Tom Hanks admits parents’ split pushed acting career

Tom Hanks admits his dysfunctional family pushed him t become an actor.

The actor reveals his parents’ split made him look at world in a different way, thereby developing his interest in acting.

Speaking on On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast, Hanks said: “Because my parents were divorced, I spent a lot of time traveling to and from where my mom lived in this small town, or where my dad lived, in Oakland, in the Bay Area.”

He added: “And those hours on a Greyhound bus, starting when I was 7 or 8 years old. Five hours of just daydreaming. Five hours of looking out the window. Five hours of looking at people passing cars. Air, trains going by, farms and whatnot, buildings within it.”

“The natural preponderance I had to sit there quietly and imagine what was going on. That fueled me into realizing that there’s actually … a pursuit that is, ‘Let’s put on a show. Let’s tell the story.’ That came along, and bang that that was it,” he explained of how the experience inspired him to become a storyteller. “And I’m telling you, it’s the same exact now as it was then.”

“Because I was so young when my parents split up and there were so many other factors that had to go into [it] — it was logistics and legal things and time and distance and stuff like that — I took care of myself and, you know, was satisfied, I think it was a reprieve for them,” he said of his parents.