What does a balanced life look like for you?
Are you getting enough time to recharge?
Today, Jay engages in a deeply reflective conversation with legendary actor, filmmaker, and writer Tom Hanks. With a career spanning over four decades, Hanks is renowned for his roles in iconic films like Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away, and The Green Mile, earning him two Academy Awards.
Tom opens up about his unconventional childhood, moving frequently and adjusting to new environments, which shaped his adaptability and taught him the art of letting go. As he reflects on his career, he discusses how he continues to find purpose and depth in his work, emphasizing the joy of collaboration and the importance of staying curious.
Together, Jay and Tom discuss how certain locations hold emotional weight, becoming symbols of comfort or life-changing reflection. They also touch on generational wisdom, the role of luck, and finding joy in small, shared experiences. With his characteristic humor and humility, Tom offers listeners a glimpse into his contemplative nature and the lessons he's learned over the years, reminding us all of the power of presence and community.
In this interview, you'll learn:
How to Find Comfort in Solitude
How to Embrace Life's Unexpected Changes
How to Connect Across Generations
How to Trust Your Instincts and Take Risks
How to Stay Curious at Any Age
How to Discover Purpose in Your Work
How to Show Up Fully in Relationships
How to Find Wisdom in Life’s Challenges
How to Pursue Meaning over Perfection
Life isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about embracing the unknown with openness, honoring the journey, and finding meaning in each moment, each experience, and each relationship.
With Love and Gratitude,
Jay Shetty
What We Discuss:
00:00 Intro
01:17 Early Life Lessons: Childhood, Change, and Resilience
05:37 Mastering the Art of Detachment
10:15 Discovering Theater and Passion in High School
18:56 Can We Create Our Own Luck?
21:35 Exploring the Sacred Sites of Jerusalem
27:03 Owning Your Mistakes and When to Take Personal Responsibility
30:52 The Third Space: Finding Balance Beyond Work and Home
37:03 Fathers and the Lasting Impact on Their Sons
38:42 Nurturing Kids’ Interests for Genuine Growth
42:59 The Value of Academic Ambition
45:21 Capturing the Present: Finding Magic in Every Moment
52:46 Reflections on Seeing Your Younger Self in the Movie
55:03 Finding Presence in Everyday Life
58:04 The Freedom of Following Your True Desires
01:04:25 Imagining the Dream Life: Building a Path to Fulfillment
01:07:29 Themes of Time and Place in the Film Here
01:09:01 The Fascination with Reaching the Moon
01:11:04 Unraveling a Deep Fascination with WWII
01:18:01 Becoming America’s Most Trusted Voice
01:21:07 Grateful for the Blessings of Family
01:22:04 Observing Life’s Passing Moments
01:27:42 Honored with Greek Citizenship
01:31:31 Tom on Final Five
Episode Resources:
Tom Hanks | Instagram
Sometimes life passes in the wink of an eye and it's like, wow, are we here already? But there's other times in that same week of an eye, you comprehend it all.
One of the greatest and most iconic actors of all time, He's started dozens of movies over his forty year career. You know, I'm mean loving.
If you're just looking at the passer saying, man, that was when it was great. I wish we could go back. No, you never want to go back. You always have to understand that our best days are still ahead of it.
Well, as you keep saying more will be revealed as well.
This too shall pass and more shall be revealed.
The number one health and Well In his podcast set Jay Shetty.
See only.
Tom Hanks, Welcome to on Purpose. It's truly an honor and a gift to being your presence to have you here, and even the first few moments that we've just exchanged a few thoughts, ideas and stories, I'm already enjoying your companies so much, and I'm so grateful that.
You took me time to do this.
Kind of likewise, and I watched here, which is out on November first, I have so much that I want to talk about it through and through your lens. I mean, I was watching it to me, the theme of home, obviously is so strong and apparent, and I wanted to ask you where do you feel most at home apart from home?
Okay, all right, man, all right, let's throw deep right off the bat. Because I was so many things lined up with me at my age. I was the third of four. Uh, my parents were very preoccupied with all certain you know, like the positives and miseries of their lives. I like to joke that they pioneered the marriage dissolution laws for the state of California, you know, back they got divorces, when only like Jean Jahabor you know, or you know, Nicky Hilton got divorces. My home environment was fluid in that we moved a lot, and we were suddenly living with a whole different set of people because people, you know, my parents got remarried and whatnot, so that by the time I was seven, I had lived in eight different homes. By the time I was ten, I lived in ten different homes. And it's always been like that. So I am not intimidated by it, and I don't think I'm damaged by it at all. As a matter of fact, my brother, who I did not live with, he lived in the same town and in one of three houses all his life. And I consider myself the lucky one, you know, just just by the nature of so much stuff that I've seen and so much stuff that I've been able to experience and be comfortable with. Now. Look, you know, I'm sixty eight. So I went through I witnessed everything, you know, whatever drug thing that you want to go. I wasn't a participantant awful lot of that because I was so I was kind of like entertained by the new rules of whatever we were. And here's a new school, and here's a new apartment complex, and now we're living in a bona fide neighborhood. And I was not intimidated by all of that stuff. And I was also comfortable, perhaps in a way that's not healthy in some ways, of being a new guy in a new circumstance, sizing up a room, sizing up a school, figuring out, all right, what's the easiest way to get comfortable here. Part of it is being open, you know, kind of like taking over, cracking a few jokes, not getting in trouble. And that's different from I would say, like my older brother who was very shy, and we were connected at the hip to all of this stuff, and it was not great for the other members of my family. But there was just something about that, the roll of the dice, number three of four right there when the parents are too busy with all this other kind of stuff. And my siblings were not much older than I was, but older than I, but they were social beings long before I was. I didn't become a social being until I was like seven years old or when. And by that time I'd lived in very many places. So long winded conversation, where where where do I feel it? Why do I feel at home most? I'm going to say, now, at the age of sixty eight, with some collection of my immediate family, wherever we are, provided we are and I don't mean to be good laughing, you know, provided we are laughing at perhaps the absurdity of it, or dealing with the cruelty of it, or sometimes just there's surreal, soilistic aspect of can somebody tell me how we ended up here? Exactly? Can someone? Can someone do that? Right now? So? I, uh, now that's not necessarily a strength, because along with that came Dude, I travel light, and I can travel light. Emotionally, I'm done. There's stuff that I cannot control. I have left many wonderful atmosphere or a loving atmosphere, or a friendly atmosphere. And like Ernie Banks, you know, the ballplayer for the Chicago Cubs, without ever looking back, without thinking, oh, things were really wonderful back then, I wish I was back there, Jay, I don't think I've ever thought that now. Is that great? Is it facile? Or is it so mercurial that maybe maybe you shouldn't trust me?
Does it feel like it feels like it sounds like a healthy detachment?
There is a type Okay, let's talk about that, because there is a version of detachment that means that you can navigate, say like, can I say assholes? So you can navigate assholes? And you know, I think my experience is about ninety percent of the people that you come across pretty decent folks, five percent are assholes, and I'll say five percent are sociopaths, you know, and you cannot avoid that other ten percent, those two five percent, and the ability to detach from those circumstances without a doubt a good thing. But the habit, then I think of choosing isolation from the other ninety percent, because what can I rely on at the end of the day. I can only rely on what I can fit in either my emotional suitcase, an actual suitcase, or the back of my car, and that lingers for a very long time. So I think the healthy aspect of it has been a grade aid to me, as well as the tendency to want to be isolated, to not need anybody. Put it that way, to not want anybody, because that's just what I learned. Life is easy if you don't need anybody, and it can be a lot easier if you want nothing more than what's in the back of the car. But that can be a solitary life, and a lot of times being solitary can be confused with being lonely, and lonely can being lonely can lead to anger and resentments and stuff that you got to work through. And Okay, at the sixty eight, you know a lot of those years have been dealt with dealing with the latter and enjoying the former at the same time.
Well, I think what you've rightly said is that there's this binary feeling of if you're detached, you're lonely or disconnected, or you might be at the other end codependent and attached and not have the ability to operate in a solitary state. So how have you danced almost so beautifully between the two of being able to confidently say you've been detached in the right ways, and then at the same time, you have this beautiful relationship with your wife, you have long term friendships with people in the industry, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, you have. So how does that dance work? Because I do think that the magic is in the dance, not in the choice.
