Tom Hanks Breaks Silence About Michael Clarke Duncan

There is a moment Tom Hanks has described that most people who love The Green Mile have never heard. It happened in the recording booth years after the film had come out when Hanks was being interviewed about the production. He started talking about Michael Clark Duncan and stopped mid-sentence. Not for dramatic effect, not because he was reaching for the right word.

He stopped because whatever he was about to say had gotten too large to fit comfortably into the frame of a professional interview. He collected himself and then he said Michael Clark Duncan was not acting. He was being. Tom Hanks has spoken about many of the people he has worked with across 40 years and two Academy Awards.

He has been generous and articulate about nearly all of them. But the way he speaks about Michael Clark Duncan is different. It has a quality that his other tributes do not. A specific weight, a gratitude that seems to go beyond the professional, as if what Duncan gave him on that set was something he is still trying to adequately account for.

And given what that film required of both of them, what it cost both of them, that makes a certain kind of sense. The Green Mile is not a film you walk away from easily. The people who made it didn’t walk away from it easily either. Thomas Jeffrey Hanks was born July 9th, 1956 in conquered, California, the third of four children.

His parents divorced when he was five, and what followed was a childhood of constant movement. His father remarried several times. The family relocated regularly, and Tom spent his early years navigating new schools and new stepfamilies with the adaptability that would later become the most recognizable quality of his professional life.

He found the Shabbo College drama department in his teens, fell completely in love with the stage, and transferred to California State University, Sacramento to pursue it properly. He was performing in local theater in Cleveland when a casting director noticed him and by 1980 he was in New York with a small television part and the conviction that this was the life he was going to have.

The early years were lean in the specific way that early years in show business are lean. A single season of the sitcom Bosom Budd.i.es, small film roles, the particular grind of being almost but not quite. Then came Ron Howard and Splash in 1984, which gave him his first leading film role and revealed to the industry something that aud.i.ences grasped immediately.

Tom Hanks was someone you trusted, not because he was imposing or glamorous or dangerous, because he was real in a way that the camera finds in very few people and cannot manufacture in any of them. He has told the story of his first day on Splash with the pleasure of someone who still cannot quite believe it was his job.

Ron Howard told him he would need to learn to scuba dive for the production. Hanks processed this information and concluded that he was in fact being paid to go on vacation. He describes the subsequent reality in formal clothes weighted down with iron being towed underwater by a safety diver with the same delight. The impracticality of it was part of what made it wonderful.

What followed over the next decade was a career that moved between comedy and drama with a fluency that is rarer than it looks. big in 1988 where he played a 12-year-old in a grown man’s body and made it entirely believable. A league of their own in 1992 where he played a washedup alcoholic baseball manager with a tenderness underneath the bluster that kept the character from being merely a joke.

Philadelphia in 1993 where he played a man dying of AIDS and won his first Academy Award. Forest Gump in 1994 where he won his second, an unprecedented back-to-back achievement that has not been matched since. Apollo 13 in 1995, saving Private Ryan in 1998 required something from him that no previous role had.

Spielberg shot the Omaha Beach landing sequence in a way that nobody had shot combat before. extended, visceral, without the grammar of heroism that war films had always used to make violence bearable. Hanks has described standing on that beach on the first day of shooting, listening to Spielberg explain the positions and the effects and the air mortars marked with red flags in the sand.

The special effects crew then removed all the red flags. The cameras rolled. Something very hot landed on Hanks’s neck. The burn scar is visible in the film from that point forward. He has told the story with the dark humor of someone who has fully processed a terrifying thing and emerged on the other side of it with a good anecdote.

By the time Frank Darabont approached him about the green mile later that year, Tom Hanks was the most trusted actor in America. Not the most acclaimed, not the most powerful, the most trusted. There is a distinction. Trust is earned differently than admiration, and it is harder to manufacture. Aud.i.ences had spent 15 years watching him be hurt and confused and frightened and joyful and devastated, and they had believed every version of it.

And so they came to him the way you come to someone you know, with the expectation of honesty. The Green Mile required something specific from that trust. Derabant, who had already adapted Stephen King’s Shaw Shank Redemption to critical reverence and commercial disappointment, was returning to the same territory, a prison, a period setting, men in proximity to d.e.a.t.h .

the question of what justice actually means when the machinery that administers it is operated by human beings. The story centered on Paul Edgecomb, the d.e.a.t.h row corrections officer who encounters John Coffee, a massive gentleman convicted of murdering two young girls who possesses an inexplicable gift for healing. The film asks you to believe in that gift.

