Tom Hanks

Starring as Walt Disney trying to persuade the original author of Mary Poppins to allow him to make it a film, Hanks brings Saving Mr. Banks to life.

I thought the script was a fair portrayal of Walt as a mogul but also as an artist and a human being.

In a film of six intertwined storylines spanning different eras, Hanks plays six different characters for each plot. Cloud Atlas‘ official synopsis calls it”

An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.

Over four years of development, the film cost $103 million to create, making it one of the most expensive independent films of all time.

Based on the 2009 Maersk Alabama pirate hijacking of a merchant mariner in the Indian Ocean, Hanks stars as Captain Phillips. During filming, Hanks never met the actors who played Somalian pirates until the action-packed scene where the pirates take the bridge. Director Paul Greengrass believed this would make the meeting more natural as strangers barked commands and pointed guns at the captain and crew.

They were the skinniest, scariest human beings I had ever come across.

Hanks stars opposite Sandra Bullock and Thomas Horn as a father who dies during the September 11th attack of the World Trade Center in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Through the movie, his son battles his autism to search New York City for people who knew his father.

The very first time [Sandra and I] met was at [a] house with Thomas… we came out and we were going to prepare a meal. It was ‘Mom’, ‘Dad’, and young ‘Oscar’ and we made pasta and salad and garlic bread. I gotta tell you, it was the most pleasant time in a kitchen I’ve had.

Hanks again works with Disney to bring Toy Story 3 to life. In the final movie of the trilogy, Woody, Buzz and friends are donated to a day care where they encounter hellish children and a dictating teddy bear. The film held the record of the number one grossing animated film, bringing in $1 billion, until it as surpassed by another Disney film, Frozen (2014).

Reprising the role of Professor Robert Langdon, Hanks again stars in a Dan Brown film adaptation of Angels & Demons, a prequel to The Da Vinci Code. The second film makes less than the first by grossing $485 million.

Starring opposite his son Collin Hanks, Tom Hanks co-produces The Great Buck Howard, a film about a boy who defies his father by dropping out of law school to become a writer in Los Angeles.

He’s better looking than I am, he’s taller than I ever was and he’s hotter than I am – and he’s calmer. I was usually running around looking like Gumby on acid.

Hanks stars in a co-produces the biographical drama, Charlie Wilson’s War, ab out U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson who partnered with CIA to launch Operation Cyclone, a program to support Afghan mujahideen during the war.

Hanks plays Texas congressman Charlie Wilson in this drama directed by Mike Nichols. Wilson  teams up with a renegade CIA agent and a Houston socialite to assist Afghani rebels in their war with the Soviets. Their efforts contribute to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

I responded to it because I couldn’t believe that this had ever happened. In reading the book, I thought that this was a serious piece of journalism that describes something that’s almost surrealistic hilarious, as well as historically accurate.