Tom Hanks on Toy Story, Sequels and The Scene He Regrets

0:00The Rest's Entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, one of the strangest signs of status in show business is being very, very hard to reach.

0:09Richard Osman:Exactly. You get to a certain level in the business where you don't want anyone to talk to you at all. And there are some people who are notoriously difficult to get hold of. Christopher Nolan, for example, is famously almost completely... He doesn't even have a mobile phone. I mean, you literally cannot get hold of Christopher Nolan. He says, of course he does. He's got a sneaky little mobile, has he? yeah he's on whatsapp groups but uh he doesn't want you to know that should i tell you who's easy to get hold of octopus energy yes so octopus energy if uh you know the score when one of your service providers writes to you you've got a question for them or you're disputing something you reply and immediately says you cannot reply to this email with octopus energy any email they send you you can reply to and it will go to your dedicated team which to me feels like one of the greatest advancements I've heard of the last 30 or 40 years.

0:59Richard Osman:You can actually reply to people. Would it be possible to contact the people I'm paying my money to? Well, with Octopus email, you can reply directly to your own dedicated small team. I mean, that's amazing, right? The 2026 FIFA World Cup meal at McDonald's is underway with one of nine legendary cups in the lineup. Christian Pulisic, David Beckham, Laminio Mal, Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, Son, Hyung-min, Alfonso Davies, Santi Jimenez. And between the posts, it's grimace. Get one of nine collectible cups with a FIFA World Cup meal. At participating McDonald's for a limited time. While supplies last, all rights reserved.

1:372026 McDonald's at FIFA World Cup 2026.

1:41Richard Osman:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+.

2:12Hello and welcome to this episode of the Rusters Entertainment Questions and Answers Edition. I'm Marina Hyde.

2:18Richard Osman:And I'm Richard Osman. And are you nervous, Marina? Shall we tell people where we are? Yeah, we are in Claridge's and the person doing the answers to your questions is Mr. Tom Hanks. He's due any moment. I keep looking through that door just in case you turn that up. Well, if we stop in the middle, it's because Tom Hanks has just turned up. You will understand why. We've got obviously lots of questions about Toy Story 5 and all Toy Stories that have gone before. One, two, three and four. But we're going to get deeper into those huge unifying roles he's played across absolute decades of one of the best all-time careers in cinema.

2:54Richard Osman:We've got stuff about Aston Villa. We've got... His favourite tank. I'm incredibly excited to talk to him and thank you for arming us with such amazing questions as well. I hear a noise in the corridor, so Mr Tom Hanks is on his way. please let us compose ourselves and enjoy this episode. Tom, welcome. You have been playing Woody for over 30 years. And our first question comes from Steph Allen. And she says, when you first joined the cast of Toy Story, did you have any inkling of how successful Pixar and specifically the Toy Story franchise would end up being? They were explaining it to us as though it was a volatile mixture that could blow everybody's fingers off if we didn't do it right.

3:43It was this new technology of animation that wasn't hand-drawn on cells by artists, that it was going to be this, well, we can show you sort of what it looks like and it should all come together. They kept saying should, we hope, maybe. But as the guy, look, my job is to inhabit something that is not myself. The only thing that I saw was about 12 seconds of a line from a movie called Turner and Hooch, in which I'm screaming at a dog. It was a thing where I was like, don't eat the car, don't eat the car. And they animated Woody, as you know, Woody right now. It was just him against a blue background.

4:27And they say, see what we can do with the thing. And it was all this elbows and fists and outrage and what have you. And I said, wow, you want me? Sure. And then for the next two hours, they kept explaining to me what the process was and what the story was going to be. And I said, guys, I'm good. Yeah, I don't, I'm in. Tell me where to show up.

4:51Richard Osman:I'm going to do some acting. That's it. The thing that then was actually a great part of the process was, and I got to give this up to the powers that be, certainly John Lasseter at the time that he was, you know, the head of Pixar and all of the whole Pixar team, this phalanx of folks that never stopped testing material. We did about 80 % of a movie that they threw out. They put it together and they said, there is something intrinsically wrong with the DNA that we started off with. And I guess they made a painful call to us all saying, everything you've done, we're going to start all over from scratch was.

5:30And I said, okay, all right, fine. And then in out it came a whole different relationship between Woody and Buzz and our original characters as well. And I had to say, I had to give that up to that. That's a pretty bold throw in order to make on something that they just wanted to get right. and by the time you get to see the finished thing, I'm just like, I can't believe that I'm in something that is as fascinating as this.

5:58Richard Osman:Is it quite a rare throw in Hollywood to throw things out like that in your experience? 80 % of a movie? Yeah, that's rare. Yeah, I can understand. You know those first three days of shooting? We're going to reshoot that. And I know that there are some filmmakers that build in two weeks of reshoots into the actual budget. But, you know, the finances are so absolutely insane. as well as I guess in some ways the egos that would be involved that make Pixar different. There are other times once you get the template down, you've got it and it's all going to work and they're going to put it all together.