And in Paul’s gradual reckoning with what it means to execute someone he has come to understand is innocent. It asks three hours of your time and your complete emotional surrender. And it gets both. And the reason it gets both begins with Tom Hanks and ends with Michael Clark Duncan. Duncan was 31 years old when he auditioned for John Coffee.

He had grown up on the south side of Chicago, the son of a single mother, Jean, who worked multiple jobs and raised him largely alone. The neighborhood was not gentle and money was not plentiful, and the world from a young age made clear to Michael Clark Duncan what category of person it had assigned him to. He was large, eventually 6’5 in and close to 300 pounds.

And large black men in America are assigned a particular category that has very little room in it for gentleness or vulnerability or the kind of interior life that producing a performance like John Coffee requires. He dug ditches. He worked as a bouncer. He became a bodyguard for Will Smith and then for Martin Lawrence, which put him inside movie sets and on red carpets and in rooms with famous people, watching from the perimeter, while the work he could not yet imagine doing happened in front of him.

He had small acting parts, the kind that require a large man to stand in a doorway and look threatening. That was by any reasonable accounting where his relationship with the film industry was going to stay. His manager convinced him to audition. Duncan was not convinced he should. He did not believe he was actor enough, his own words, for something this complex.

The character of John Coffee required him to project childlike innocence and otherworldly wisdom in the same body, often in the same scene. It required him to be the largest person in any room and also the most vulnerable. It required him to make 40 million strangers love him before asking them to watch him d.i.e.

He auditioned anyway. He delivered a monologue and the room went quiet in the specific way that rooms go quiet when something unexpected has just happened. Derabant said afterward that he knew immediately. Tom Hanks, who was already attached to the film, agreed completely. What nobody outside the production quite understood yet was the thing that Hanks would spend the rest of his life trying to articulate.

That what Duncan brought to John Coffee was not technique. It was himself. Hanks became a mentor on set in the most organic sense. Not because he appointed himself one, but because Duncan was terrified, and Hanks was the person with the most experience and the least ego about deploying it for someone else’s benefit.

Between takes, when Duncan was doubting himself, Hanks was there, not with instruction, with presence. the simple fact of a man who had done this for 20 years treating a man doing it for the first time as a peer. Duncan has talked about what that meant. Hanks has talked about what he received in return, which was something he didn’t expect, the specific education of watching someone perform without the protection of technique.

Because Duncan had no technique, he had never learned to manage the instrument the way trained actors learned to manage it. The controlled distance, the ability to go somewhere emotionally and come back from it on schedule. When the scene required grief, he grieved. When it required terror, he was terrified. When John Coffee told Paul Edgecomb that he was tired, tired of people being ugly to each other, Michael Clark Duncan was tired. You can see it.

The exhaustion is not performed. It is present in the body, in the eyes, in the specific quality of stillness that a man produces when he has actually used himself up. Tom Hanks has said that watching him do that changed how he thought about acting. That is a significant statement from a man who has two Academy Awards and 40 years of accumulated craft.

He did not say it made him question his own method. He said it expanded what he understood the work to be capable of. There is a particular humility in that admission. The recognition that someone with almost no professional training had in the specific circumstances of that specific story found a door that formal training had not shown him.

He has been honest about this in a way that most actors at his level would not be because most actors at his level have too much invested in the idea that craft is the whole of it. The film’s production required the cast to inhabit the d.e.a.t.h row set in a way that was not common practice. Production designer Terrence Marsh, who had won Oscars for Dr.

Jivago and Oliver, built the mile with a historical precision that extended to the exact shade of green lenolum used in southern prisons of that era. to the periodcorrect wiring and light fixtures to the way the lighting grew more oppressive the further down the corridor you walked. The set was designed to produce a specific psychological effect on the people inside it and it did.

Darabont gave the cast an afternoon before filming began during which they simply occupied their positions. Guards at their stations, prisoners in their cells in complete silence without speaking or performing for hours. Not a rehearsal, an immersion. The point was to let the weight of the place accumulate in the body before the cameras arrived.