I'm going to say that I got very, very, very lucky being in the right place at the right time and recognizing something that was just for me. All Right, you go back to let's just go back to school. You know, people say show business is like high school with money. High school is like show business without money. You know, it truly was. And when I was, when I would look, I just went to school. And my joke was, we moved around so much that whenever, you know, at the end of the school year, my dad would stand me out on the driveway and say, so your school is somewhere in that direction. Just walk that way, and when you see kids your own age, just follow them and they lead you to whatever school you are supposed to go to. The school was a social kind of like place for me, and every now and again there might be a moment that landed in my intellectual pursuit, if that makes sense. I can't say I really loved going to school, but I certainly loved the hang of going to school. That's a different thing. Subject matters, that was a role of history was great. Sometimes some reading was great. But I was no artist. I was no you know, I was no mathematician. You know. I kind of like geography because you could visualize a map and know where like Sri Lanka was, or you know, the difference between Cambodia and Thailand. But when I was in high school and had no idea what I was supposed to do with my time other than you know, maybe go to young life, you know, hang out, you know, hang out with you know, some sort of psych theological you know, brothers. But other than that, sign up for class, maybe do your homework on the bus on the way to school, and what run track? I don't know what he is supposed to do. But there was a theater teacher. There was a theater department at this high school. And actually, this guy I had known since sixth grade was playing Dracula in the high school play. And I said, really, and so you know, we went, we went up to school at night to see him. And I'd never been at my high school at night. Looks different at night. Right Then I sat there and there was you know, a bunch of people in the auditorium, and then they came out and did this play, and I thought, this is school. You can do this at school. School. Isn't this thing just to survive? This isn't this thing just to fill up your time to leave as soon as you can and get there at the lake. Oh No. I never cut class and didn't do that because in some ways the hang of school was too much fun. But when I saw that there was this kind of discipline that I had already been thinking of in my head, that just changed everything. That just would you suddenly have a reason to go and do something, and the reason is in a pursuit of something that you cannot find anywhere else. Right that I got to say my junior and senior years of high school. I have been living that same exact life and excitement ever since. I'm not kidding the idea of auditioning for the first Like our great instructor, our teacher, he wanted to do real plays because he loved to do the scenic design for it. So we did a Knight of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. How about that sixteen year old seventeen year old kids playing Night of the Iguana that we did Shakespeare. We they did musicals as well, those were always popular. But suddenly having this tantalizing thing, that's like, if you have an imagination and if you're not afraid of getting up in front of people, which I was not. Some people can't get up, and it was a bunt for me. I did. I did it without even thinking that that gave. That gave a purpose and a pursuit that was much much bigger than anything else that had been in my life. Now I have a friend of mine from the same era, James is his name. I met him in fifth grade and he said to me he was going to be a draftsman. He was going to he was going to be an engineer. He's going to design buildings, and he did. That's what he's been doing all this life. I knew. I knew people that at the same age. They said, well, I really love to cook, and they have written cook books and they've run their own catering companies. That is what That's the same sort of thing that I that I landed upon without really knowing it. Because my parents were divorced. I spent a lot of time I'm traveling to and from, you know, where my mom lived in this small town where my dad lived in Oakland in the Bay Area. And those hours on a Greyhound bus, starting when I was seven, seven or eight years old, five hours of just daydreaming, five hours of looking out the window, five hours of looking at people passing cars, air trains, going by, farms and whatnot, buildings within the natural preponderance. I had to sit there quietly and imagine what was going on. Was that fueled me into realizing that there's this thing, that there's actually a discipline and a trade and an art and a what's the word I'm looking for and I'll just say it again, a pursuit that is, let's put on a show, Let's tell a story that came along and bang. That was it. And I'm telling you it's the same exact now as it was then.
Did you write on those journeys or was it mainly.
I wanted to write specific glee, but I did not literally, I did not have the I did not have the scholastic example. I did not learn the tools because I just wanted to fake it, you know, at the last moment. Now, I started writing about about twenty years ago by just incorporating the work that an actor does that is not told to anybody, that is not spoken. That actually was a form of writing that came about, and I was sort of like instructed on how that come how that comes along, but without putting it down on paper. I had malleable, cohesive narratives in my head for all of this stuff, and I just thought, well, isn't that what everybody does. That's the way you do this, right, Because it's not just showing up on time and you know, learning your words and doing what you're told. There is something beyond that. And the beyond that was always fifteen times greater than the actual physical showing up. I can't I can't discount enough the power of the hang. You want to hear a story. Here's here's the sor Okay, here's the story. Darlene Love. You know who. Darlene Love is, legendary singer, you know singer, A fantastic, fantastic uh motown artist, among other things were I was on the Christmas show of the old David Letterman Show, and every year he brought her along to sing It's Christmas, this fabulous rendition with a big orchestra and male choruses. I saw her there and I said, oh, oh, I'd seen her on the David Letterman Show for like six or seven years, and I said, I met her, and I said, I mislove, I cannot believe that I am on the show with you. You are you. You have been belting out you know, so so many moments of the soundtrack of my life that I'm just I'm just thrilled that you're here, and I'm here glad that you're still doing it. And she looked at me, said, Tom, I'm just here for the hang, and I got I completely, I completely got that, because the hang, the interaction with everybody dealing with the attractiveness of those ninety percent avoiding or learning how to negotiate around those other five percent, you know, the jerks and the evil people. Ain't that just living? You know? Ain't that better than being alone in a room when you don't have a thought in your head?
Well said, yeah, absolutely, I was wondering. You talked about luck a lot. There can we all become a bit more lucky.
The fellow who ran the Great Lake Shakespeare festal Vincent Dowling, I worked for him for three years and he's the number of people that loved that man and worked with that man. He touched a great many people's lives. He said. It's the most unfair business in the world. That's one aspect of it, because so much of it requires being in the right place at the right time, by choice and by sacrifice, you know, and that's not easy to do. I feel that I was fortunate that from as we spoke about, from that upg bringing, I had no qualms about, Hey, let's go. I got enough money for gas. I drove across the country with four other people one time, and then the next year I drove across the country by myself. Did not bat deny. And there are people that listen, they just can't do that, you know. There is a degree of security and fear and intimidation that can go along with what putting yourself in the right place at the right time, and along with that will come all it's a fifty to fifty. Okay, it's a fifty to fifty. Have you heard this great thing? I'm no mathematician, but when I heard this, I thought, that's actually a principle for living. Jay. If I had a quarter and I flipped it and aim up heads five times in the row, what are the odds that it's going to come up heads a seven times, six time, six time in a row?
Is it still fifty to fifty?
It's absolute fifty to fifty. Just because something has happened doesn't mean it's going to Just because you're in a place doesn't mean that's where you should be. So along with luck, shouldn't the shouldn't the other requirement be faith or some degree of disconnected to it. To whatever the end result is going to be, you're going to have to be I was. I was talking to a friend of mine and he said he read somebody I don't know who it was, but someone someone wrote down you have to be all right with what's going to happen, and I just well, okay, yeah, so yeah, all right, let's let's try to do that. So you have to be all right with what's going to happen, right or wrong, disaster, disease, you know, whatever you have to be. You have to be all right with what is going to happen with some degree of faith and luck that what happens after that is the best thing that could possibly be.
What's helped you get closer to that. That sounds hard, it is, it sounds impossible.
Yeah, yeah, I am going to say that age in all honesty experience, you know, that thing of what has not destroyed me only makes me stronger. And look, let's not discount the power of getting your ass kicked, you know. And I'm not just you know, suddenly not professionally as well. All sorts of you know, all sorts of personal things go along that give you a bloody nose and bust your teeth, and you have to go through those metaphysically, perhaps physically. I made this movie where I wrote a Scooter Vespa, and so because of that, I wrote a Vespa for about two years until I realized that I had been so close to kill myself on this thing making a stupid missy thing that I'm going to give up this vestival. This was a smart This was a smart thing to do that only came about because I learned, you know that, you know, sometimes a hair's breadth between you know, cracking up or falling down or needing that crash helmet or not. So it is a degree of that experience and also being I think open to some of the most basic I don't want to say philosophical truths, but I have been to the Holy Land. I have seen the sights that are precious, divine. I was. I was actually working this a long time ago. This was before the great many of the great problems that were going there. And I was driving back, being driven to Jerusalem. I was with a guy and I said, Hey, so, so Moche tells me, tell me tell me about where we are. He says, okay, I will tell you.
This is.
We are bound by a key boots. This is a very old key boots. You know key boots. Yes, this is a very old one. It's been there a very long time, very popular. And uh now we are coming up of a moshav. You know what is moshove is not like a kaboots it's different, more more socialists, less comfortable. But this is also much like that. And people live there and they work in their farm. And this is where David killed Goliath. And coming up here said well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa packed the car just a little packed this side. Did you just say this is where David killed Goliath? Yes, he says. There's a little sign there It said in English and Hebrew and Arabic. This is well, tell me about that. Okay, Well, okay, there you see the valley, yes, okay. And on one side was the the Philistines. Philistic they were.
They were there, okay, And David and the Israelites were here, and they sent down to the middle. There the the the guillant, the the giant yes yes, the golight yes.
