Tom Hanks is, in many ways, an unconventional leading man. He's a quieter sort of hero – less of the impassioned shouting, the muscled straining, the savage charm of his Hollywood counterparts, more of a gentle word at the right moment. A hand on the shoulder. A knowing smile. In a career that's now approaching half a century in length, he seems to have done it all while also retaining a hard-to-define, perhaps even mystical sense of what he does best, his thing.
Whatever it is, it's great, and it's graced the leading roles of some of the most-cherished films in cinematic history. It's a tough ask to whittle it down to just ten, but someone had to do it. That someone was us, and so here's our highest-ranking handful of Hanks humdingers.
10. Sully (2016) A series of complimentary ingredients combined nicely here to make a very solid American Pie. (Not like that, very different film). All-American hero Clint Eastwood directs a film about all-American hero Captain Chelsey Sullenberger, a pilot who managed to emergency-land his plane in the Hudson River in the middle of New York in circumstances that seemed at many points much more likely to end in tragedy. Hanks does his well-honed responsible and competent man thing, and Eastwood manages to land the plane (sorry) on a story that's pretty incredible in its own right. There's enough tension that you will actually find yourself getting a little hot under the collar when the big moment arrives, despite knowing how it ends.
9. Captain Phillips (2013) It’s Paul Greengrass instead of Clint Eastwood, and a boat instead of a plane, but from a distance Captain Phillips and Sully bear a pretty close resemblance. Hanks is again a man of wearily-capable virtue, presented with a disaster his character must resolve in order to prevent death, destruction etc. In this case the situation is that merchant mariner Phillips’s boat has been set upon by Somali pirates. Greengrass being the excellent director that he is, we get a perfectly calibrated claustrophobia here that elevates the film a few notches above where it could otherwise have been, in what’s ultimately a well-judged and impressively sensitive piece of action fun.
8. Cast Away (2000) Zemeckis x Hanks crossover no. 2 wasn’t as good as a certain other film that appears a little higher on this list, but it remains an iconic member of the Hanks filmography nonetheless. A FedEx employee is left stranded on a desert island after his plane crashes and he appears to be the only survivor. He tries to escape on a raft, he befriends a Wilson volleyball, he extracts his own tooth with an ice skate. It’s not a great time for him. But it’s a strangely compelling sort of will-they-won’t-they, where the “they” in question is a bedraggled man and the abstract concept of being rescued from a desert island.
7. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) 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 a 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) DiCaprio might be the star here, but Hanks is the perfect foil to his exuberant confidence man in this fantastically fun effort from Spielberg about a conman and the FBI agent (Hanks) who becomes obsessed with pursuing him. The reluctant camaraderie that develops between Hanks and DiCaprio’s characters is the real core of this film, and while that sentiment might come more easily to DiCaprio’s happy-go-lucky Frank Abegnale Jr, Hanks’s battle with it is what really pulls you in. A timeless watch.
3. Toy Story 3 (2010) Honestly, if it weren’t for a vague sense that doing so just wouldn’t really be in the spirit of this article, a certain GQ writer would’ve been very tempted to include Toy Stories 1-3 on this list. (Not four. We must never speak of four.) All of them deserve it in one way or another, but three gets the nod because of the range of emotional registers it weaves together, which dovetail beautifully in that fiery scene towards the end of the film. Woody’s such a singular and enigmatic figure, we often don’t associate him with the man who plays him – but he’s the heart and soul of the series, and that’s got a lot to do with Tom Hanks.
2. Sleepless in Seattle (1993) Hanks was an excellent romantic lead for a stretch in the 1990s and early 2000s. His turn here as a forlorn widower whose son puts him up for romantic adoption via a submission to a matchmaking radio show is wonderful to watch. The finer of Nora Ephron’s Hanks-Ryan romcoms perhaps doesn’t have the whip-smart zip of When Harry Met Sally, but it’s a different kind of film – gentler, more sensitive, more warming of the soul. A big cosy hug of a film.
1. Forrest Gump (1994) It’s not cool to like Forrest Gump. Recent retrospective appraisals suggest it might not even be politically correct to like Forrest Gump. But we’d defy anyone to watch it with an open mind and not have it fill up their heart. Forrest Gump miraculously and masterfully exempts itself from the traps it might threaten to fall into by following a character who does the same. Gump’s obliviousness designates him as somehow extra-societal, a character stripped back to his primal components, wanting only to love and be loved, to do good, to help others and perhaps have others help him. Hanks wears a dazed gravitas as his character muddles through life, twisting awkwardly through the gap between his simple ideals and the world’s ability to service them with often heartbreaking frustration. It’s a wild ride, and an often ridiculous one, but so many people love this film for a reason – it’s really good.
