Tom Hanks was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar a total of six times, and he took home the coveted statue twice: for his starring role as “Forrest Gump” and the AIDS drama “Philadelphia.”
When you think of Tom Hanks, the first thing that comes to mind today is probably his dramatic roles in the aforementioned and other films such as ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or ‘The Green Mile’. But before he first switched to drama in the early 1990s, Hanks was best known as a comedy actor: During the 1980s, the now 67-year-old made audiences laugh with works such as ‘Gift is still too expensive’, ‘My devilish neighbors’ and ‘Big’.
However, it was the starting signal for his first film career Only possible because another successful comedy actor really wanted to prove that he could also handle serious roles: Bill Murraywith whom Hanks probably shared the German dubbing voice with good reason – both stars were voiced by Arne Elsholtz until his death.
Bill Murray wanted to prove his dramatic skills – and Tom Hanks took advantage
By 1984, Hanks had only played a handful of TV roles and taken on smaller roles in films such as the slasher ‘Panic Fear’, but his breakthrough was still waiting to happen. That changed when he was finally offered the lead role in the fantasy comedy ‘Splash’, in which a fruit and vegetable seller falls in love with a mermaid (Daryl Hannah).
Bill Murray was originally going to play the lead actor Allen Bauer. Thanks to hits like ‘Caddyshack – madness without a handicap’ or ‘I think a moose is smooching me!’ the later ‘Lost In Translation’ star was already a sought-after name for comedic roles, but Murray had bigger ambitions – and ‘Splash’ instead decided to star in ‘The Razor’s Edge’, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by William Somerset Maugham. Murray took on the lead role of Larry Darrell, who struggles with war trauma, searches for enlightenment and becomes entangled in an ill-fated love triangle.
The project was so important to Murray that he even co-wrote the script and made the film’s production a condition of his participation in ‘Ghostbusters’. But in the end, he fell quite badly: neither the critics nor the public bought him as the tragic hero, and “On the Knife’s Edge” became a huge flop.
Here’s one of the poster motifs for the film, which gives a good idea of how strange Murray’s forced image change must have seemed at the time:
Hanks, meanwhile, rose to fame with ‘Splash’ – and, unlike his colleague some ten years later, immediately managed to reinvent himself with a dramatic role. Later, Murray also showed in films such as ‘Broken Flowers’ that he also mastered the quieter tones, but without completely denying his comic roots.