And the David goes says, I will fight this man. And he puts the stones and he kills him, and and I said this is the place. He said, yeah, I'm not going to argue with that. Absolutely not going to argue with that. So move along. And I you know, you visit great cathedrals and whatnot have been all place around around the world, some of the great face. And we were in we were in Japan, the family and I. We had this fabulous guy that was driving us around and he took us to some Buddhist places, some Shinto shrines, and there was a big tree at one of them, uh at one of the one of the temples the shrines, and people would write down prayers on these on wooden wooden signs and they would hang them up like ornaments. So this tree is just covered with a million prayers, beautiful kind of like sensibility. And he wrote down something and he hung it up and I said, you know, oh, she what did you write? This says oh, I wrote here. I'll show you. And it was in Japanese, you know the language. And he says, this, this, this means I will never know all I need to know. That's all we talked about, you know, later on, you know what, So the ongoing education of we're never going to know what we need to know more is always going to be revealed. And this too shall pass. That governs absolutely everything. If you are having the greatest time in your work, this too shall pass. If you are successful, that this too shall pass. If you are sick, if you are experiencing and great tragedy and great drama, great difficulty. This too shall pass. Now. I don't know if I'm still answering the question you ask. This was educated to me over the course of my twenties and thirties and forties or fifties, at a time when you think that, no, what you have to do is have a master plan. You got to stick to the plan. You got to lay your head down, you got to fight for it, you got to compete. Yeah, Okay, there's times when you know you got to do that other kind of stuff, and other times you just kind of like got to roll over and say, I surrender, you know, just I will never know all I need to know and I'll never be able to do all that I should do. Yeah, that makes sense.
It does make sense. It does make sense. And I appreciate you saying that it comes with wisdom and age and experience, because I used to have a mentor you sadly passed away during the pandemic, but he would always replace He would always repeat to me, there's no substitute for maturity, and it was.
No shortcut to it. Yeah, yeah, the maturity was just and yet didn't you know somebody when you were young who was the same age as you that had it.
Absolutely.
Oh. I came across all sorts of people like that. Yeah, And I just said, first of all, what makes you so special? And what makes you so smart? What makes you so calm?
You know?
What was it?
Did you have a figure out?
I having the vegus idea, you know, some combination I would probably say of connection, you know, a connection to a family, connection to you know, uh, perhaps a heritage that goes along with that that you know. Some friend of mine we were we went to their sons bob mitzvah. And I'm not Jewish, but I said, you got by me said O, yeah, of course I got bom Mitzvah, he said. And he said, let me tell you something about the bomb Mitzvah. This is what's great about it. Because my thirteen year old son when he's getting bod mitzvah, and I told him, I said, after this, my son, your sins are your own. He's thirteen. But this is the you know, and there's studies of you know, there's examples of that all through all sorts of cultures, uh, and all sorts of histories that said, there is a time when you and you alone are responsible for everything that goes on goes on in your life. I have a I have a friend who is studying with a Buddhist monk. You know, a guy whose name he's literally got his name venerable in his first name. How about that? When I was talking to the venerable you know whatever it and I said, look, I know squat about Buddhism outside of you know what I you know, see on TV shows, So well, what's the deal? And he said, Well, one of the smartest things I heard from a guy who precious Buddhism is my life used to be nothing but chopping wood and carrying water, and now that I have received some enlightenment, I find that all that is necessary for me to live is to chop wood and carry water. Okay, all right, man, that's some high country. And I don't know if you hear that. Well, I don't know. If I had heard that at the age of twenty two, I would have had the slightest an idea of what are But at the age of sixty eight, you know, I think I can get a little bit closer to that.
Definitely to that. Yeah, I think there's two things you brought to mind for me. I think one of them's been when I've noticed some of the wiser people that I've met along the way or at a younger age. As you were mentioning, it's always been people who were exposed to more generations, and so people who were in their twenties but new people who are seventy and spent quality time with them, or people who are in their fifties and spent time with someone who is eighteen or twenty one, and that kind of juxtaposition of being surrounded by people that weren't just all your age in the same space, there was a sense of you being able to learn and grow and take and receive. I was spending time with couple that my wife and I have become very close friends with, and they're both seventy, and my wife and I are in our in our mid thirties, and we were we spent a weekend with them, and it was brilliant because I got destroyed at pickleball by this. For me, Yeah, he's playing pickleball and tennis for four hours a day and I can barely play. For a couple and so big inspiration. But just the life experience and the engagement you get from that. And I think so much of our going back to what we were seeing about community and even your mention of church there or the Holy Land. I was researching something recently. I'm writing my third book, and something that I came across and I've been playing around with is this idea called the third space theory. And what the third space theory lays out is that back in the day, we would have home, we would have work, and we would have church. And church was a place you could look back on working home and reconcile and reflect and think.
About you can ponder why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. Yeah, a place literally meant for that. This is why you come here exactly.
And now what's happened is let alone three spaces. We don't eat, We just have one, so we work from home, we live at home, and then our third space or the closest thing to it is a television. Probably there is there isn't a separate space, and so it's arguing the fact that there isn't that space almost to have those thoughts, conversations, ideas, insights that may arise.
The generational thing I think is wickedly important, whether or not you like they don't. You know, sometimes it's just the old person that's sitting in the corner, you know. But other times it's like, you know, a big there is some aspect of the big family that is not for everybody, you know, because God knows, not everybody wance to come to Thanksgiving sometimes because they don't want to have that same fight again.
I had.
I had a friend who he had his His grandmother was like and already had an like she was ninety three or something like that, and she was always just there, you know, just there. And at one point he was he was arguing with his parents about not wanting to do something. I can't remember what it was, didn't matter. But everybody say, why are you doing it? Why do you what's that about? How can you do? How can you da da da dah blah blah blah. And my friend said, wow, hey man, because life's too short. And this ninety year old grandmother is just sitting there and she said, no, life's not short. Life is long, which I interpreted as being life is long. So if you're doing something stupid, you know, you're spending a lot of time relishing, you know, living inside inside that that stupidity. Yes, and my kids are my my old my youngest kids essentially were raised along by us as well as a couple of people that have you know, been uh employee like families for members of him, but also their grandparents, their yai and popoo, as they say in Greek, people who were never not engaged with them when they were babysitting. We never had to have babysitters, We never had to have a nanny, We didn't have anything like that. What we had instead was two generations removed of people speaking Greek to them, asking them questions what are you doing? From the moment they are toddlers until they're fourteen years old. What they got from that is so different from from what I got from mine. There is a joke in my family about how bad I am with tools. I mean, as soon as I pick up a screwdriver or a hammer, I start getting cold sweats. Because my dad had no patience with me about He never said, let me show you how to use it, let me show you how to scrape that off. It was always I'll come on you, not head. Don't you know how to stand a board? Don't you know the difference between a standard socket wrench and metric And I never did because nobody said, let me show you how you do this. You got to learn it so that you're talking about something there that is it's almost it's like water on a stone, you know, it just has an effect over time. And uh, you know for in many cultures you have to look at that and say, the more, the more generations around that table with regularity, you know, not just for you know, three holidays, three holidays a year, the richer the lesson is going to be, you know, the deeper, because you're going to pick up some stuff just by like a like an old story from you know, from the old country. My uh my, my father in law, dad he was he was Greek but grew up in Bulgaria and had to escape the communists at whatnot which is a fascinating story unto itself, but but what what hell? The story about being told by his dad to take the donkey up to this, you know, up to the mountains and get something and bring it back, knowing that there was the meanest dog on the planet Earth up there that was going to uh try to try to bite him. He came back there. Oh, I think of what it was is he said, take the donkey up there, and he didn't want to wrestle with the donkey. He just wanted to go up there and get it back really fast. And on the way there, this dog, you know, nearly mauled, scared the living daylights out of him. So when he came back down, his dad said, I told you to take the donkey because the donkey would scare off the dog. You know like that, So you know you don't That's the kind of stuff you got to pick up over time. But did you did you have multiple multiple generations in the home as you were growing up?
I felt that for me. My my monk teachers became that for me because they were older, and so I had had among teachers in his probably his sixties when I met him, at an who was in his thirties when I first met him, and so they became that. I wasn't so close to my grandparents and so I didn't really have that same interaction as you wasn't mentioning your children, did I didn't really have that with them. So I had my parents, I had my uncles and aunts. But then I think it was really later on when I met those two generations in the monastery, that that really expanded my breath of you know, human experience.
The guy's worked across the board. But sometimes you know, grandpas are drunk and you know, and and grandma does not to but smoke cigarettes and you know, and watch Wheel of Fortune. So maybe it's not always me.
So gave me it gave me. Was there you were talking about your experience with your father and you know, with the tools, And it's so funny because my dad was the opposite. He was he was useless at di y and so I'm useless, and so I have that.
My dad was great. My dad could fix everything. There was a there was a story I was talking to my older brother that he and my dad my dad was a w Why in the word was spending a lot of money for crying out loud? We could get it. We could get electronics kit and make our own amplifier. We don't have to go off and pay all this much money. But I'll get up to a turntable and a speakers there we have stereo systems. So they got a kit and I saw them working on it together, and I was kind of jealous and I'm honestly forty years later I said to so you know that when you made the amplifier with Dad, I was really jealous, being like, oh man, I wish I would have done anything to trade shape places with you. My dad was so miserable as we're doing it always or you not head? Don't you know? Don't you know why? To Solder, it's like, oh, oh yeah, there's a perspective of everything.
