35 years ago, ‘Splash’ landed
And Tom Hanks’ career has gone swimmingly.
Even Tom Hanks had to earn his status as a beloved movie icon. As a fresh-faced 28-year-old TV star, Hanks rode a fluke wave to leading-man movie stardom playing a regular guy in love with a mermaid in “Splash,” which turns 35 this weekend.
Hanks had some luck in his unlikely casting as Allen Bauer alongside Daryl Hannah’s mermaid Madison in the Ron Howard-directed 1984 comedy smash. But Hanks owned the role, showing comic chops and his signature attribute: utter relatability.
“Tom Hanks was the endearing everyman in ‘Splash’ – that’s what he projected,” says film historian Leonard Maltin. “He couldn’t have asked for a better vehicle that let him be funny, romantic and even heroic in a broadly popular mass-audience movie.”
Hanks’ fortune in landing the part after two seasons on the sitcom “Bosom Buddies” was aided by a rival mermaid movie project that was set to star A-lister Warren Beatty.
The story featured Beatty as man charged with building a marina who falls in love with a mermaid whose rock home is endangered by the lucrative project. Beatty’s film was never made, but it still kept established Hollywood leading men away from “Splash.”
“‘Splash’ was the second-string mermaid movie. We were having a miserable time casting, turned down by some of Hollywood’s finest people,” says Lowell Ganz, whose script with Babaloo Mandel would go on to receive an Oscar nomination for original screenplay.
While consulting on TV’s “Happy Days,” the duo were struck watching Hanks shoot a guest role – as a man bent on martial arts vengeance against Henry Winker’s Fonzie in a 1982 episode titled “A Little Case of Revenge.” It’s one of the rare times when Hanks has played a bully.
“Tom came in and blew the doors off the joint. He was tremendously funny,” Mandel says. The two suggested Hanks to Howard’s assistant, and the actor auditioned that afternoon.
Howard recalled in 2016 that he was certain there was “no chance in hell” of getting studio executives to sign off on the unknown Hanks. But the actor aced the audition and got the green light.
For a rookie in the leading role, Hanks’ performance alongside Hannah’s Madison comes off as entirely natural as the mermaid keeps her identity and giant fish tail (which comes out with water) hidden from her true love.
Jillian Bell, who has been cast as the human alongside Channing Tatum’s merman in a “Splash” reboot in development with Disney, says she’s blown away by Hanks’ performance every time she watches it. (She has seen it 20 times now.)
“Tom Hanks is just so effortless. Every line is so him, and he’s so genuinely likable that you root for him,” Bell says. “You really believe it’s a regular guy whose life changes when he falls in love with a mermaid. And that’s incredible to pull off.”
“Splash” would mark the first of five films teaming Hanks with Howard and producer Brian Grazer, including 1995’s “Apollo 13,” and the start of a stellar film career that has earned him two bestactor Oscars (for 1993’s “Philadelphia” and 1994’s “Forrest Gump”).
But one of Hanks’ great hallmarks is that the man known as the mayor of Hollywood has never lost his modesty, on or off the screen. Hanks, by then a big star, was still down-to-earth when Mandel and Ganz worked with him on director Penny Marshall’s 1992 film “A League of Their Own.”
Says Ganz, “Besides being a great actor, Tom Hanks has always been a great spirit.”