You can keep your Harrison Fords and Anthony Hopkinses. I want Hanks to legally become my parent, take me to the
baseball game and give me chummy little pep talks
It is Father’s Day on Sunday. And while the traditional way to spend Father’s Day is to think about your own father, and all the sacrifices he made to raise you, let’s do things a bit differently this year. Let’s all imagine that we have better, more famous dads.
No, we should. Sony Pictures has just suggested we do exactly that, and released a study revealing that almost one in 10 of us wish that Tom Hanks would play our dad in a film. And that makes sense, more or less, because Hanks exudes a steady paternalism in most of his films. He played a father surrogate in News of the World, and Woody from Toy Story is one of the all-time great non-dad dads in cinema. Even in something as morally soupy as Road to Perdition, you could chop Hanks’s character in half and see the words “Great Dad” running through him like a stick of rock.