What Tom Hanks Thinks of America

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There are few actors as widely beloved as Tom Hanks. Hanks has acted in over 75 films in his 46-year career, winning the best actor Academy Award two years in a row, for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.” And more recently, he’s the author of the short story collection “Uncommon Type” and the novel “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.” What is the source of Hanks’s near-universal admiration? In playing roles including Chesley Sullenberger, Mister Rogers and World War II heroes, Hanks reflects back to audiences what we could be at our very best. He’s an uncannily wise interpreter of America: what our country has been, and what it could be if we activated our potential to be kind, compassionate, even heroic toward one another. That’s just one of many topics we traverse in this truly delightful conversation. We also discuss how working on typewriters helps fuel Hanks’s creativity, why there’s such a huge global appetite for superhero stories, why America has become so cynical and how Hanks endeavors to defy that cynicism, how Hanks’s complicated family upbringing influences how he approaches his film roles, what America learned about itself — and didn’t — through Vietnam, Watergate and other historical events, how Hanks understands the complexity of heroic figures he’s played, why he views kindness as an active practice and more. Book Recommendations: Beartown by Fredrik Backman The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt Trust by Hernan Diaz Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Pat McCusker.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times' opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23.0	I hate to do this because I know the cliche when the host says, my guest today needs no
0:27.0	introduction. But what I'm really going to say here and introduce who Tom Hanks is to you.
0:31.0	It's a waste of your time in mind. But he does have a new book out, the making of another major
0:36.2	motion picture masterpiece, which follows a Pisschord story collection, Uncommon type, both which are
0:41.5	real delight. And there's a reason I wanted to have his conversation. And I'm going to try to
0:46.7	let it unfold, but I've always been interested in Hanks as a kind of interpreter of America.
0:52.5	And also somebody who gets something that is often fallen out of fashion, both politically and
0:57.6	culturally, even as it maintains a huge amount of strength and appeal, which is the power of
1:06.1	sincerity in American culture. And the way in which there's this constant push and pull between
1:14.4	elite intellectual culture, which is more cynical, which is more ironic, and mass culture, which is
1:20.0	more sincere, many ways patriotic, at least wants to believe that we all can agree on things, even if
1:26.6	the people in it don't all agree on things. And Hanks is somebody who's navigated the currents of
1:31.4	this for a very long time now, very adroitly. I don't think you can have played the role
1:37.7	as the movie star everybody can agree on, right? The nice guy of American movies for this long,
1:42.4	in this many changing versions of America without understanding something pretty deep about the
1:48.1	American psyche. So that was a conversation I wanted to have with him here, and it was a lot of fun.
1:53.6	As always, my email as ReclinedShow at nytimes.com.
1:59.7	Tom Hanks, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, I was real climbing. So I wanted to start
2:04.9	in your earlier book of short stories, Uncommon type. And in that book, you have a typewriter
2:09.5	appearing in every single story. You've talked a lot in different interviews about your love of
2:13.5	typewriters. And I'm going to admit to being a cynic here, I thought this was maybe a cute
	...

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