Tom Hanks may just be the most modest man in Hollywood.
Despite building a career that spans more than 80 films and six Oscar nominations, the 66-year-old actor commented in a recent interview that only a handful of his movies are “pretty good.”
Speaking with People Magazine while promoting his debut novel — a fictional story about the making of a big-budget superhero film called “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” — the “Castaway” actor said it’s a “miracle” that any films make it through the production process.
“No one knows how a movie is made, though everyone thinks they do,” he told the magazine. “I’ve made a ton of movies — and four of them are pretty good, I think — and I’m still amazed at how films come together. From a flicker of an idea to the flickering image onscreen, the whole process is a miracle.”
Which four films he was referring to remains a mystery, but Hanks did give a clue in an interview last year.
In an appearance on Bill Simmons’ podcast in November 2021, the actor was asked to list the three favorite films he had done in his career.
“I wouldn’t do it according to the way the movies came out, I would do it by way of the personal experience that I had while I was doing them, which is very different,” he said at the time.
He listed 1992’s “A League of Their Own”, 2000’s “Castaway” and 2012’s “Cloud Atlas” as the three best experiences he had making movies.
Hanks, who won back-to-back Oscars for Best Actor in 1994 and 1995 for his performances in “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”, told People that the process creating a movie can bring about feelings of “self-loathing” and “joy” in equal measure.
“Movie-making is very hard work over a very long period of time that consists of so many moments of joy slapped up against an equal number of feelings of self-loathing,” he said. “It is the greatest job in the world and the most confounding of labors that I know of.”
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