(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 17 August 2025 16:15, UK
Every jobbing actor would love nothing more than a guaranteed job and a steady paycheque, which begs the question as to why Tom Hanks even bothered going to an audition for a role he didn’t want.
At the time, he was a million miles away from winning consecutive Academy Awards for ‘Best Actor’ and becoming ‘America’s Dad’, with rejection the order of the day. It took Hanks a while to gain a foothold in Hollywood, and when he was trying, he still decided to sabotage himself.
He wasn’t even an unknown; he was a nonentity. Hanks wouldn’t make his screen debut until 1980, which saw him cross film and television off the list with an appearance in an episode of The Love Boat and a feature-length outing in the shoddy slasher, He Knows You’re Alone, which indicates that he wasn’t particularly choosy about the work.
However, he did have some principles, after revealing that he’d conspired to bomb his way through an audition for a TV show he never wanted to be cast in. It’s the age-old struggle of the jobbing actor: Hanks was just one of many making the rounds and performing screentests in the hopes of being hired, but he still knew where to draw the line.
“I tested for the TV version of Breaking Away and didn’t get it,” he told Richard Schickel. “I tested for the TV version of… what was the Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn movie? Foul Play.” From the sound of it, he was specialising in auditioning for short-lived shows adapted from reasonably popular movies.
Peter Yates’ Oscar-winning Breaking Away gave rise to a series of the same name that was cancelled after seven of its eight episodes aired, while the seven-time Golden Globe-nominated Foul Play was a box office hit that failed to resonate without its stars, faring even worse than Breaking Away by getting canned halfway through its ten-episode run.
Hanks definitely dodged a couple of bullets, but there was one he didn’t want in the chamber to begin with. “I tested for some show called Blue Jeans about a rock and roll band,” he shared. “I actually kind of learned how to sandbag the audition for that one, because I didn’t want to do the role. If they gave me that job, I didn’t want to have it.”
The first two weren’t long for the world, but he didn’t have any problems giving his all in the screentest. Blue Jeans was an entirely different case, though, with the eventual superstar intentionally giving a shite audition because he wanted nothing to do with the show, which must have been awful, looking at how the other pair turned out.
There was at least a silver lining, with Hanks’ soul-destroying trawl through the endless circuit eventually bringing him Bosom Buddies, an audition that finally got him his first major recurring role. It was cancelled after two seasons and 37 episodes, but it was the launchpad he’d so desperately craved, with the sitcom offering the chance to showcase his comedic talents, which came in very handy when his big-screen career began in earnest with Ron Howard’s Splash.
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