Tom Hanks has been making movies now for more than four decades. During that time he has starred in some of the best movies ever made and received countless awards and accolades for his acting skills. Of course, when you’ve been in as many films as Hanks they’re not all going to be winners.
In fact, Hanks himself knows they’ve not all been great and he’s called out The Bonfire of the Vanities as the “crappiest” movie he ever made. Directed by Brian De Palma, Vanities is a black comedy movie about Sherman McCoy (Hanks) a sleazy Wall Street banker who helps his mistress cover up the accidental death of a Black teenager. A financial and critical disaster, Vanities was eviscerated by critics, audiences and even its cast.
“It’s one of the crappiest movies ever made,” Hanks told Oprah Winfrey during an interview, later explaining that he realises now he couldn’t relate to the character and “bullshitting his way through” didn’t work. That said the experience did teach Hanks a valuable lesson about the world of filmmaking.
“Yet if I hadn’t gone through that experience, I would have lost out on something valuable,” he explained. “That movie was a fascinating enterprise from the word go. It was bigger than life, and for some reason, it had a huge amount of attention on it.”
“I can go to Germany, even now, and people will say, ‘How come you don’t make good, gritty movies like “The Bonfire of the Vanities” anymore?’,” Hanks continued. “They have no concept of what it meant to be an American and have that movie enter the national consciousness. ‘Bonfire’ taught me that I couldn’t manufacture a core connection.”
Hanks now apparently only accepts a film if the project excites him, which explains why he’s enjoyed such an impressive career over the last few years. That said, what on Earth did he see in The Da Vinci Code that excited him?
If you love Hanks check out our list of the best Toy Story characters.