Actor Tom Hanks is being attacked in response to video footage that has surfaced online, purporting to show the actor in less-than-appropriate behavior toward a child.
The internet has been abuzz in recent days with posts about Tom Hanks–one that shows his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame being defaced by vandals. In the video, Hanks’s name inside his star is blacked out by a vandal who then scribbles the word pedophile in place of it as a crowd gathers. The noise is such that cheers are virtually indistinguishable from the jeers of the crowd.
But naysayers point out that this isn’t the first time the two-time Academy Award-winning actor has been accused of such, and the clip of Hanks used in the Instagram is taken completely out of context.
Tom Hanks began his career in Hollywood in the 1980s. As an actor, he has portrayed a variety of characters in a variety of film genres, including comedy, drama, and even horror.
His first major film roles were in Splash (1984) and Big (1988), but perhaps his most memorable roles were in Philadelphia (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Apollo 13 (1995), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Cast Away (2000). More recently, Hanks played the role of Elvis Presley’s manager, Tom Parker, in the film Elvis (2022) and the role of a cranky old man who discovers an unlikely friendship with a new neighbor in A Man Called Otto (2022).
Hanks is also known for his long-standing relationship with The Walt Disney Company, and his most famous acting role with the company is also the one that began that relationship.
Hanks has lent his voice to Sheriff Woody in Pixar’s Toy Story franchise, beginning with the first film in the series, which debuted in 1995. Since then, he has given Woody his trademark voice in Toy Story 2, 3, and 4, as well as in numerous Toy Story shorts, including Toy Story of Terror and Toy Story That Time Forgot, among others.
Hanks also portrayed Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks (2012) opposite actress Emma Thompson. The actor also lent a vocal cameo of himself to an episode of Big City Greens, and more recently, Hanks played the role of the woodcarver Geppetto in Robert Zemeckis’s live-action Pinocchio, which debuted on Disney+ in 2022.
One of Hanks’s parody performances, a clip of which was included in the aforementioned Instagram post, however, has been taken so far out of context that it makes no sense whatsoever, but it has left a deluge of rumors, accusations, and allegations in its wake.
The clip is from a skit Hanks performed during an episode of Jimmy Kimmel LIVE! in 2011. In the sketch comedy bit, the actor and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel satirize the TLC reality television series Toddlers & Tiaras, which aired from 2009 to 2016.
The reality series was criticized for sexualizing children who compete in beauty pageants, as they are expected to wear costumes and participate in performances deemed overly adult in nature, and the parents of the children in various beauty pageants received criticism for allowing–and sometimes demanding–that their children participate in the pageants.
Hanks and Kimmel performed a satire sketch, mocking the show and its adult participants. The actor and host did not, however, endorse pedophilia in any way.
The clip, instead, shows Hanks acting as an overbearing parent obsessed with seeing his fictional daughter win a fictional child pageant called Miss Ultimate Sexy Baby Nevada.
But, as with many things online, the clip was taken from the Kimmel show and “doctored” to look as though it depicts Hanks himself obsessed with a child in a pageant. The misconstrued, out-of-context clip can be seen in the Instagram post below.
The post includes the caption, “Tom Hanks Not Trying to Hide It,” alleging that Hanks is, indeed, a pedophile when the post is clearly pieced together from clips of a more than 12-year-old episode of a sketch for Jimmy Kimmel LIVE!
Sadly, this isn’t the first time social media has attacked Hanks, accusing him of such behavior. There are so many false and accusatory posts on the subject, in fact, that the top debunking website, Snopes.com, has an entire library of content about the topic, all of which has been fact-checked and proven false.
