If he describes being a little taken aback by the attention it drew-“When your name appears in a chyron on CNN as breaking news: ‘Oh, I guess we’re a bigger part of the zeitgeist than we anticipated’ ”-well, perhaps he is not as invested as the wider culture is in the idea of Tom Hanks as some kind of cherished symbol, benignly treasured in a way few public figures are. When he and his wife, Rita Wilson, contracted COVID in the anxious early days of the pandemic, it made Hanks, in his words, “the celebrity canary in the coal mine.” Back then, his infection seemed disproportionately unsettling. Half a century later, Tom Hanks meets me in the lobby of Claridge’s hotel in London, clutching the rectangular stick of a negative COVID test in one hand. A boy by a window, imagining what was and what could be. Sometimes it would just flow and flow, as the day’s light faded and his destination edged nearer. He’d see himself flying a jet, being an explorer, winning the day, gaining revenge, getting into a fistfight.
Sometimes it would coalesce into a narrative. In his mind, all of these questions and thoughts would mix with what was already sloshing around-the movies he’d seen, the stuff he liked to read about space exploration. Some figures standing outside: What were they doing? A plane up in the clear sky: All those people, where were they going and what were they thinking? The couple in that car as the Greyhound passed, the guy by himself in the truck, that station wagon loaded up with kids in the back, that locomotive on the train tracks … A house would flash by he’d imagine who lived in it. He’d see a barn, wonder what was on the other side. He’d watch the broken sine wave of the telephone lines, looping on and on and on for miles, then veering away, then rejoining the bus’s path. Sometimes he read a little, maybe a comic, maybe a book, but mostly he’d stare out into the passing world. Those journeys, they released something within him.
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