Yeah, definitely, did you try to? Did you try to pair in differently? Like? Did you?
You know? You try to? But I made every mistake. You know, you scar the kids somehow in the same exact way, and as they get older, you know, you come back around it said, hey, can I talk about what a nodthead I was with you for all those years? And said yeah, sure, Dad, Yeah, I've been kind of waiting for this. Why don't what did you? What are your unloads? So no, but I would say at the same time, I think there was you know, does it come up to be fifty to fifty? Maybe the attitude and the you know, the life that we led, the laughs. You know that stuff's worth its weight, and you know, gem encrusted gold.
So what's something that they've taught you, What's something that they've How.
Different they all are, you know, they are not the same type of human being. Ever. My youngest at one point said something that was definitely true for him, and I thought, is in fact true for all of my kids, which makes makes me feel good. And that was he was younger, he was like seven or eight. I said, oh, you know, at one point, let's let's go down we were New York. Said let's go down the park and we'll take our gloves, we'll throw it around, we'll bat the balls. Let's just find a place of grass. And said, okay, do that, and it got away from me. Didn't happen? This called that something happened and I realized that, oh, the sun's going down. I said, oh my god, oh my god. Hey, I'm sorry. I said we were going to go down in the and throw the ball around. It got away from me. Forgive me, and he said, no, it's okay to and he sounded disappointment. That's okay. I said, well, you know, I feel bad. I just I just I don't I don't want you to be bored. And he looked at me with a look on his face and said, Dad, I'm never bored. And that is that's curiosity. That speaks to curiosity and drive and also the comfort of where one is in order to feel free, in order to explore whatever world that is. And I can I think I could say that maybe in varied degrees for all the kids, their ability to pursue their own interests without being prodded, without being forced to, I've learned from that because look, there was that isolation that I'm that I ays talking about. There was a time when I was so comfortable doing absolutely nothing or you know, pursuing some brand of you know, disconnection that wasn't good for me. And uh, I you know they everybody has it in some some some degrees, but it could be of a with all that you were, with all you kids, with all your advantages, I do not want to hear that you're bored. And they have never they have never said that they're bored. They they have always had some action thing that was going on, whether I understood their passion for it or not.
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I think I just had to get used to it because I was number three. People ran out of time, you know, they didn't have the wherewithal of the interest because I was so young when my parents split up, and there were so many other factors that had to go into Man, there's logistics and legal thing, time and distance and stuff like that that I took care of myself, and you know, was satisfied. I think it was reprieve for them. So I just got used to occupying myself by being alone. Yeah, and that's really great and it can be really detrimental.
Yeah, I can relate to so much of that as well. I felt I was the eldest, just one of two and my parents. You've used this word previously in other interviews of having your parents had a fractured relationship, and so did mine, and so there was definitely a sense if I had to build independence, accountability, and responsibility very early on because I had to take care of things. And I also look back at that as such a strength and I'm so grateful for it in a kind of weird way because I feel like it made me grow up earlier. Not in a way that I felt I lost to childhood or I didn't have amazing experiences, but I'm really happy now when I look back that it gave me strength and courage much.
But as the older one did, they have some expectations of responsibility put on you, like where are you going and you have to be back by now? Where there are rules placed.
No rules, no rules for me, more expectations educationally and what was strange, which is so much link to what I do today, and I've drawn that line fairly often for myself is I was emotionally dependent on by both of them. Okay, so I became the therapist.
Wow, that's no wonder you went off for three years to sleep on the floor exactly on the ground.
Yeah.
Yeah. So I'm grateful for it now though, because I think it gave me the ability to listen closely, be empathetic, understand both sides, care for both, like he gave me that ability to recognize how it takes two to ten go.
I think, I think this is a viable study about where you are in that pecking order every now. And I agreed about it because because I was last and last by like five years, I had no rules. I had no expectit. They had. They had spent so much time trying to establish that with the older you know, my older siblings. They didn't want to bother with it anymore. So if I was gone for you know, like two weeks, I just didn't come home for two weeks in high school, they knew I was sleeping at somebody's house and doing my homework and getting to school on my own. They were thrilled that they didn't have to, you know, they didn't have to discipline me or punish me. They didn't have even have to think about me. I just came and went by myself. So, but I was not the oldest, you know, I did not have somebody that was establishing the rules and you know the structure of the family.
Yeah, that was Yeah, that was different for me too. I had expectations that academically, which is normal in an Indian family, but there weren't any rules for me as well. So if I was out and about and doing whatever it was, it didn't matter.
And so so I'm gonna it's the stereotype of the Indian family, are they? Are you all brilliant students? Do you all work really hard.
And finish all you're forced to? Yeah, you're forced to. You're forced to prioritize homework. Education is all that matters. Your social skills, life relationships don't matter. It's all about how well you're glad.
I'm not an Indian and there's no way I could have been.
Yeah, it's all about how well you perform academically. Your whole life revolves around that.
Were your parents like high academic and June.
Well, I think they I would say they did very well for what they had. So my dad became a chartered accountant. He qualified in England, but he grew up he was raised in India, and my mom never did any more than what you'd started up until age sixteen, and then after that also became an entrepreneur and became a financial advisor. So they both struggled and worked hard.
I love it. It was going it was going right where I thought it was until you said, and then became an entrepreneur.
Yeah, ok, yeah, which I realize growing up that she was an entrepreneur.
Well, that comes from somewhere of that structure of education and homework done even no matter the gender.
Exactly, exactly, exactly definitely. But I was thinking about, as we're talking about your life, I can't help but think about the movie here that I'm so grateful I got to watch a couple of days ago, a couple of weeks, no, a week ago now, and I really just felt that it was a work of art. That's kind of what I took away from it. It was a work of art because really, as a film more recently had me so fixated on. First of all, the way it's produced and created is beautiful, and the way it's a pretty deep throat, it's it's so deep, and it's perfect for this conversation that we're having. And even as you're reflecting on all of these scenes in your life. To me, I can't help.
The project, oh dear, Oh but you because because it was four of us, you know, Bob, Bob Zamacus and Eric Roth and Robin and I and everybody everybody else in it, you know, Paul and every re actor. Did we The scenes are very very specific of a moment in a family's life, yes, and everybody was armed for bear. Everybody had a thing that it had happened to them that was like that. Not necessarily example, but the sensory experience, the emotional connection to every single moment in this thing was really quite resonant for us all. And I had to when I people say what are you working on? Or I'm making a movie called here? I say not h E A R it's h E R E. I said, well, what's it about? I've said it is about how important things are when they happen here, you know, because you cannot control them, and they are if you the film, I mean all of the permutations it goes. You know, we say the camera stands still in space, but it moves in time. You know, everybody, every character in it is going through that profound thing that happens in a specific moment in their life. And where does it happen. It happens right here. So we were always to talking about presence, you know, some big aspect of it, and also that we do not know that we're living in a moment of history. We don't know. They don't know that the first tribes, you know, the Native Americans, they don't know that they're Native Americans. They're just living in the moment. They don't know they're living, you know, six hundred years ago. Nor do the people that build the house that takes place, and they don't know that they're living in nineteen eleven. They think that they're just living in the right now of it. And that's a type of thing that really is so examinable examine the bull in a very specific type of cinema that that is the point of the what the whole movie is that you know that Bob and Eric fleshed out long before Robin and I came along, and along with that comes together. The four of us have a history that we can go back to. I mean, Robins worked with Bob a couple of times. I've worked with Bob a number of times. Eric is one for in mine. We worked on stuff all the time, and every time we've done it, we have a pinpoint of the difference between here at the moment that had happened and now at this moment where we're talking about establishing a whole new other place in time.
Yeah, when I mean, when I was watching it, I couldn't help but think of every place that has been monumental in my life, and then think about how many other events must have taken place in that room, in that space that I'm not even aware of, and I might even take for granted and not recognize the value of both in my life and previously, and of course the future as well well.
