Tom Hanks Says He Has Acted in ‘Some Movies That I Hate’: ‘Let’s Admit This’

“We all have seen movies that we hate. I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them,” the Oscar winner said

Tom Hanks.

Tom Hanks isn’t a fan of some of his filmography.

In an interview published with The New Yorker on Sunday, the 66-year-old actor discussed how it may not be fair to judge a film after a single first viewing.

But, added the Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece author, “Let’s admit this: We all have seen movies that we hate. I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them.”

As for how a film is received in general, “Someone is going to say, ‘I hated it.’ Other people can say, ‘I think it’s brilliant.’ Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is,” the Oscar winner explained, referring to the idea as “Rubicon No. 3” in his list of “five points of the Rubicon that are crossed by anybody who makes movies.”

“The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. … You are going to be in that movie,” Hanks said. “The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make, or it does not work and it’s not the movie you wanted to make.”

From L: Tom Hanks in Big (1988), Forrest Gump (1994) and A Man Called Otto (2022).

“The commercial performance of the film,” Hanks said, is the fourth Rubicon, “because, if it does not make money, your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be. That’s just the fact.”

And the fifth and final Rubicon is time, which the actor illustrated with examples including It’s a Wonderful Life, which became more popular and beloved much later than its 1946 release, and his own 1996 film That Thing You Do!, which he wrote, directed and starred in.

“I loved making that movie,” Hanks said. “I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it. When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of vox populi. It didn’t do great business. It hung around for a while, was viewed as being some sort of odd, kinda quasi-ripoff of nine other different movies and a nice little stroll down memory lane.”

“Now the same exact publications that dismissed it in their initial review called it ‘Tom Hanks’ cult classic, That Thing You Do!’ So now it’s a cult classic,” he added. “What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time.”

Tom Hanks.

Hanks’ comments about his own films come after, earlier this year, he admitted that he can’t watch some of them.

As the actor said on a January episode of The Great Creators with Guy Raz podcast, “I wrestle with authenticity. I wrestle with the difference between lying for a living as an actor and lying to myself as a human being.”

Hanks went on to say shortly after that he doesn’t watch some of his own films, including his “big hits,” because he sees “the falsehood in them. I see the loss. I see that one time, ‘Oh, man, I missed that opportunity.’ ”

“And it’s not because, at the moment, I chose not to — it’s because, after it was done, I realized I didn’t go far enough. I didn’t go to the place that I could have gone,” he added.