s transformational encounter with children’s television host Fred Rogers, opens Nov. 22. Hanks, wed to actress Rita Wilson since 1988, wasn’t a fan of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood as a kid, but an old clip from the PBS series — of Rogers gently conversing with a young wheelchairuser named Jeffrey Erlanger — convinced the dad of four to tackle the role. Watching the two sing the heartfelt ditty “It’sYou I Like,” admitted Hanks, “made me bawl my eyes out.” And when he reflects on Rogers, who died at 74 in 2003, he might as well be talking about himself. “The [only]dark side of Fred is that he wasn’t a saint, that he was just a regular human being,” says the actor, known for such good-guy acts as sending hand-typed replies to fan mail, crashing wedding-photo shoots and returning a Fordham University student’s ID via Twitter. Like one who knows, he says of the niceness of his onscreen alter ego, a onetime Presbyterian clergyman: “It wasn’t an act. He was doing it because it was a good thing to do.”