I had to wrap my head around this thing that I had never experienced. We lived here. I've never lived any place, you know, you know now I've now I've had I've lived had in the same literally home as in three dimensional structure and time and space. I've had that now for you know, a couple of decades here, but this idea of someone putting so much I don't want to say importance, but having so much emotional centeredness in literally this place, in a room, by these stairs, through this door. The TV used to be there, and there it was there. Here's where mom and dad did this, Here's where I did that. I don't have that. Oh I got it, you know, like we got married, and you know, finally I didn't. But I didn't get it until I was thirty five years old. And my kids have it, and sometimes I have to ask them about their perspectives. I moved around so much as a kid. I looked forward to it. When we moved out of the house that my kids had been born in and lived in for the better part, you know, lived in for like fourteen years a piece, they were sort of undone by it, and I didn't understand it. I literally, in the back of my head, if not verbally, said, what's a big deal? You know, how's that for a perspective? It is a huge deal if you're actually there and Richard, you know, Robin and I are characters. You know, I'm born in the house, I grow up in the house. My kids are born in the house, or entire marriage and family is spent in that house, and is it a solace or is it a boundary that you're never able to get through of that? Experiencing that and examining that was, Oh my lord, I can't tell you how many how much conversation. This whole movie was just one big ass conversation about what it means, and not so much about what the words are, how we move around. That's the technical stuff that goes along. But every moment that we were off by ourselves, it seemed to me we were trying to weigh this very specific thing of what we have always, what we have all been through in our odd you know, celebrated goofy stupid individual lives, and what it meant to this the h E R E aspect of this story that we were trying to tell, and Bob particularly I mean Bob's, and we all I think, incorporated our own approach to our art form and commercial life to it. Bob is a filmmaker, is not about to do a shot that anybody could do, you know, And he's not about to tell a story cinematically in ways that have been done before. He's just built that way hell anybody could do that. You know, he says stuff like that. And Eric, as a screenwriter, he's constantly landing on this place where only his words on paper can translate this thought process. And Robin and I you know, I'll Paul everybody, everybody, And the thing is like, I know, the lines turned me loose. Let's go, let's go. What are you going to do? You're going to try that? Let's try that? Are you going to just take it? You know, this ongoing game of improvisational emotional football in which you're just and I mean football is the international sense. Yes, Premiership, the Championship, as league. It is a ball that is kind. It's a matter of engines, it's a matter of a curve. It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time in order to receive what's given to you and then pass on to somebody else.
Yeah, it was. I know the film uses digital anti aging technology and you have to see yourself many years younger. Was there any special feeling of that?
It was kind of great. Yeah, I mean because it's a great tool because it's been you know, people are aged and younged up in movies, you know, since since Edison stole George Melier's film process back in the early nineteen hundreds. It was fascinating to watch because it ended up being the tools were so much better that it was a different completeness to it. Absolutely, you know, we all had you know, you always have hair and makeup. We went through extensive everything you know they did. At one point, I'm sitting there and Jennifer are fabulous makeup artist. She's just looking at me. She just grabbed both of my ears and then lifted them up and shoved them into the top of my head, and I said, what are you doing? He said, oh, Tom, we're working on you being seventeen and as you age, your ears grow and lower on your head, and so I'm trying to see if I'll be able to glue them up on the side. I said, have at it, girl. So that all of the tool aspect of it is standard. What was new is that we could see it in real time. We didn't have to send it off and wait for a long post production thing. Because that was the deep fake technology that uses some form of AI just to make it much much faster and immediate. And listen, what one of the things that it shows is just how old bio because you know, you got to have posture and energy. If you're if everything else about you looks like you're twenty two years old, you're going to have to embody a twenty two year old. I'm going to tell you right now, it's very hard to leap off a couch and enthusiasm as a as a as a sixty seven year old guy. At the time that.
We did it, I didn't even think of that.
Hey, you know what, had a lot of tea, had a lot of protein for us, you know, got a lot of rest, got a lot of stretching, you know, in order in order to make that happen.
Yeah, you mentioned presence there, and that was a theme that definitely struck me. What do you find helps you be the most present today as you're living.
There are times that I think you have to be oblivious. You have to sort of like enforce it. You have to not think of things. It's crazy, but one of the most basic things I think that I learned probably in junior college when I actually for the Chabeau Community College, when it truly did begin to study this kind of stuff, is that the words what you are saying has to be so familiar to you that you don't think about it. And that is a degree of being oblivious to the specifics of what you're doing, because if you're trying to get through it, that means self consciousness. That means you are not getting out of yourself, and self consciousness is the death of performance. Ask any actor this thing is that if you have a scene, well, you have to go to a deep emotional place and the only way to do it is to go there. Chances are you have had the most wonderful day of your life prior to that, or that it is so much fun to come to work that day, all right, So that's one thing that you have to do. And the other side of it is if you have to be charming and convivial and funny on paper on stage a day, chances are you're going through some personal health you know off uh, you know off camera that you just have to be oblivious to somehow. And along with that, there's a I can't discount enough the joy of the hang I think what I do for a living joy does does it promotes it? The and joy not necessarily being we're all having a great time, We're all you know, singing campfire songs, but the joy of allying yourself with great collaborators and trusting that they are going to get better stuff out of you that you could possibly bring yourself, and being open to just knowing it so well. Everybody says, well, what do you mean by what do you mean? What do you mean by learning the lines? I mean learning the lines like you know, the of the lyrics to the best song you ever heard in your life. Yesterday, all my trouble seems so far away now. I need a place that's here to say, Oh, I believe you got to be able to rattle it off that fast, that easily. It's going to be so much a part of you that you don't have to think about it all. If I actually sang the right words to you.
Yeah, No, that makes a lot of sense. And I feel there's this It's amazing to see your enthusiasm, excitement, joy, you know, continuing your career when you're even what you just said now of working with people who can get even more out of me, and that belief that there's more in you always. You've talked about imposter syndrome in the past, which obviously I'm sure everyone when they look at you find it hard to believe. But I recognize when you've shared or I've heard you talk about it before, it's very real. It's very genuine, this feeling of like, oh, well, you know, walk us through that. How you've been able to constantly believe there's more in you, to give, more, to do, more, to find.
Somebody wanted me to do a movie, all right, and it was great and I should have done it. It was going to be for a lot of money or peing. You go somewhere cool, you get a good you know, all that kind of stuff. There was no reason not to do the movie, except there was something that I just said, this is not the match for me because number one, I don't have any curiosity about the subject. Now that's not the only reason to do it, but in order to translate the theme of the movie through a performance, there has to be some sort of challenge and curiosity to it, and I had none. That was one thing. But the other part of the two I was searching. I was I was having a one on one talk with the director and I just I said, look, I said, I don't I don't have the I don't have the I don't have the countenance, and the drinker said, countenance. The hell does that means? Said, there is a thing that we all carry with us. We have a countenance that comes from everything we've said, all the work that we've done, all the all the times that we've either succeeded or failed, Because they both go together. Failure teaches you a lot more than success does. I'm talking about commercial success, but that idea that you walk away from a job and you think that we went to a new place in order to in order to examine this theme that only we could have done unless we all got together and challenge each other and made it happen, and without that type of stretching of one's countenance that you come into. Uh, that's that to me is the That's that to me is the big mcgilla. I still find myself, uh, completely at the mercy of that instinctive moment of oh my god, that's what that's what I think, you know, and the next thing you know, you'll want to do it and you're talking talking about it continuously, And there is nothing that anybody says that detracts from that initial initial experience because you know the other other, you know that there's there's plenty of the things that you can do because they're fun. I mean, my my, my beginnings. The first time I was a professional actor, we were in repertory theater uh at uh with my Vincent Dowling at a place called the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. And because we were in a rep we did everything we did. We did Hamlet and King John at Othello at the same time we were doing fabulous Rip Warren comedies that everybody, everybody dug. The countenance then is exchanged between them between the two, and that's something that it's not a burden at all, but it is a it is a prism through which a decision has to be made. Going back again to this idea of this, I believe that mike my count and look it up staff, look up countenance for me. My countenance is not going to aid the examination of this theme. And movies work when the theme is worthy of being examined by that movie. And so in that case you just have to say, uh no, there's a you need somebody that's going to come in there like a you know, like like a like a mad dog and devour that bone and I just my countenance doesn't match up to that.
Yeah, it sounds like you've never compromised that.
Oh, I've compromised you twenty of time. Okay, you know making mistakes. You know, there was a period of time. Look look at my IMDb. It might be up in triple digits by now, you know. And it was a time where I just said, they are asking me to be in a movie. You don't say no to that. And that's young. That's the stuff that you do in your twenties and in your thirties, and then sometime in there you start thinking about no, no, no, no, wait to bit, Wait a minute, wait a minute, the greatest decision. By the way, I don't think I've ever said no yet, except by schedule. But now it turns out to me that's where you start shaping what your your art and the body of work you have to start. The power is saying no. And that's really it was really hard to do when you know everybody thinks you're great. You show up and everybody wants you to do it, and everybody says fabulous things. But I've I didn't know I was compromising because I didn't know any better. But there was a moment. I guess when you say, like, ah, you know, I don't. I don't want to. I don't want to. I think I'd be compromising somewhere here. And so the first time I said no to something, it was a very it was it was on one hand, liberating inter course. I might have thought I made the biggest mistake of my life. You know, I tell you, if you take any great take, any great magnificent take, let's just pull from to take Faye done Away and Lawrence Olivier, they have very specific countenances. There is a thing that you will say, oh my god, the countenance of Lawrence will really really Ozzie Davis, Well, you know any grade then wow, that countenance matches. Yes, And that's I guess that's what I'm.
Yes, yes, yes, there is.
It makes like a you know, some sort of cosmic weight that they carry along with it that makes sense for what they're doing.
Yeah, for sure, there's a listening to you speak about I mean, it's so relieving to hear that you've compromised sometimes, like because it's a relief I'm.
By my house right if but not a compromised you know, how about that you want to do that. We'll bring that well, I love it. I mean, we'll bring the DVDs and say this is the DVD of Compromise.
