NEW YORK: Since contracting COVID-19 in March, Tom Hanks has been, by most measures, busy.Tom Hanks AP PHOTOHe and his wife, Rita Wilson, flew home after recuperating in Australia, where he had been shooting Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley film. He hosted a from-home episode of “Saturday Night Live,” an already distant enough memory that it takes a beat for him to remember it. And he saw his new World War 2 naval drama “Greyhound” steered from theatrical release by Sony Pictures to Apple TV+ — the streaming service’s biggest movie yet.But he’s mostly been taking it day by day.“There’s sort of an ongoing physiological maintenance for your brain and for your body that we’ve been following through,” Hanks says, speaking by video conference from his home in California.“What can you do but try to bind up the hay in neat little bundles. That’s what we’ve been doing. Just going into the barn with the baling machine, saying, ‘Well, we got all this hay. Let’s at least stack it up and get it ready for the next day.”For many, Hanks’ contraction of Covid-19 was the first loud alarm bell that went off in the early days of the pandemic. If “America’s Dad” could get it, so could anyone.The decision to go public with their diagnoses, Hanks said in a recent interview, was twofold. He didn’t want any rumors about why the production was shut down. And if he was going to serve as an overdue public service announcement, so be it.“Why hide from the facts?” he says. “These were the facts.”The ordeal, one experienced with varying severity and symptoms between Hanks and Wilson, gave him a perspective on differing national responses to the coronavirus. The comparison with Australia, Hanks grants, isn’t a favorable one for the United States. But he says, there’s no need for “another dump truck to unload all the things that have gone wrong” in the US.Before the pandemic, “Greyhound” was going to hit theaters in early June, smack in between “Wonder Woman 1984” and “Top Gun 2.”“We were going to fight like the scrappy runt of a litter in order to get somebody to pay attention to us,” says Hanks, chuckling.Now, “Greyhound” will head straight into homes as a marquee event with little competition of similar scale or star power. A Tom Hanks-led, special effects-laden WW2 movie is a weight class above most straight-to-streaming options in this strange summer movie season. Disney+ has “Hamilton,” but Apple TV+ has Hanks.The film, made for about $40 million and acquired by Apple for a reported $70 million, is a taut 88-minute naval drama about a lesser-seen theater of WW2, the Battle of the Atlantic.“Greyhound” has long been a pet project for the 63-year-old actor. He wrote the script, adapted from C. S. Forester’s 1955 novel “The Good Shepherd,” a book first given to him by his late friend and “Sleepless in Seattle” director Nora Ephron.For Hanks, whose father served in the Navy, his attachment to the era goes deeper than DNA. It’s about connecting to the wartime mentality of survival and sacrifice.“I’m asked by every journalist, ‘Why do you keep going back to World War 2?’” says Hanks, donning a vaguely European accent.“The answer is because I come back to that position of the stress upon a human being’s psyche. It doesn’t have to be a captain, necessarily, on board a destroyer in the middle of the North Atlantic. It can be on an 8-year-old kid or a 24-year-old woman or even a 54-year-old man back in the United States wondering, ‘Are we going to live or die? Are we going to be free or not? How long is it going to go on?’ To me, that’s the human condition in every circumstance, even in today in 2020.”
