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Tom Hanks Didn't Want to Be Mr. Rogers '¦ Then He Met Marielle

Associated Press

   NEW YORK - Tom Hanks has never played a superhero. But when the actor
   recently donned a very simple cardigan sweater, and the slacks to go
   with it, he felt like one.

   "I felt like Batman. It felt like I was wearing the cape and the cowl
   of the Dark Knight detective," Hanks says. "There's only one person you
   can be when you put those things on, and that's Fred Rogers."

   Since it was first announced, Hanks' casting as the beloved children's
   television host in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" has had the
   feeling of kismet. Here was an actor nearly synonymous with affability,
   with "niceness," playing one of the friendliest faces to ever flicker
   across a TV screen. Hanks might as well have been answering a Bat
   Signal in the sky.

   But as inevitable as Hanks playing Mr. Rogers may have seemed, it never
   would have happened without Marielle Heller, the filmmaker of the
   literary forger drama "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" and the `70s coming of
   age tale "The Diary of a Teenage Girl." The film's script, by Noah
   Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, had been floating around for years
   before Heller got attached. Hanks had already passed on it, more than
   once.

   "I didn't pass on you," Hanks said in an interview alongside Heller. "I
   just passed on a thing."

   It would probably please Mr. Rogers that the first big-screen fiction
   film about him was based, from the start, on a newfound friendship.
   Hanks and Heller met at a backyard birthday party for Hanks' son Colin.
   Hanks had just read a New York Times article about female filmmakers
   and mentioned it to Heller after learning she was a director.

   "And she said, `I'm in it,''' recalls Hanks. "And I said, `Well, of
   course you are and I have to remove my shoe from my mouth."

   Hanks, newly resolved to work more with female directors, promised to
   watch "Diary of a Teenage Girl."

   "I thought, `Sure, Tom Hanks. I'm sure you'll run right out and watch
   my movie,''' says Heller. "And you did!"

   Within days, Hanks called to set up a meeting, and that led to "A
   Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." Sony Pictures releases it in
   theaters this weekend. Based loosely on an Esquire Magazine article by
   Tom Junod, the film's protagonist is a New York journalist named Lloyd
   Vogel (Matthew Rhys) assigned to profile Rogers. Heller and Hanks view
   Rogers as the movie's antagonist -- the agent of change in Lloyd's
   life, whose sincerity and caring disarm the cynical reporter.

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