Tom Hanks is a big star. One of the biggest. Is there a person on this earth that doesn’t like him? The list of movies is long, and almost all of them are great. Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Philadelphia … freaking Big, Turner and Hooch, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle. See? And that’s just a handful. He has two Academy Awards, a handful of Golden Globes, a Screen Actors Guild Award, an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and even a Presidential Medal of Freedom. He’s a star. But even stars have heroes, and apparently, one of Tom Hanks’ heroes is Kelly Slater.
“Kelly Slater, holy smokes!” he exclaimed when Kelly Slater asked him a question on In Depth With Graham Bensinger. “Living legend Kelly Slater! Oh Lord! That’s like having Joe DiMaggio ask you a question about playing Three Flies Up when you were a kid! This is unbelievable!… That Kelly Slater would even ponder me to be a… you just made my night. That is fantastic.”
Bensinger enlisted Kelly Slater to ask Hanks a question, and, since Slater pals around with a few Hollywood big wigs, he asked about a friend they have in common. “I used to know Brian Grazer a bit,” Slater said. “We had a bunch of mutual friends and we talked about surfing quite a bit. He told me you made him buy a house at Malibu near the beach so you could surf together and have competitions. I’m wondering where your surf level is at these days and if you still get in the water.”
As it turns out, Hanks mostly paddles these days, but he had a story from surfing with Grazer, a film producer who started Imagine Entertainment with Ron Howard. “I have a vicious scar in my calf from Brian Grazer running over me on his surfboard,” Hanks remembered. “His fin sliced me open to the point that I had to go to the clinic in Malibu and get 37 stitches on the inside and outside. My calf muscle has always been too short because I made the mistake of going surfing with Brian Grazer.”
