INTERVIEW
Actor and self-confessed ‘Space Geek’ Tom Hanks, 67, reveals how he was affected by his parents’ divorce, why he only chooses roles he thinks will be fun, and that he’d clean astronauts’ boots if it meant travelling to the Moon
On a hot July day in 1969, a 13-year-old schoolboy called Tom Hanks was lying on the living room floor of his mother’s home in California. ‘I’d been waiting for it all day long, the TV was on one channel, and one channel only,’ the now entirely grown-up movie star Tom Hanks recalls. ‘The rest of the family was coming and going, as they weren’t quite as interested in it as I was.’
‘It’ was the historic moment when man first walked on the Moon – something the teenage Tom could not wait to see.
‘When the moment came, and Armstrong actually stepped off Apollo and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” a click went off in my head,’ he says. ‘I knew it was an evolutionary moment for the human species, and I was tickled and delighted that I had witnessed it.’
That delight in man’s exploration of the world beyond the boundaries of our planet has never ended: today we all may think of him as one of our most venerable and beloved leading men, but 67-year-old Hanks is perfectly happy to be known under the title of ‘Space Geek’.
It is what brought the veteran Hollywood star to London to oversee the creation of The Moonwalkers, an hour-long experience opening this month at London gallery Lightroom, offering a unique new perspective on humanity’s past and future voyages to the Moon.
The immersive attraction allows visitors to experience the sensation of walking on the lunar surface, and also tells the history of the Apollo missions alongside illuminating Nasa’s plans to return astronauts there in the coming years.
Hanks’ role is that of both enthusiastic narrator and interlocutor of the experience – he interviews the crew of Artemis 2, who next November are scheduled to launch a craft sending man beyond Earth for the first time in more than 50 years – and today, talking to me over Zoom from the book-lined study of his US home, his enthusiasm for the project remains palpable.
‘It takes people back, but it’s more than that,’ he says of The Moonwalkers. ‘Rather than it being just an examination of what we did 50 years ago, it is really about what we are doing right now – and I don’t just mean going into space, I mean the idea of putting human beings on another extra-terrestrial body. Because we can understand that it’s only a matter of time until human beings figure out how to live somewhere else. And even if it is billions of years from now, we will be going based on some version of the technology and the spirit of those f
