He’s one of the greats, I agree. Plus he has no rape/sexual assault allegations or abusive behaviour on-set over a 40+ year career, so that gives him a 900% boost in my estimation.

He plays a lot of ‘safe’ characters. That is, characters that don’t require him to dig deep into his own capacity for human depravity or whatever, and I think this gives people the impression that he’s not in the same league as your De Niros or Pacinos. But I have never watched a film of his where he didn’t completely sell the performance to me, even if the movie itself was shite. He’s content and secure enough to not need to take roles that require him flay his psyche on-screen, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I love watching those intense performances of course, but he isn’t any less a master of his craft just because he has other focuses. It’s like guitar virtuosos such as Steve Vai, who can play just about anything with superhuman levels of skill, speed and precision, versus someone like BB King, who plays stuff that a beginner guitarist could use as great training material. No one, including Steve Vai, would say BB King is a lesser guitarist or musician because his music doesn’t require 12 fingers on each hand to play. Tom Hanks is the BB King of this tortured analogy, and someone like Gary Oldman is Steve Vai. Both great, but there’s more to it than mere ‘spectacle’.

I would love to see him to something more dark and evil, if only once. If Robin Williams can play a serial killer, and can play it well, Tom Hanks would absolutely smash that shit. Especially now that he’s an older fella; I think he could get away with a lot more without damaging his ‘brand’. I wanna see him be a serial killing, necrophilic, EVE Online-playing demonic monster.