Tom Hanks Headlines the Apple TV Hit Finch

The Academy Award-winning actor chats about isolation, redemption and his new streaming hit 

If Hollywood had a literal A-list, Tom Hanks would be the first name. After getting his start on shortlived ABC sitcom Bosom Buddies back in the ’80s, the man promptly transitioned into film superstardom with flicks like Splash, Big and Sleepless in Seattle, before winning back-to-back Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump in the mid-’90s.

In 2020, the pandemic forced Hanks’ Second World War thriller Greyhound to debut on streamer Apple TV+. Now, another of his would-be blockbusters has done the same. Finch finds cinema’s consummate everyman playing a scientist who, in the midst of the post-apocalypse, heads off on a fateful road trip with his dog and a robot he’s just invented.

TV Week: Are there parallels to be drawn between the isolation Finch is feeling in the movie and what we’ve all experienced during COVID-19?
Tom Hanks: I actually think Finch does an awfully good job of being isolated. But of course, he’s not missing anything. During the course of COVID-19, the rest of the world was out there and we had a very real yearning to return to these places that give us the great common pleasures—company and shops and stores and coffee shops and being able to get together with friends. Knowing that we were separated from those types of things during all of our various lockdowns might have caused a bit more of a mental yearning to get out of here in order to get back and live the way we did just a few short months ago. Finch doesn’t have that luxury. He’s been alone for years, since all of creation shut down and all of society imploded. So I think in one way, we can look at the film and say, “This guy Finch has it easy. At least he’s got a dog and he can create a friend he can talk to.”

You’ve now bonded with a volleyball on a deserted island and a dog at the end of the world. If you got to choose your next movie character, what would he look for in a companion?
They would be part of an ongoing ensemble in which there are 18 people in the room at the same time and we all get to talk and listen to one another. There is an aspect of a movie like Finch and some other movies that I have done that is glorious because you are all by yourself, or in this case with a dog. That means you are very much engaged every single day and there seem to be almost no rules, because between you and the director and the screenplay, you get to say and do almost anything that comes into your mind. But the discipline and the pleasure and the joy of interacting with other people on a big movie is actually a better way to live.

What was your most memorable moment on set during this film?
It would be connections that I ended up having with Seamus the dog. A dog in a movie requires an awful lot of training and our animal handlers who lived with Seamus for years were able to transfer some of it to me. But there’s something else that happened… I got to spend so much time with Seamus. And Seamus was just a dog and I was a guy he was comfortable with. There are photographs of us grabbing a quick snooze on the back, in the bed, and he’s just laying there and I’m laying right next to him.

Do you see Finch as a story of redemption?
I actually think it’s a story about permanence and a story about some degree of living eternally. As the last man on the planet for a while, until we realize there are some other people out there, there is a task that Finch has, which is to exist beyond his corporeal survival. He dies, but what he’s constantly trying to do is make sure that his sense of right and his care and empathy carry on to whatever the next generation is going to be… And isn’t that somehow a bit of a responsibility that we all have? We all have an impact on our friends and our offspring. Sometimes we can have an impact on society, even if it’s just as small as our little tiny circle. Good things last just as much as bad and evil things, and they carry weight and they have ripples. So I think Finch was hoping to create a long-lasting imprint of what he did for the world and his place in it.

Finch streams on Apple TV+