Inside Tom Hanks' Friendship With Robin Wright

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright's respective Hollywood careers took off in the 1980s, but they wouldn't cross paths until the following decade. The two first met while making the 1994 movie "Forrest Gump." They played childhood best friends, Forrest and Jenny, in the Academy Award-winning film. 

The two actors picked up on their natural chemistry during the audition stage. On a 2024 episode of "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," Wright remembered how right she felt after the tryout. "Tom and I just had a great connection," she said. "I walked out of there and I went, 'Not only do I really want to do this movie, I hope I get it, but I think I got it.'" 

That connection didn't fade when it was time to film. As Wright said of Hanks on a 2024 episode of "The Drew Barrymore Show," "He's so funny. No, hysterically funny." She went on to share that Hanks once offered to show her the dance he planned to do for a scene they were set to film, and he didn't disappoint. "I laughed so hard I peed in my costume," she said. When it was time to make "Here," Wright looked forward to spending more time with her former co-star. As she told Drew Barrymore, he was pretty busy during "Forrest Gump," so they didn't exactly get many chances to hang out behind the scenes. You may not know this about Hanks, but he really did run a lot while making that movie. "He was doing all the running sequences during lunch break," she said.

In 2024, a whopping 30 years after "Forrest Gump" hit theaters, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright joined forces once again for the film "Here." As if that wasn't enough of a reunion, they also happened to team up with "Forrest Gump" director Robert Zemeckis. "We all know each other so well," Hanks told People ahead of the movie's release. "Working with people you know and you're compatible with, there's nothing like that. We could put our heads together and know exactly what we wanted to try different." The feeling is mutual for Wright. Back in March 2024, she gushed to the hosts of "This Morning" about how excited she was about the project. "The whole band got back together," she said. "It was incredible, reuniting 30 years later, it was like no time had passed. There was nothing awkward about it."

In the new movie, Wright and Hanks go through a stunning transformation, as both have been digitally de-aged to reflect their characters at different points in their lives. Zemeckis used Metaphysic Live, an AI-assisted product, to replace their present-day faces with younger versions of themselves in real time. In other words, they ostensibly could look just like they did back when they filmed "Forrest Gump" in the early '90s; this flick is sure to give audiences déjà vu. Technology has certainly changed since Hanks and Wright last shared the silver screen, but their chemistry without question has stood the test of time.