THR continues their awards season roundtable conversations, focusing this week on the actors, as Stephen Galloway interviews Tom Hanks (“The Post”), James Franco (“The Disaster Artist”), John Boyega (“Detroit”, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”) and Academy Award nominees Gary Oldman (“Darkest Hour”), Sam Rockwell (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) and Willem Dafoe (“The Florida Project”).
The conversation is wide-ranging, as always, with each actor diving into their process, including Sam Rockwell discussing how, after “The Green Mile,” which it came to subject matter in films, “the pedophile thing is something I can’t mess with.” Meanwhile, Tom Hanks discussed stepping into Jason Robards shoes as Ben Bradlee, mentioning, “I was competing with Jason Robards because he played Ben … He owns that role. And I was actually given permission to forget about it by Ben himself.”
John Boyega talked about his toughest moment as an actor, mentioned his role in 2017’s “The Circle“, noting: “My second to last day, I had a big speech that basically put the whole movie in context for the audience, an I just froze up. I froze up and I forgot the whole thing. I was there with Emma Watson, who was amazing about it. And I found myself in an Acting 101 class, with Emma trying to say, ‘Just remember the lines. What are your motivations?’ And I just couldn’t get it. It was embarrassing.”
Elsewhere in the talk, Academy Award front-runner Gary Oldman, examined how he transformed to into Winston Churchill. “[I] went to the footage, the news, apart from the mountain of reading – you’d have a second life just to read all the material on him. But I went to the footage, and I saw a man who was energized and had vitality. He looked like a baby, he had a cherubic face, a sort of naughty schoolboy grin with a sparkle in his eye,” he explained.
Listening to their responses, it’s quite disappointing that Boyega and, especially, Hanks are no longer in the awards conversation. I know Tom Hanks makes it looks easy, but it’s a true shame that he hasn’t been nominated for an Oscar since “Cast Away,” especially considering that Hanks has been doing some of his best work within the past decade. Check out the full conversation below.