Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks cover W magazine for the June issue and talk about how their careers and the roles they’ve chosen have changed as they get older.
Hanks, who made his name off his romantic comedies like Splash, Big, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail wanted to segue into films where his character had more complicated conflicts like The Green Mile, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
“I told my agents that I wasn’t going to play pu***es anymore,” Hanks told the magazine. “I was tired of playing, ‘Oh, boo-hoo–I was in love, but oh, boo-hoo-hoo.’ There comes an age when you can’t do that anymore. I wanted to play men instead of boys. In your mid-30s, it’s time to start playing guys of compromise. And as you get older, men of bitter compromise.”
Roberts has tried to find roles that challenge her as an actress and that she can identify with.
“I think it’s called growing up. Light and funny has a more compelling quality when you’re younger,” she said. “But I haven’t abandoned the genre: I love falling down; I love Lucille Ball. It’s just that a lot of those stories revolve around problems that I can’t convincingly portray at this age.”
For their new film Larry Crowne, people might think on first glance it’s supposed to fall into that romantic comedy genre, but Hanks, who wrote and directed the film, wants people to take away more.
“The movie is about combating cynicism. People are naturally optimistic, but you have to choose to walk away from cynicism,” he explains. “You have to say, I am going to combat cynicism today. I had this idea about a unique guy who loses his job and then, at the end of the movie, realizes that it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He thought he was going to die, but it turned out great!”
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