(Credits: Far Out / Raph_PH)
Tue 30 September 2025 19:15, UK
Even though Penny Marshall’s Big had earned Tom Hanks his first Academy Award nomination and won him a maiden Golden Globe, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that he finally shook off the tag of being a comedy performer, first and foremost.
While his breakthrough turn as Josh Baskin was good enough to be ranked among the five best performances of the year at the Oscars, it was still a comedic film. Hanks has pointed to 1986’s Nothing in Common as his first serious taste of dramatic acting, but it wasn’t enough to break him out of his wheelhouse.
The likes of the small-screen sitcom Bosom Buddies, a guest spot on Happy Days, Ron Howard’s Splash, Richard Benjamin’s The Money Pit, and Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs had established Hanks as one of the industry’s fastest-rising comedy stars, but he wasn’t of a mind to be permanently pigeonholed.
Would things have turned out differently had he accepted a leading role in a classic parody that only gets more beloved by the year? Probably not, seeing as he’s proven himself as being far too talented not to make it to the top. Even more remarkably, he wasn’t even the only future superstar named Tom to turn down Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs.
The Star Wars spoof wasn’t a runaway hit at the box office, but the fact that a sequel is set to be released 40 years after the original is proof enough that Brooks’ space opera has longevity. The Han Solo surrogate, Lone Starr, was played by Bill Pullman in his first major movie gig, and he admitted that he was way down the pecking order when the filmmaker was searching for the picture’s straight man.
Brooks and his wife, Anne Bancroft, had caught a play that Pullman was acting in, and when they met for the first time, he was told that he wasn’t the first choice. “When I got it and went in to meet him, he said, ‘I tried to get a Tom and I couldn’t get him,’” he recalled to Geek Tyrant. “‘I tried to get Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, and I couldn’t get them, so I got a Bill!” And I said, ‘Is that a joke, Mel?’”
It was a reasonable question, given Brooks’ penchant for cracking jokes at all hours of every day, but Pullman acknowledged that “it’s true,” and explained why: “He really crafted the part, and he imagined he was going to get a big box office draw at the time, and I think he was hurt that they didn’t take him up on it, you know?”
When that happened, the director opted for an unknown: “Then he said, ‘Heck, I’ll get somebody nobody knows!’ And I got a chance to do it. If there was a downside for Pullman, it’s that the addition of more established comics, including John Candy and Rick Moranis, meant his character didn’t get any of the best lines. Candy tried to give him one, though, only for Brooks to tell the actor in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t funny enough to be saying them, which must have stung a little.
They may not have been A-listers at the time, but it’s nonetheless fascinating to think about how Hanks’ or Cruise’s careers could have turned out had they opted to appear in Spaceballs, especially when they ended up headlining Big and Rain Man the following year, respectively.
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