Tom Hanks on coronavirus, survivor: "I had body aches, fatigue and couldn't concentrate."

Welcome to the future, Hadley!” Tom Hanks says on my computer screen as he glances quickly to the right to check my name. “Can you remember the last time you felt comfortable hanging out with other people?” he asks.

I tell him that was probably the last time I saw him, which was when we were at the Oscars in February, where he picked up his fifth Oscar nomination, for his performance as beloved American children's TV host Fred Rogers in the movie A Beautiful Day. on the neighborhood.

“Remember those carefree Oscar days? It was like, what is this place in Italy under the mountain that exploded? " Pompeii? “Here we are in Pompeii! Great day! A little smoke on the horizon, but other than that…” he says and ends with a laugh.

It's because of that present-day Vesuvius — the coronavirus — that Hanks and I are talking on screens and he's promoting a movie that will stream on Apple TV+ instead of being released in theaters. Greyhound tells the story of Captain Ernie Krause (Hanks, natch) on his first wartime mission in the Battle of the Atlantic. It is, I tell him, a classic Hanks role, by which I mean he plays a completely good man in extraordinary circumstances. But Hanks takes my comment more literally.

“Look, I've played a lot of captains,” he says. “Captain Jim Lovell [on Apollo 13]; Captain Richard Phillips [in Captain Phillips]; Captain Sully Sullenberger [on Sully]; Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan. But I try to bring to any of these roles, and Ernie Krause specifically, the question that anyone might ask, including you, Hadley: 'What would I do if I were in his shoes?' Afterwards, it ends up being something more tangible than a museum piece of what it was like to be on this ship in the North Atlantic. He's right, and it's hard to think of many – or even none – actors who are as good at instantly empathizing with an audience as Hanks. That's why so many of his films are so comforting to watch: Big, Sleepless in Seattle, and A League of Own Own are among my most cherished comfort watches (although the movies he won Oscars for, Forrest Gump and Philadelphia, they are not, and would probably be canceled if they were released today). It's also why he's often described as an everyman, because he makes his characters so relatable, not because he himself – a Hollywood megastar who collects typewriters – is relatable, though that distinction is often blurred.

Not only does Hanks star in Greyhound, he also produced and wrote the screenplay, adapting it from CS Forester's novel The Good Shepherd. “My ego is running rampant, Hadley, and it's all over the place!” he whistles. Hanks has written movies before – the 1996 for '60s bands That Thing You Do! And Larry Crowne's from 2011. But Greyhound has been a special labor of love for him that he's sweated over for nearly a decade, and it's one of those war movies that really must be seen on the big screen. So the change of plans was, he says, “an absolute heartbreak. I don't mean to piss off my Apple overlords, but there is a difference in picture and sound quality. ”

Apple TV+ is having an equally negative impact on how Hanks looks in this interview. Even though he was in his office, "Apple's cruel whipmasters" decided that the backdrop needed to be a blank wall, presumably nosy journalists like myself wouldn't spend the meeting snooping through Hanks' bookshelves. Against the eerily empty backdrop, he looks, Hanks rightly says, like he's in "a witness protection program. But here I am, bowing to the needs of the Apple TV. ”

Hanks is used to bowing to the altered landscape. In March, while filming in Australia, he and his wife, Rita Wilson, became, he says, "the celebrity canaries in the coal mine of all things Covid-19." They were among the oldest and certainly most famous people in the west to be diagnosed with the virus on March 10th, and were hospitalized for three days. I ask if they suffered any effects after the illness.

“Oh no, we're fine. Our discomfort from the virus was pretty much over in two weeks and we had very different reactions, and that was weird. My wife lost her sense of taste and smell, had severe nausea, fever much higher than me. I had body aches, I was very tired all the time, and I couldn't concentrate on anything for more than 12 minutes. That last part is like my natural state anyway,” he says, with another laugh, like this is my dad telling me there are no more monsters under the bed.

I interviewed Wilson shortly after she and Hanks returned to the US. She still looked pretty shaken up, and we discussed how she talked to her children about the illness (she and Hanks have two children, Chet and Truman; Hanks also has two older children from a previous marriage, Colin and Elizabeth). Was Hanks scared? He makes a mocking face before I even finish the question.

When we were in the hospital, I said, 'I'm 63, I have type 2 diabetes, a stent in my heart – am I a red flag case?' But as long as our temperatures didn't rise and our lungs didn't fill up with something that looked like pneumonia, they weren't worried. I'm not the one waking up in the morning wondering if I'm going to see the end of the day or not. I'm pretty calm about it.

On the day that Hanks and I spoke, infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci is warning that unless current US outbreaks are contained, the rate of coronavirus infections could reach 100,000 a day. Hanks is regularly called "America's Father" and is so revered that his face will likely be carved into Mount Rushmore, so I ask him how he thinks his country has responded to the virus.

"Oh dear! I have nothing but question marks about the official position as well as individual choice. There are really only three things everyone needs to do: wear a mask, social distance, wash your hands. I know socially it was politicized, but I don't get it, man. I don't understand how anyone can put their foot down and say, 'I don't have to do my part.' ”

It doesn't help when the person in charge says that, I suggest.

“Well, I must say, I grew up looking to our leaders for calm, informed guidance and I don't think we got it,” he says, eyebrows raised.

I've interviewed Hanks a few times, and talking to him is always a delightful experience. This won't come as a huge surprise to anyone, given his reputation for cursed goodness, though I've seen him prickly and there are enough stories out there to suggest he's more human than his plaster image. “I am capable of salty language,” he admits. I ask if he can tell me one unpleasant thing he did last year.

