Based on Tom Junod’s must-read article about his life-altering experience of interviewing Mr Rogers, Hanks is more closely aligned with our perception of him as a person here than in any other role he’s played. Mr Rogers is a gentle, benevolent font of kindness, and could perhaps not have been played by anyone else. Fred Rogers is the role Tom Hanks was born to play (in more ways than one – while doing promo for the film, Hanks discovered they were in fact distant cousins. How about that!)
6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The opening sequence gets all the attention – and not without reason, it still being one of the successfully horrific depictions of the unstructured terror of war ever to traumatise a cinema audience – but Hanks’s performance, in some ways the counterpoint to the chaos of war in its assurance, should not be overlooked. He teeters, sometimes visibly and sometimes implicitly, on the verge of emotional collapse. It’s a performance within in performance – a man acting as a man acting like it’s all going to be alright – for the ages.
5. The Post (2017)
Strangely forgotten since its Best Picture nomination in 2017, this is an absolute classic of the Men in Suits Talking Seriously in Open Plan Offices genre (see Spotlight, see Dark Waters, see All the President’s Men). Hanks is casually authoritative as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who steers and strains his way through the paper’s fight to publish a cache of documents that would expose the extent of the Nixon government’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and just how poorly that involvement resembled its description by that very government. AKA, they lied. And good old Tom ain’t gonna let them get away with it.
4. Catch Me if You Can (2002)
