I heard a story: When he was a carny, he had a dime welded to his ring. Tom Parker was the same exact type of thing on a crass, nonartistic level. Onstage, he wasn’t wiggling to say, “Hey, time to turn on the sex appeal.” It was instinct.
Elvis dressed the way he dressed because he had to. Well, I don’t think in show business there were more authentic-to-themselves personalities than those two. Such is the malleability of his gift that he has created trustworthy portraits of real-life characters (the heroic airline and cargo-ship captains of, respectively, Sully and Captain Phillips), cartoons (Woody the cowboy from the Toy Story films) and real-life characters who easily could have come off like cartoons (as Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). At other times, he has found ways to imbue with can-do optimism characters who are caught in the middle of seemingly unbearable situations, whether they’re alone (Cast Away) or surrounded by enemies (Saving Private Ryan). He has played honorable men on society’s then-margins (the discriminated-against gay lawyer of Philadelphia) and at the center of our history (Forrest Gump Apollo 13). Over the course of his long career, he has found clever ways to convey a fundamental and aspirational decency. Ever since the actor broke out from a string of roles as a goofy, lovelorn leading man via the complicated innocence of his work in Big (1988), Hanks has gradually become an avatar of American goodness. There are some artistes, and Tom Hanks is one, who go beyond mere popularity and instead come to embody some part of the American story.