Tom Hanks has faced his fair share of on-set challenges over his decades-long career, but says one stands out as genuinely terrifying.
In a recent podcast appearance on Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, Hanks recounted “the most truly scary, intense, real-life scene” on the set of 2013’s Captain Phillips.
“Four of the scariest human beings I have ever met come in, and they are screaming at us. They are slapping us. They are hitting us. They are pushing us down, and they’re holding real guns in our faces, screaming at us. It was honestly — we are all bug-eyed with some form of terror. Even though we know it’s a movie, that is removed because — guess what? — we all went there.”
The film, based on the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, required a high level of intensity. To heighten the realism, Hanks and his co-stars hadn’t even met the men that played the pirates until that very scene.
“We’re overweight, old, middle-aged guys who are gonna be taken over by these pirates,” Hanks explained. “We never met the guys who play the pirates. We don’t know who they are. All we know is that they are coming… we have never met them, and they are firing automatic blanks, you know, machine guns. We hear all this stuff that’s going on. We don’t see anything until the camera outside the bridge of the Maersk Alabama.”
Listen to the full podcast here:
