Tom Hanks, the 63-year-old two-time Oscar-winner, is inexorably connected with the Age of Coronavirus, having been the first major celebrity to announce that he had tested positive for the disease on March 11th. (News that Hanks and his wife, fellow actor Rita Wilson, gave on the heels of the just-before-tipoff cancellation of an NBA game will surely be part of many a dark montage in future documentaries.)
Now that Hanks and Wilson are both feeling better (after tweeting jokes from Australia, where they both contracted the illness), he’s back doing what nice guys do: appearing on NPR.
On a recent episode of the current affairs quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, Hanks explained that he itched to do more about the current pandemic, now that he’s made it through to the other side. When Hanks and Wilson learned they had coronavirus antibodies, they stepped forward to donate their cells to science.
“We have said, ‘Do you want our blood? Can we give plasma?’ And, in fact, we will be giving it now to the places that hope to work on what I would like to call the ‘Hank-cine,’” the actor Dad-joked.
"You thought he was Jimmy Stewart, but he's also Jonas Salk,” yukked panelist Peter Grosz.
Lest you think having life-saving blood might go to Hanks’s head, know that he kicked off the Wait, Wait segment by referencing the reviews of his 1990 flop Bonfire of the Vanities.
On January 5, 2020, approximately 300 years ago, Hanks received the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes. Here is a memory of those simpler times.
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