Fox News host Laura Ingraham slammed Tom Hanks on her primetime program Wednesday night, recommending the actor be “cast away … to a deserted island talking to that volleyball” instead of talking politics.
Ingraham, in her reference to Hanks’s movie “Cast Away” where he talks to a volleyball on an island, was responding to a recent interview where Hanks said he would “probably” not screen his new movie “The Post” at President Trump’s White House.
“This is the moment where, in some ways, our personal choices are going to have to reflect our opinions,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We have to start voting, actually, before the election. So, I would probably vote not to go.”
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“Right now, without a doubt, there are people in power trying to — if not quash or stop the right to publication, [then at least] denigrate it to the point [where] they are saying there is no truth to it whatsoever,” Hanks added. “And there are stories out there that are the truth, [in] organs of the Fourth Estate like The New York Times and The Washington Post.”
Ingraham noted that Trump hasn’t made any such invitation to screen the movie at the White House, and questioned the 61-year-old actor’s ability to play the role of political pundit.
“After the year Hollywood had with [Harvey] Weinstein and [Kevin] Spacey et al, you’d kind of think that its brightest stars would practice some humility on the whole moral barometer front,” Ingraham said. “No such luck. Instead one of America’s favorite actors is insulting the president just to sell his movie.”
“The swipe comes from actor Tom Hanks, who has given us so many iconic moments on the screen, the big screen, but he kind of flops as a political commentator and pundit,” she continued.
“Imagine a world, Hanks explained, where the president treats papers like The Washington Post as purveyors of fake news. Hey Gump, maybe he treats them that way because half the time they are,” the host said.
“Maybe it’s time to, I don’t know, cast away Tom Hanks,” she continued later in her commentary. “I kind of like him better, by the way, on the deserted island talking to that volleyball. That was cute. That’s the dialogue that I enjoy from Tom Hanks. Riveting. I almost thought it was a basketball, I had forgotten.”
Hanks plays iconic Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in “The Post,” which is directed by Steven Spielberg and co-stars Meryl Streep as Washington Post editor Katharine Graham.
The film looks back at the fight the paper had with the Nixon administration in reporting on the Pentagon Papers, which was a secret government study about the Vietnam War.