“Well, you know, um, you know…” he says, seemingly confused. “I don't carry a lot of anger. But instead of just being kind, I think I'm kind. Can we say this?

It's true that since I last interviewed him, his demeanor has changed a bit from the good Jimmy Stewart "shucks" - the stuff he was going through, to something more like the beatific goodness of Fred Rogers - "part of people like you. they say I was born to play, ”he says. “On a beautiful day in the neighborhood, I ended up reading a lot of [Rogers] and he put ideas into words for me. There's no reason not to greet the world with some kind of kindness. ”

If, in the late '80s, you asked who the big star of the '90s was, your answer would probably be Eddie Murphy or Tom Cruise - but it was Hanks. I tend to think of it as the REM of the acting world: enjoyable in the '80s, unexpectedly mega in the '90s. But unlike REM, it's only gotten better – and bigger – in the 21st century. I ask him how he made this shift from being the preferred subject of chaotic comedy to becoming an almost father figure.

"Don't ask me, it wasn't planned!" he says and then describes how it was planned a bit. “There was a point after A League of Own Own where I felt like I wasn't going to play a certain type of young person anymore. I was older and had experienced some degrees of bitter compromise in areas that aren't public,” he says, shaking his finger at me. “So I started looking for different things. But I was surprised when I received these offers. When I said to Ron Howard, 'Wow, I'd really like to do a movie about Apollo 13,' I thought he'd say, 'OK, but you must be one of the guys with the headset in the big room at NASA. You don't have the moxie [to be the star]. But I have a job where I pretend to be other people, and it works 51% of the time. ”

At this year's Governors' Ball – the Academy Oscar party – the A-brokers were, as usual, hurriedly ushered into a special section behind a velvet rope, so they could relax without disturbing the peasants. But while Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and others lingered in the VIP section, Hanks spent all night — behind the rope, yes — but standing against it, so journalists and members of the public could line up to chat with him. Part of me saw this as another example of Hanks' goodness, but a more cynical part of me wondered if he just needed some validation after not winning an Oscar for playing Rogers. Why didn't he spend the night relaxing with his wife?

“Let me tell you, it's impossible to relax in a room full of about 1,500 people. Look, a night like this is about surviving and you're looking for a way to have a good time. If I really wanted to relax and have a glass of champagne, I would be sitting in my car behind the Kodak theater,” he says.

In an interview last year, Hanks said he realized early on that he could "seduce a room." Is what he did at the Governors Ball and all that kindness of his doing just that?

“You know, I don't even think about it. It's really a self-defense mechanism when I feel uncomfortable or insecure. Since I was a kid, I've been aware [that I have an ability], in a way that my brothers and sisters didn't, to walk into a room and make everyone believe that I was incredibly comfortable being there. And that, along with attention deficit disorder, turned out to be the perfect combination for becoming an actor,” he says.

Hanks was born in California. When he was four years old, his parents divorced. He and two of his brothers lived with their father, a cook, while their youngest brother lived with their mother. Hanks moved more than 10 times before age 10, but acting classes at school provided some much-needed stability, and by his early 20s he was acting in small films, before making his Splash debut in 1984.

It seems silly to claim that a man who has had five Oscar nominations and two wins is underrated, but sometimes it seems that Hanks the persona overshadows Hanks the actor in the public's imagination. But really, Hanks is a character actor who can turn into a superstar. He spots every nuance, and unlike, say, Harrison Ford, you often forget you're watching someone whose face you've known for four decades and instead believe he's the character you're playing. Just think of him in that extraordinary last Captain Phillips scene: it's hard to believe you're watching the same actor who bullies Meg Ryan into falling in love with him in You've Got Mail, or performs clowning around a construction site in The Money Pit. Hanks' much-touted kindness must be less a factor in his appeal than as a brilliant, stone-cold actor. But we live in a world where the brand matters at least as much, if not more, than the actual product, and Hanks, that seducer of rooms, probably understood this before most.

I ask how the block went for him and he goes back into reassuring parent mode. “I have all the benefits of my station, I can see the kids and some friends. I'm not experiencing anything other than the big question of, what's going to happen? You are a member of the fourth sector – what is the future of our industry? " he asks.

I tell him I stopped making predictions after Hillary Clinton lost. Suddenly, Hanks looks despondent. “Yeah, remember those carefree days?” he says, but his heart isn't in the joke anymore.

To cheer him up, I ask if he has any words of wisdom for others who are struggling right now. “Wisdom from a guy like me? I wouldn't give that up on a bet. Because I'm the answer on Jeopardy, do I have any lore somewhere? he asks.

Come on Tom, I say, I know you can do this.

He shifts a small amount on the seat and – I swear to God – I watch him turn it on. “It's funny how those things mix with the art you hope to create. When we put Castaway together, we knew there was a card missing from that deck of 52, and the dismay over what was missing from that movie drove us crazy. It was that kind of elusive beat, and it was what we're talking about now: how do you keep going? At Greyhound, Krause has a little card that says, "Yesterday, Today, and Forever." It's all we have as human beings and it's all we have in the midst of the 19 different crises we're facing right now, between Covid-19, the worldwide economic disaster, what happened to George Floyd - the big hit that we're all going through. What do we have that we can have faith in? Well, we can have an understanding of yesterday, we can have a plan for today, and we can have hope forever, and that's it. That's my wisdom. It's not much, Hadley, but is there anything else?

We are both quiet for a moment.

Damn it Tom, I say, and he laughs.

Is he for real? This matters? Someone gave this man his third Oscar.