I mean, that'll be amazing. No, I think, because I think we're so good, we forget that. You're used to celebrating and counting someone's wins and hits when they've had so many, and you look over the compromises or whatever it may have been. And so it's a relief hearing that because your values of how you pick a project, of how you work on a project seems so so strong and defined now, and that's obviously come with time. As you were making here, was there a particular scene that reminded you of a time in your life that you want to revisit, relive, rethink.
Eugene O'Neil wrote All Wilderness. He wrote that play as the life he would have, he wanted to have, he wished he had had, the family that he had wished he had. And I always read that Eugene only is a big reason why I became an actor, because I saw great productions of his stuff back in nineteen seventy five, seventy six, And when I finally saw All Wilderness, I was knocked out because it was as delightful a play as it was. And I'd always heard that he wrote that as you know, the family that he wished he had. I thought about that when I was doing here, because there are moments, for example, when we're just sitting watching TV and you know, Robin is there, the kids are little, and we're just there. We ended up talking about what would be on the TV, you know, and I went right back to you know, I don't know it was a Dean Martin show or an episode of something, even down to some of the commercials that we wanted to and those moments were transporting for me, but not in a home the way we were picturing it. I remember seeing those in an apartment that we lived in for two and a half years when I was walking to school by myself, or the first year's you know, somebody was married to a step spouse that was not the most benevolent human being in the planet earth. Right. Sometimes I remembered sometimes just that that gathering around like mindedly getting the same thing out of a TV show, like an electric fireplace. But it was solace. It was a togetherness that belied what was really going on. In the house. And there's a couple of those, particularly when the kids are little and Robin and Iron the early early years of our marriages, that were sublime right then and there because we're laughing, it's there, the kids are being goofy, there's a moment that there's a moment that comes along and what I don't think there's a better example of a true sense of family and home and connection in moments that are not Thanksgiving or Christmas morning, or a wedding or a kid They are when you're just sitting around on a Thursday night, you know, content and happy and nothing is happening except the sense of presence that's there. There's a couple of them. That's funny that they usually asked that because I realized now that the amount of the amount of suggestions we all had for how we would sit there, what would be on the TV, what we had done just before, was coming right out of right out of our individual lives, from Bob, from Eric, certainly from Robin and myself.
Yeah, it felt so real. It feels so real. Every scene, every conversation, every event feels so real.
One of the things that we learned because it's shot in this very specific you know, aspect ratio, you know, camera position is that everything works. Everything if you're in the scene, even if you're not talking, you are registering in a way that warrants attention. The stuff that is on the walls. I can't say enough about the TV. Here's something goofy. I walked onto the set one day and it was from a period from you know, early nineteen sixties or something like that, and the TV was an old General Electric TV that was the same model we had when Apollo eight flew around the Moon we had. This was the TV we had, all black and white thing with General Electric, had this big channel changing knob on the side. It was like that, and it was the same maple cabinet. It wasn't big. It was just not much. You know, it's on legs, and it had the cloth speakers at General Electric and any thing like that. And I immediately took a picture of it and I sent it to my siblings and I said, you recognize this and they all said, ah, that's a TV from the Johnson House. You know. It was like that. So it had these kind of like talismans that came along with it that oddly enough, they were. They were both great to see and bittersweet to remember. Does that make sense?
Yeah for sure? Sure? Do I know you're fascinated by space? Do you have any desire to go to the Moon?
Oh? You know, if they were going to do a thing where you know, regular blokes could just go up and go around it, I mean I take that.
That's it.
Oh yeah, just just to do it. But oh yeah, I.
Think I'm sure love to take.
Oh I'm not going with him, but he's not going there anyway. You know, they're just going up. But I've met I've talked to the I've talked to the crews that are in line to make the next orbit around the Moon that could happen as early as twenty five twenty six, And man, oh man, I just say, hey, if you need someone just to clean up and crack jokes, you got room in there, give me a call. I'll dead down to whatever weight requirements are necessary, because I wouldn't pass it up. But I said, but only if all of the windows are clear, because a lot of times those they have gone up and the windows get kind of like messed up because of zero gravity and the vacuum outside and the building material.
Right, was that fascination only from movies? Is that where it came from?
No, No, that came from I was right, smack dab, and I was that educatable generation for which it was. Space travel was the embodiment of every discipline that we were studying, current events, politics, physics, art, engineering, math. It was all all all wrapped up, all into one. It was on TV TV regularly. I was. I was just I was that the of course, now you're going to think about this, but the idea of being alone in space in a space suit, it was kind of mirroring my life when I was like seven, eight, nine, ten eleven.
Years Well, yeah, I mean it's I don't know if you saw that movie fly Me to the Moon recently, No, I did not.
But it's you know, it's streaming in the new movie economy, so I know it'll be there for a thousand years.
Yea. I just want to catch fascinating.
It's a little bit of the conspiracy theory really didn't happen yet. Normally I hate that kind of stuff, but it's good quality people.
Yeah, tru exactly that. I'd love to get your thoughts on it when you see it. Yeah, and your other fascination is world wars.
Well, this is another thing that goes back to the study of it. Let me put it. Let me put it to you this way. I was born in nineteen fifty six, that's eleven years after the war has done. So essentially everybody who is an adult in my life had memories of those years, whether they went to war or not. They had memories of the what I like to call the emotional stasis of the early nineteen forties, in which go back again. They did not know the war was going to end in nineteen forty three. They had no idea how long the war was. Who's going to live, who's going to die, who's going to win, who's going to not, who's not, who's going to come back nineteen forty three. If you're alive, they're not saying, hey, don't worry about it. The war is going to be over in just another eighteen months. They don't know that. And that was a palpable thing that was passed on to me because when it came around time to get to know the life stories of a teacher, a friend of my dad's, you know, parents of my pals, they would talk about those years, their youth in three distinctive parts, three acts of their lives, you know, which might have been picking up on because you know, some sort of story since when they were kids. It was before the war, when my dad was in high school. It was before the war, when he was working on a farm, listening to the radio and worried about, you know, not being able to afford the dentist. It was before the war. Then there was well that was during the war. It's a whole different storytelling process, the whole different guidelines of the narrative. Well, you have to understand that was during the war. That was forty two, was during the war, and their daily life was completely different than what had had been. There was less of things. There was this fear of this unseen enemy, possible attack. There were blackouts, They couldn't get cling peaches, they didn't have birthday cakes as much they had that it was during the war. And also I said, well where were you, Oh, well that was during the war. Well where were you, Well, I was in a you know, I was you know was my dad was in the South Pacific. He was a machinist and he would never have been in the South Pacific as a machinery were not for the war. Then the rest of their lives. When we show up, you know, and with this next generation shows up, when their kids show up, all this stuff happened, and again the narrative has completely changed. We have to understand that was after the war. So on one hand there was something to celebrate, but on the other hand, there was guess what. Life became one damn thing after another in a different way than it had been before the war. During and you know the people that you the people who did it well, you know, these storytellers, the teachers, or even the friends of my dads. When we're sitting around and everybody's relaxed on a Thursday night and they're drinking beers, you know, and they're talking about when they're getting to know each other. These the stories from any one of those acts I thought we were fastre were ponderable because as a seven year old, I'm hearing my dad and my mom and other people talk about when they were seven years old with the magnifying glass and the division of well, that was before the war. We did not know what was coming down the pipe. Then everything else that goes along with it. I still can't quite get past the fact that in nineteen sixty four, the Beatles are on the Ed Sullivan Show, and my dad is of the generation of just twenty years prior. The war was not yet over and they had no idea when they were ever going to come home. And now these four kids are up on there saying yeah, yeah, yeah, and playing guitars and stuff like that. Andybody, everybody's making a big deal about it. Part of it is never saw this coming, never would have never. And in a lot of ways now us younger generation did not have the same attention span for they had what they had been through. I mean until the you know, you can talk about Elvis Presley all you want, rightly, so he was a massive generational force, changed the world a lot of ways. But still VI's a v a World War two generation. The Beatles come along at nineteen sixty four, and it's almost as though the last vessage of that generation carries import you know, has has weight that we can pay attention to, even though I've you know, I've never stopped studying of it, because at the end of the day, it's just great storytelling. You want to talk about great protagonists, antagonists, You want to talk about the irony you want to talk about the schizophrenia of what can happen in good and bad. World War two is about as good as you're going to get. And also, here's this other thing that's ridiculously satisfying about it. It ended, there was a time when it was all done. And wars now go on for generations, and they go on for decades, and there are no there are no moments when you know, the swords are pounded into plowshares, not that that happened in you know, one hundred, nineteen forty five.
Yeah, it seems it seems as though, like not that it's any comparison with the events that took place, but our language of this generation has become pre pandemic during the pandemic abdemic.
