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Tom Hanks Breaks Down As He Talks About His Lonely Childhood

By Victoria Miller
Published on: 12:37 PST, May 8, 2016

Tom Hanks got emotional about his childhood in a rare interview. Hanks broke down when recalling his transient childhood in an interview with Kirsty Young of Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, according to The Guardian. When talking about the records he would take with him to a desert island, the actor recalled that after his parents divorced when he was 5-years-old, his father, Amos, moved him and his siblings to 10 different homes in five cities within five years.

Hanks and his siblings were mostly raised by their father who worked as a chef and went on marry two more times. Tom and his brother briefly lost touch with their mother, Jan, a topic that is clearly still painful for the 59-year-old two-time Oscar winner.

But Hanks revealed that hearing the Richard Strauss song “Also Sprach Zarathustra” from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was a light bulb moment for him when he was a teen.

“This was the ‘wow’ moment of my life going from a kid trying to figure out what’s interesting in this life to young man yearning to be an artist,” Hanks said. “I started asking myself: ‘How do I find the vocabulary for what’s rattling around in my head?’ Not long after I started going to the American Conservatory theatre by myself to see plays I had no idea even existed.”
Tom Hanks had to compose himself when Young asked him to describe what the unspoken feelings in his head were.

“What have you done to me?” Hanks said before admitting that he put too much thought into his list of songs. “What it was, it was the vocabulary of loneliness.”

Tom Hanks had spoken about his childhood in the past, but his latest radio interview sheds new light on his struggles as a child. In fact, in previous interviews, the actor put on a brave face when talking about his past. In a 2001 interview with Oprah Winfrey for O Magazine, Tom Hanks said he never felt intimidated by his nomadic life.

“I was never intimidated by change. I was like an army brat who had lived all around the world,” Hanks said at the time. “I always had plenty of friends and lots of stuff to do, because I aggressively made those things happen. I didn’t want to be lonely. I knew that when I went to a new school, sooner or later someone was going to laugh at something I said in the handball line, and boom!—it would all be fine. Sometimes it took two days, but other times it happened on the first day at lunch.”

Hanks even said he felt like he had an advantage with all of that school switching.

“Because I went to so many different kinds of schools, I got a wide view of the way others did things, and I thought it was all so interesting,” Tom said.

Tom Hanks married his first wife, Samantha Lewes, when he was just 21-years-old, and he admitted to Young that it was to “quell the loneliness.” But he said that when he met his future second wife, Rita Wilson, he knew he would never be lonely again.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be lonely anymore, that’s how I felt when I met my wife,” he said.

The couple married in 1988, but according to People, Tom had his eye on the pretty actress more than 15 years earlier when he saw her guest star on a 1972 episode of The Brady Bunch. Wilson played a cheerleader on the classic sitcom episode, and Hanks recalled thinking “that girl’s cute” when he first saw her.

You can listen to Tom Hanks’ full interview with Kirsty Young on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs broadcast, which is available for download.

[Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images]

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