6:33The fact that they all go back and I guess in some sort of like hothouse boiler room atmosphere, they just test it and test it and test it amongst themselves, not a screening thing. They just, are we doing this right? And they all draw and they all put up these animatics and their storyboards that are magnificent. But that they were willing to say this isn't what we originally intended to be. That's a deep throw as far as I'm concerned, and God bless them. And I'm going to assume now that that testing process is now built into all of the other ones, which is why it takes so damn long to shoot these things and get them done.

7:10It's like, it's two and a half years, you know, of my involvement in it about every six months.

7:15Richard Osman:I have a question from Charlotte who says, this will not be unfamiliar to you. When I watched Toy Story 3 in that now infamous scene with the enormous incinerator, I sobbed with my child and promised her that I'd never throw away her toys. 17 years later, I still have every single one. What do you struggle to let go of? Asks Charlotte. Oh, my Lord. She got philosophical at the end there. Just a little bit. I am. I'm trying to get into this combination. You know the book by Marie Kondo, you know, clearing out your closet. I try to give up anything that does produce joy, that does not produce joy in my hand.

7:53Richard Osman:You started with the stuff that produces joy. I keep the joy thing as best I can. But then you combine that with the diabolical sounding Swedish death cleaning, which is not. Let's talk about that. And some combination between there, I will literally force myself to give up the sweatshirt that I wore the day I moved my third son into college that I bought at the bookstore that day. I must say, I still have those. So, you can't get rid of some of that. And it's not because it looks good or it doesn't have holds in it. It's because, no, you don't understand. I spent a very important day wearing this, you know, back in 19, whatever it was.

8:39Richard Osman:Well, that's the interesting part of Charlotte's question, I think, because you have, through this character and through this incredible franchise, been part of so many childhoods. And, of course, parents is a huge part of those childhoods. You must get a sense of how much these films mean to people. More so, I think, than anything else. Anything else you've done? Well, it's because of the volume. Yeah. And it's because there are now – I was talking with Tim. It's like it's a shame that there's a number that is attached to any of these movies. They should just call it, here's the next Toy Story movie or, you know, another Toy Story, five, four, three, two, one, whatever it goes.

9:16But there is a contract that you always have with the audience anyway, right? And they never forget the first time they saw the movie, whatever it comes down to. but they see it in a different way when they are six or 16 but now we are into 56 year old people that are talking about the first time they saw woody and buzz together and how much it meant them and how they go back to it again and again and again and again and it produces these same feelings along with reflection of all the wisdom that they have since acquired because they now have kids that were their age when they saw it the first time.

9:58I don't discount the power of cinema because I have that, my own reference in my head for individuals that I might meet because they were in a movie that I saw when I was 18 years old.

10:12Richard Osman:Can you think of specific examples of people you've met? Well, like I have met Pierre DeLay, you know, who was in 2001 A Space Odyssey, and I become a babbling fool. That's amazing. And I tell him I've seen 2001 A Space Odyssey 119 times and I've always seen something different. Can I ask you please a question about when you were running upside down? You know, that kind of stuff. And it's very wonderful. And that when I am in an elevator with someone who has a six-year-old child in tow, and they are trying to explain that this guy who got on on the fourth floor is Woody. And you can't, and this just simply does not compute until I get the kid to close their eyes.

11:00And then I say, imagine, think of Woody now, can you see him? All right, well, oh my God, here we are in the elevator at the same time. And you see their face just kind of like explode in this recognition and joy. You don't discount that. That is the production of high art and a very, very personal moment between you and a six-year-old or a 56-year-old. But it's part of maybe a shrinking mainstream culture. You've always been interested in those kind of big unifying roles that lots of Americans can buy into. Is it harder to find those roles in a much more fractured culture? As you know, I always go back to, you know, this has come up periodically as, you know, some brand of new technology becomes the habit of how we experience these one-on-one things.

11:48Without a doubt, there is, I think, a greater power now to those fewer and fewer things that garner all of our attention more or less at the same time. because, you know, I can entertain myself, anybody can entertain this if they want to all day long in three-minute increments, you know, on whatever they tend to swipe through. So, the power of that union of an individual experience that you actually share with 200 or 1 ,600 strangers at the same time in the same room or maybe just talk about after you've all been able to see it, it will always be here. It will always be a part of the consciousness.

12:27But I go back to periods of time when most of culture was aware of a great opera or a great Shakespearean play. And it just becomes more diffused. And eventually, there's just less and less of those – one of the grand unifying moments, G-U-M's. Let's call them that. Yeah, don'ts. The grand unifying moments of no matter what your age, no matter what culture is, even no matter what language that you speak that binds us, binds everybody together. And let's just call it art for the sake of what art can do.

13:03Richard Osman:We'll call it grand unifying moment pictures. We can call it Gump for short, if that's helpful. Oh, my Lord. Write that down. Yeah, there we go. Quick, staff. By the way, not a bad example of that, too. Yeah, a really good example of it. And, you know, when that happens, all you can do is bow your head in humble submission. You know, finally, I've got a question from Neil Anderson, which actually talks about your personal role in that sort of phenomenon. He says there's a graphic that's doing the rounds showing your 90s run, and it's frankly ridiculous. Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Toy Story, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile Cast Away.