Yeah, you could, you could probably look at it. There was a moment certainly the AIDS crisis came along and the pandemic of the of AIDS that certainly altered all of society in the same way you can talk about it. You could talk to an awful lot of guys who will say, well, you know what I'm saying, that was before AIDS. You know that that means and yeah, you would say the same thing about certainly the COVID pandemic. We went through something that I mean, my look, I got grandkids who are now talking about their lives. Well, that was doing COVID. Yeah, and so they didn't go to school, and they didn't see their friends. They were trying to do things online. It was really different. And now COVID has let go, and guess what now they're just getting on with the rest of the tasks of growing up with their life. So they too, you know, it might be a little young to remember, you know, before COVID, but they do. So. Yeah, so what's going to be next? Do you think what's going to be that next three acts structure to our to our collective history.
Well, as you keep saying, more will be revealed as well as.
This, Yes, this too shall pass, and more shall be revealed, and we will never all know of everything that we need to know.
Yeah, and you've been seen as the or even in a poll, voted the most trusted man in America.
That's something. There's an anomaly in the vote taking process. After all the times I've lied to everybody. Oh no, this is a great movie. Yeah, by all means, come see this movie that was a lie? Sometimes?
How does how do you how do you deal with that kind of movie?
Oh? I you know, I don't know, there's there's a yeah, okay, you know, I get it. That's good. I guess that comes around to perhaps the thing that I was talking about countenance wise. You know, if you were going to take somebody who is who's an artist and say who is the scariest person alive? You know, the you'll you'll come off with you know, I don't know, you know, Vincent Price, you know whatever. I'm an artist, I'm a storyteller, and I think I'll take that as as a testament to I guess the veracity that I brought to my craft, my my choice. I'd like to think that, you know, you go all in on a story on and say, hey, sit down, I want you might be interested in hearing this is that you're you're this an onyx exchange between myself and the audience, and if it's an honest exchange, then you could come to trust them. You know, that's not about thing. That's not a bad.
Thing, absolutely, and it's it's quite magical actually, I mean trust in that way. Of course, you know, Hollywood success you've spoken about it so many times, which is why we haven't dived into it. And then you know, a happy, healthy marriage, And how did you know Rita was the one? Like that's you know, how did you know?
Uh, divine providence? Uh you know, uh, maybe it's kind of like the same thing that happened when I was in school, uh and in high school, and I said, this can be school. There was a thing with the with the with reader or I just thought, wait, it could be like this, It could be like just sitting around that's it could be like a care free union. I didn't know that. How about that I had honestly, I had not truly experienced that somehow. And when it's there, you just kind of go, oh, I you know, I you know, i'd like to say. And then you know, and then we met and I said, and you know, and that was that. Okay, yeah, that's pretty much it. Then you get on with it, and you know, years later, no small amount of no small amount of me saying things like, oh, let me get this straight. You know, there's a lot of plenty of plenty of examples of that going on, you know, with so much so that oh, here goes dad, oh, here goes dad. Well, let me get this straight. Why would it work for me? Argument? I pull it out. I pull it out all the time, and you know we we do. She does too. And that's the exchange. Yes, and it's it remains glorious and you're and you can't create it anywhere else. Can't fake that.
Yeah, there's that beautiful acceptance speech that you have in twenty twenty when you talk about how a man is blessed with this beautiful family. Oh tears, and.
That you know you can't Number one, I am a sap. Number two you don't expect. You think you're going to be able to get up and you know, get away with it some even on I'm going to get it. There'll be some straight shooting. I'll see some great stuff. But then I just you look down and you know, there's my wife, and there's you know, there's you know a combination of all my kids sometimes four or five, you know, they're all just there. And what do you see? I see little babies, you know, and I you know, I you know, I see uh, I see this uh, this woman that has put up with so much stuff, and he just life flashes before your eyes. A little bit, and there's that there's that moment of surrealism where it's like, can somebody explain to me how this happened? I'm not I'm not quite sure.
And here does the same thing the movie here ah t I E. Yeah, there's a sense of your watching your life flash back.
What I really loved. Okay, this, I guess we have to be careful about spoiler a little yea, So we don't try.
I'm trying.
We don't want to go there. But I think that it ends up examining this truth that sometimes life passes in the wink of an eye and it's like, wow, are we here already? But there's other times in that same week of an eye, you comprehend it all. And I think that's what the that's what the movie works towards. If I can be so bold, And in many ways that was the theme that we were all working towards. And even in the perfectness of just the word it happened here, this is where that happened. Have you been Have you been in like a really super historic place, yes, where something went down. Now, maybe it's something from thousands of years ago, or maybe it's something that you witnessed on TV yourself. You go to I could go to like Washington, DC and stood on the you know, look, I made a movie in front of the Lincoln Memorial and believe that was happening. And then the years later, I'm going back and there is a plaque at the top of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial which is where Martin Luther King stood, and I have since gone back and read about that extraordinary day that did not happen by accident. In fact, it was originally going to be a protest, it was going to be a sit in, and the powers that be all got together said, rather than make it a protest of a sit in, make it a march. And suddenly also things happened, like there were plenty of bathrooms lined up, there were sandwiches that was made for people, there were social services, there were cops, there were army men standing by ready in case it was going to be a riot. And in nineteen sixty four or sixty three, a riot was definitely a possibility. It would have been a massive amount of civilic unrest. And instead it was all of these speakers. Marlon Brando was there for Charlton Heston was there along with everybody else, and Martin Luther King was everybody who could only speak for seven minutes because they did not want it to run over and become unruly. So every everybody who spoke spoke for seven minutes, and that includes the Reverend doctor Martin Luther King. And there's a reason that plaque is that that plaque is there in order to in order to place it and to be there and say that, then just envision every powerful place, powerful, powerful, spiritual.
Yeah, are there other places you've been to like that? We've revisited multiple times to decode and discover and.
Uhh yeah, I'll tell you. I'll tell you one who cares what I said on other podcasts. When we when we were doing I Believe or Not, when we were in Philadelphia, because I was making Philadelphia kids were you know, I uh are only had three kids there and some of them were with us and we were it was a freezing cold day. We had a day off, so we went and saw the sides, including it depends Hall, Liberty Bell. You know a whole bit. What are you going to do in Philadelphia? You're going to go do that, You're going to see the Liberty Bell you're going to go and Independence Hall being a famous place, and it's still in the same joint and it still holds the same you know, dimensional structure to it. You know, maybe a lot of everything it might have been, you know, recreated, but nonetheless there it is. And we were up in the Senate building and the Senate room, you know, because it had Congress, the Supreme Court and the Senate right there. And we were there and the the it's a national park. And the ranger said, if you look at all of this stuff as reproductions except that chair, you know, which is the original chair. It said, wow, it looked the same. It looked like a chair to me. So said that chair, that's an original chair and looked exactly like the same. Is that all this other stuff had been recreated to to the best of its authenticity. And it's a riser there and he said that spot in front of in front of the that the dais John Adams was sworn in as the second President of the United States, taking the place of George Washington. Was the first time in recorded history when the rule of a sovereign nation was passed to another without bloodshed, and him not being a relation, said something like that, and the head I said, we are in holy ground. Nobody died, the king is dead, long lived the king. No one was murdered, butchered. The hordes didn't come in and take away. No one was passing it on to his son in order to go on. There was no relation between John Adams and George Washington. The only thing that happened was this modicum of a thing they called democracy, which wasn't really democracy. I mean, women couldn't vote. If you were a slave, you were only three fifths of the human being. The only people that actually voted were a bunch of white men property owners who originally didn't want to pay their taxes to the to the crown. But look, look, look what happened there. I mean I I you know, I've been you know, plenty of cool joints in it, but they're they're this idea, not unlike the place where Martin Luther King's. The idea that was communicated right there was tantamount to being in you know, some version of the Holies, A Holies, you know, a precious shrine, a place of great faith and hope.
I mean, speaking to that impact, you received honorary Greek citizenship. Oh yeah, for I got a passport for your amazing work.
Then well yeah, yeah, look, we just love you know, we love Greece and you know it is the home country to to my wife's family, and well you can do.
This is something that that we do and that are doing Greece. You know, you go off to some other island, you're swimming somewhere, you're on a boat and you can kind of like pivot and all you see is land, sea and sky. There's no sign of humanity. And this is exactly what it's looked like for one hundred and ten thousand years. You know, this is exactly what this island was here in this exact same force. And by the way, there's a port right there, which was you know, a place of antiquity or that. But to be able to look at something that is on scarred exactly as it was, it's like looking at primordial force, like going back in time. And you see this aspect of the sky and the wind and the aridness of it, but the power of you know, a ship in order to get there. I've done that. You know any number of places, you know, great historical places like that, and it ends up It makes you feel really really teeny tiny. Sometimes it's like who are we? But you know, specs in the course of all of this is like standing under you know, a big, massive sky and finally seeing on a really super dark night, the you know, our galaxy or the Milky Way are so system and like, wow, I haven't been out of town for a while. I forgot how big that sky is and that that's a part of this. It's important to.
Go through that, so important, so important.
Have you ever seen a solar eclipse?
I'm sure i've kind of, but not I'm not.
