The iconic scene from "Cast Away" that Tom Hanks can no longer watch

He is one of the world’s most beloved actors. At the heart of his extensive filmography lies a specific scene—one that is particularly “painful”—which he prefers to avoid.

While appearing as a guest on the podcast The Rest Is Entertainment to promote Toy Story 5, Tom Hanks confides that he doesn’t rewatch (or rarely rewatches) his own movies, since he believes they never change anyway. And if there’s one feature film he no longer wants to watch all the way through, it’s Robert Zemeckis’s classic Cast Away.

In the film, the actor plays a FedEx executive, Chuck Noland, who is obsessed with punctuality and time. He must travel to the four corners of the world to optimize the company’s sorting centers. And it’s during a trip to Malaysia that his plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean. He must then survive on a deserted island, with only a volleyball named “Wilson” to keep him company. Before the accident, his fiancée Kelly had given him her grandfather’s watch, which contained a photo of her. Upon his return to everyday life, Chuck discovers that Kelly, believing him to be dead, has remarried and given birth to a little girl.

And it is precisely this moment of reunion that poses a problem for Tom Hanks:

“There’s a moment in "Cast Away" that’s painful for me. Chuck is back at Kelly’s house and he gives her back her watch; there’s a moment when I just think to myself, ‘I’m not there.’ [...] I make a gesture that feels wrong to me—it comes from me, not from Chuck,” explains the actor.

It’s not so much the sadness of the scene that bothers Tom Hanks, but his own performance. Convinced that he stepped out of character at that precise moment in the film, he refuses to watch that part again: “If the movie is playing, I get up and leave the room before that scene starts.” He clarifies that, at the time, the disconnect from his role wasn’t immediate. “I didn’t realize it until I saw them start filming. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, they were already shooting the scene and I wasn’t there.’”

But Tom Hanks shouldn’t worry too much: his performance still earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.