By the time filming started, the set was not a construction. It was a place that had been lived in. You can feel the difference. The execution sequences were shot with multiple cameras to minimize the number of takes because the practical effects were expensive and emotionally exhausting. Sam Rockwell, who played the volatile Wild Bill Wharton, has described the atmosphere of those days.

The cast knew what the film was asking aud.i.ences to feel about an execution and they felt it themselves on set while building the thing. The performance that results from that knowledge is not the same as the performance that results from hitting marks and saying lines. It is heavier. It has actual weight.

The film was released in December 1999. It earned $136 million on a $60 million budget. Not spectacular, not the blockbuster the Hank’s name might have suggested was coming. And then something happened to it that doesn’t happen to most films. It kept going through home video and cable television and the specific word of mouth that attaches itself to stories people feel compelled to share with someone they love.

The Green Mile became one of the most watched films in American television history. It is the kind of movie that finds people at the right moment that stops them from changing the channel at midnight that they watch again even though they know what happens even though they know it will cost them because the cost is part of why it matters.

Michael Clark Duncan received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. He was the first actor with so limited a prior resume to receive that recognition for a first major role. He did not win. Michael Kaine won that year for the Cider House rules, which is the kind of thing that happens, but the nomination transformed his life in the way that genuine recognition transforms lives.

He went on to appear in Planet of the Apes, The Whole Nine Yards, The Scorpion King, Daredevil. He voiced characters. He lent that extraordinary voice to animated films and video games. He was funny and warm in interviews. A man whose physical enormity was constantly upended by the gentleness he carried inside it, which was not a performance. It was him.

What those who knew him on the Green Mile set have said consistently is that the man who showed up every morning was the same man who appeared on screen. gentle, genuine, slightly awed by where he found himself, unwilling to put on any performance of being something other than what he was. Tom Hanks has noted that Duncan’s size made every room rearrange itself around him, but that Duncan himself never used that fact for anything.

He held his body carefully with a consideration for other people that is not how men of that size are expected to move through the world. He was 54 years old and still learning what the career could become. He had found late and improbably the thing he was made for. And then it was over. He d.i.ed on September 3rd, 2012 in Los Angeles.

He had suffered a heart attack in July and never recovered. The career that had begun so improbably, so late, with so little reason to expect what it became lasted 13 years from the moment Darabon’s room went quiet during that audition. He was not old. There was more to do.

That is the particular cruelty of it. Tom Hanks was among those who spoke after Duncan’s d.e.a.t.h . And what he said carried the quality that his public statements about Duncan always carry. The sense that he is still arriving at the full truth of what that working relationship was. Still finding words for something that resists adequate expression.

He said that Duncan was a man of tremendous strength and gentle kindness. He said the world was a better place for his having been in it. He said he would miss him greatly. These are not unusual things to say about someone who has d.i.ed. What makes them unusual is the register in which Hanks says them. Not the polished grief of a professional tribute, but the plainspoken inadequacy of a man who has run out of language for what he actually feels.

He has been publicly articulate about most things in his life. The green mile and the man who made it what it was is one of the subjects where the articulation breaks down, where he stops mids sentence, where he looks for the word and the word isn’t there. That gap between what he knows and what language can hold is itself a kind of tribute.

Some things are too real to be said cleanly. You circle them instead. You come back to them again and again across the years. Each time with slightly different words, each time arriving at the same place. This man showed me something I did not know the work could do, and he is gone. And I am still grateful.

And I am still not finished being grateful. He has returned to the subject in the years since, each time circling the same thing that on the set of The Green Mile in a film about what it means to take a life and what it means to be innocent and what it means when those two things collide in an irreversible way. Michael Clark Duncan showed up and gave everything he had without reservation and without the armor that most people rightly bring to that kind of exposure.

And that what came through was John Coffee in the fullest possible sense. Not a character constructed from the outside, but a man revealed from the inside. A man whose capacity for love was larger than the world he was born into and who bore that mismatch with a grace that the film asks you to witness and that you cannot once you have witnessed it entirely set down.

That is what Tom Hanks has been saying in various forms for 25 years. That he was in the room when something true happened. That the man who made it happen is gone. That the truest thing he knows how to say about it is that Michael Clark Duncan was not acting. He was being. And that some things once you have seen them stay with you for exactly as long as you