Yes, not the last one, but the one prior to it. We made sure that we were in the path of totality and we saw it, and oh my god, it you I cannot talk. No special effect in any movie has ever had the same impact or effect on anybody who takes a look at what that is. You feel as though you are witnessing got the you know, the clockworks of God, and it's they can predict it, they know what it's going to be, and every step of it is you cannot fathom what you were seeing. And it made me feel in one hand, it made us all feel one hand, really super tiny, but at the other hand, magnificent because we're a race that knew when it was coming and could predict it, could make sure where there was. She was really marvel was that when you read it there was like these paths. You know, you can look at it on a map, but we just made sure that we were up in the panhandle of Idaho in order in order to take a look at people were just parking their cars willy nilly everywhere in order to be They were driving from you know, hundreds of miles on either side of it in order to get to this very specific path of totality. And it is man it is. It is a totally immersive experience. Don't miss it if you can.
Okay, next one, Tom. It has been such a joy spending time with you today. I feel so grateful to have been able to hear stories, be taken on adventures, and learn life's lessons.
Mind just a delightful conversation I've learned. I've loved hearing about your history. You know how you got for the oldest boy of a what is it a fractured rriage between Indian Indian mom and dad. You've I think you've done well in your in your pursuit.
Thank you. I'm very grateful. We end every On Purpose episode with a final five. These have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.
One word to one sentence back, yeah, which I will probably be.
I will probably break the rules, So don't worry if you do. Okay, But Tom Hanks, these are your final five. The first question is what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
Throw deep, baby?
And why?
If you're going to do it, do it. If you have the chance, do it. Don't pause the instinct. Man, If you got an instinct, go at it, throw deep.
I love that second question, what is the worst life advice you've ever heard or received?
Do fantasy Island. I didn't take it, but there's no reason to do fantasy island.
That's great. Question number three, how would you define your current purpose?
To be present wherever one is, whoever is one around, be present, be right there, show up, be present because that will teach you. Then I think how the difference between telling the truth to the best of your understanding and being all right with what happens next. If you can't do that, your life is going to be a wasted opportunity. If that makes sense. Question number four, are you making these up as you go alonger?
No, no, no, no, no, no, okay, every single question of us today. What's something you believe you're learning and evolving into right now or something that you're tinkering with right now?
Personally, there is an addictive quality to examining the past that can be counterproductive if you're only doing it in order to wallow in a nostalgia of how easy things were back then. I fancy myself a lay historian. I vanity of vanity. All is vanity. There's nothing new under the sun. Okay, So this stuff has been going on forever. If you are not looking, if I am not looking for examples of the frailties of the human condition, if I am only looking at the past in a version of there was an antagonist and there was a protagonist, and the protagonist one missing the point of how miraculous the human condition is. If you're going to I went to Egypt, and I saw all the stuff that tourists went. They see Egypt, right, And if you're going to Egypt in order to come up with some oh this is the home of great spirituality? Is there is a cosmic power here and this is where Okay, fine, go ahead. I'm not going to tell you that's not what's going on. But if you're not also seeing this ongoing friggin mystery of what humankind has figured out on its own, you're missing out. You know, there is, Yes, they call them the great Pyramids. They weren't necessarily built for great reasons. Sometimes they're just built in order to maintain the status quo of the halves and the have nots. When I heard a guy say the Sphinx, you know, the Great Sphinx. You could have been alive two thousand years after the Great Sphinx was built, and you're still in Pharaoic Egypt. It's still before the Common Era begins. And guess what, you and nobody else has any idea who built the Sphinx. That's how old it is, and that it's bailed as well as it And if you don't take that and understand, like, man, there's mystery there. Who did it, How they did it? That stuff's always interesting, but why they did it that's interesting too. But also that incredible impact of that the Sphinx will never be explained. If you're just there for the nostalgia union. I don't want to ride the camel, get your picture. You can do all that stuff, and that's a blast, but there's something to the past that if you allow yourself just to be soothed by it, you're missing out in a great life, lesson something of that is important as physics or.
Poetry so powerful. Why do you think we do that?
I think because we're looking for a We want to feel good about going to sleep at night, you know, we want to feel as though that there is this that there is this purpose that outside I think, aside the color of cosmic understanding that hey, you know what, you know, the universe is indifferent, but the human condition is not. That's what separates us from you know, you know, the chaos theory. We don't have to live in chaos if we choose not to, and if we're only looking at the past in order for some degree of Oh, we're so much easier back then. No, it's never been easier. As I said before, you know, no one knows that they're living. They're living in the fourteen hundreds. They were just live back then. And it might be high falutin, but what it says is, oh, I'll tell you this. What it says is our best days are yet to come. We are going to progress from here. And if you're just looking at the pass and saying, man, that was when it was great. I wish we could go back. No, you never want to go back. You always have to understand that our best days are still ahead of us. Otherwise, what's that say of us if we don't move forward? It says we gave up or got lazy, or ended up putting too much power in maintaining a status quo that ends up being a division between the halves and the half dots.
Absolutely well, said fifth and final question. We asked this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
Man, you spring this on me. You really, I'm looking at a wall of shame of people that your polaroids, of people that have been they all came up with something for that. They did one law that everybody had to follow, a law meaning you could be punished if you don't obey this law. Sure well, it can't be like a philosophical thing like be kind, you know, being kind as in the eye of the both the kinder and the kind e. I would pass a law that says, no one is allowed to infringe your prom the right in regards to what somebody else reads. That is, no matter how disagreement, whatever that disagreement is. To be free is to think, And the most physical manifestation of thought is in the choosing of what you read. So I would say that no one is allowed to infringe upon the right to determine up figure out what the legal point. No one is allowed to infringe upon the right of an individual to read what they choose to read. That would be mine, That would be the law. Now take a look at all the societies. You know I'm fascinated by I'm fascinated by communism, man, because those guys were idiots, you know, they truly were. And the idea that in East Berlin you cannot read, you cannot read to kill a mockingbird, or or you know any any or doctor Shivago for crying out loud. The idea that you can maintain order in society by preventing somebody from reading what they want to read. This is madness. This is tyrancy in it, This is this is this is draconian. What's the word I'm looking at that? That's despotism and its absolute height that you can do that. And I think on the opposite that absolute freedom to read what you want to read along? Would that create what you want to create as well? That should be the default position of the human condition? And is it an amazing that it's so?
That would be the law I would powerful unique and completely original answers worth waiting for.
Well as an author, you know, as a guy who writes. I'll bow to that.
Tom, Thank you so much.
Yes, thank you so much. Oh it's great.
It's a pleasure that I can't wait for everyone to go and watch here on November four.
All right, yeah, we'll pay that. Oh yes, God. Now, by the way, you can only see it in the theater. We okay, here's the thing, this is why this is one I crack Staff is so petrified. There is no streaming deal for this movie. You know, you you you're not going to be able to you know, log on, enter your past code, you know, share it with your friends and are they the only way you're gonna You're gonna have to drive to a place and buy a ticket at a certain time and sit in a room with a bunch of strangers. I love it, and watch this movie. It's almost unheard of. And of course everybody is petrified that that's going to be the requirements of seeing a movie. But that's the way it's going to be.
I love it. This is still one of my favorite experiences.
Oh yeah, it's the you know, uh not to canntinue along with. But this is thing that we talk about all the time right now, and I actually believe that podcasts can be an example of it. It is the experienial economy, meaning that it is one thing. Look, everything is a one on one. You listen to a record, you see a band, but the experience of being with others as opposed to be in your house or being on your headphones or being like that, being with others has a value to it that in some cases is worth money. Okay, that's commerce, but on other cases is to be sought. After my wife and I went to see a play in New York. It was a revival of Into the Woods, and it was more or less right after the pandemic. Theaters were back opening again. People were essentially living their lives again. There'd been enough, you know, everybody gotten enough vaccines and what have you, and COVID wasn't killing as many people as it had. And so we went to the theater we had, we knew some people in it, and it was here's this thing happened. You know, it's a theater, mumbled everybody, blah blah blah. It sold out, big hit and mumble, mumble mumble. And when the house lights went to half for the first act, there was a standing ovation. People stood up before a word, before a note had been sung, nothing had happened on the What was happening was the show is about to start, and it was a standing ovation. And I literally said, that's that's the experience. People are reacting to the experience of being with strangers or a handful of friends with strangers in a room and nothing. What is going to happen in this room will never be repeated. The only people that will participate in this is the folks that are here right now. And movies oftentimes can have that same experience because I can remember going to see two thousand and one or Jaws or Close Encounters of the or Aliens or you know, or Full Metal Jacket. I can remember the specifics of all those things, and it's the same experiential experience. And maybe it's maybe it's part of the economy, or maybe it's just part of the great human purchase that we all want to win on to participate in.
For sure, Thank you, Tom, thank you, thank you pleasure.
I really enjoyed it.
If you love this episode, you love my interview with Will Smith on owning your truth and unlocking the power of manifestation.
Anybody who hasn't spoken to their parents or their brother, call them right now. Don't think you're going to have a chance to call them tomorrow or next week.
That opportunity with my father changed every relationship in my life.