13:35Richard Osman:At the time, were you aware you were in the middle of this once-in-a-generation golden run, or did you just feel like I'm making the next film? Was there something magic? No, no. I felt fortunate in that these things came along and I was fascinated by the subject. That was it. And the alliances that went into all of those, because dare I say it, sometimes you think you're making the same movie and you are not. You are making some other film that somebody else that is not the same thing. But also too, I think you can kind of look back on that. But I always, from my age, I think the 70s were this great golden age because you could have anti-heroes and, you know, gritty stories that ended as tragedies, but everybody remembers them as great films.

14:22The 90s might have been the last great swing of that, even though the commerce of it certainly drove it. The money numbers drove everything. The beginning of sequels and franchises and what have you came about during those eras. But I just felt, I mean, the last movie I made in the 1900s going into 2000 was Cast Away, you know. And that was about as daring a swing in every way, creatively, financially, cinematically, that anybody could take. And we all felt that, hey, we're getting away with this. Yeah, yeah. And in some ways, all those movies that you mentioned, we were getting away with something that we thought, well, isn't this what the art form, you know, can render to you?

15:05if you so want to test yourself. That and the economics of making movies, I think we're matching at that place. And that match, I don't think exists in the same way.

15:17Richard Osman:But do you think you're part of that? Because one of the things about making difficult cinema is if you've got a big mainstream presence in the middle of it who you trust, you can get away with an awful lot more. I think that trust is part of it. Alas, I think mystery might be the bigger thing. Like, what's he going to do in this? And I don't know if I have a lot of mystery versus countenance and all that. But I will say this about all of those. They were one-offs. Yeah. And I had high-powered executives say to me, no one wants to see a movie about Apollo 13 because we know how it ends. And I just thought, well, in that case, no one will ever see Star Wars or Casablanca or Citizen Kane ever again.

16:02because, you know, and so there was, it was kind of like a zeitgeist that was constantly being tested. But, you know, outside of Toy Story, there were no sequels in there.

16:15Richard Osman:Yeah. You know, each one of those were individual one-off films that had no reason to go. I always made this joke is that people say, oh, you've always, your films are always like, you just keep making the same hopeful, non-cynical films again and again. I said, yes, I said, yes, you are correct. I do try to take my button off the cynical default mode button. I try to do that. But there's also a version of my career in which I could be sitting here right now and saying, you know, I'm going to tell you right now that Forrest Gump 12 is a much better movie than Forrest Gump 10 or 11 were. And that didn't happen because it couldn't sustain anything beyond what we did.

16:57and oddly enough it's a shame that these toy story movies have numbers attached to them because they just should call them the next toy story movie because it warrants the investment

17:08Richard Osman:of the audience with the filmmaker yeah so we're not going to get apollo 14 that's what we're saying we would answer all the questions left unanswered uh by apollo 13 tom just please hold on a moment while we'll go to some adverts

17:27this episode is brought to you by Lloyds now I love it when characters are part of a club you wouldn't know anything about that would you Richard?

17:34Richard Osman:The Thursday Murder Club in some ways reminds me of the A-Team I now would like to map each of those characters onto the A-Team and feel I probably could I mean Elizabeth is Hannibal and it's not even close that's exactly right and Ron is howling mad Murdoch well there are definite perks to being in a club, just ask the members of Club Lloyds, because with Club Lloyds, you can bank on Lloyds to give you more wherever you are. If you join Club Lloyds, there's all sorts of benefits you can choose between. There's, for example, six free cinema tickets. They've got an annual coffee club and gourmet society membership, which would be mine.

18:05Richard Osman:And also something that the Thursday Motor Club would enjoy very, very much indeed. To top it all off, you have fee-free spending abroad, which means wherever you are, you won't be charged by Lloyds to use your debit card when you're travelling. Now joining this club costs£5 per month but that is refunded in any month that you pay£2 ,000 into your account. Now that is a club that's worth being part of. Check out Club Lloyd's today. You'll need to be a UK resident and aged 18 or over to apply. Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by Wise.

18:36It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.

19:15So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, T's and C's apply.

19:44Richard Osman:Nostalgic lakeside town of Ferry's Bay. Love can be hard to find. So if you're lucky enough to find that person, never let go. A second chance at first love. Every year after. Now streaming only on Prime.

20:04Welcome back, everybody. Now we are talking to Mr. Tom Hanks. This is from Patrick Farrell, who says, you've been the face of so many defining moments in cinematic history. as you've just been telling us. Peaked in the 90s, I like to say. Peaked in the 90s. At this point in your career, when you walk onto a film set on day one, what's the one thing that still genuinely surprises or challenges you? Complete, total terror of losing the battle against self-loathing that has to start when you get up in the morning. The test really is of the grand ensemble of the crew, the people who are making the movie every day.