Tom Hanks has built a career as one of Hollywood’s best actors thanks largely to his ability to be the everyman, embodying what everyone is thinking. That courtesy doesn’t extend, though, to the world of conspiracy theories. Tom Hanks thinks those people are fools.
Hanks has had to embrace the conspiracy world with his role as Robert Langdon in various adaptations of Dan Brown books, including The Da Vinci Code, but he’s not into conspiracies at all when the cameras aren’t rolling.
Angels and Demons, which became a Hanks movie based on books in 2009, is a particularly conspiracy-packed adventure. It features the Illuminati and its story revolves around the Catholic Church and a vial of antimatter. It’s truly wild stuff and one of the worst movies Hanks has ever made.
In an interview with Movies.ie, Hanks said he “loves to break down” conspiracy theories when people send them his way, but he would definitely take some convincing before he ever believed in one.
He added: “I usually start it with this question: ‘How stupid are you, that you got to believe this kind of evidence?’. I like nice, empirical evidence, I like historical fact. Because, otherwise, everything is a conspiracy theory. Everything is a conspiracy theory. So, I don’t believe them all, and sometimes I go out of my way to find out why they’re not accurate.”
We’re with Hanks. Every popular conspiracy theory espoused on the internet is deeply dumb, and Hanks is right to push all of those believers right off the edge of the flat Earth.
Thankfully, the best Tom Hanks movies aren’t as packed with conspiracies as his Langdon movies, which remain bafflingly popular at the box office. His best movies are often rooted in reality and focus on good people, because Hanks has a reason he doesn’t play villains.
For more on Hanks, check out our A Man Called Otto director interview, read our Asteroid City review, or find out why Tom Hanks’ voice once sent Florence Pugh to sleep.