Watch: Tom Hanks Shares Marriage Advice for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce
Behind every national treasure is a real gem.
And Tom Hanks would be the first to say that wife Rita Wilson is the star of this operation, an enduring love affair that started nearly 40 years ago and continues to warm cold, jaded hearts in Hollywood and beyond.
“I’m a lucky man,” Hanks told E! News in 2016. “She could’ve done better.”
Also keeping it light ahead of their 36th wedding anniversary a couple years ago, Hanks told E! that the key to their success was “finding each other” in the first place.
Though now we know his real secret, which he readily shared at the Toy Story 5 premiere in June when asked if he had marriage advice for then-engaged Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift.
“The man must make the waffles on Sunday,” Hanks, who’s turning 70 on July 9, revealed to E!, weeks before attending the couple’s July 3 nuptials.
OK, so they’re not giving away their tricks of the trade.
“Always letting the press know that there is a secret, and we bottled it,” Hanks joked to Fox News Digital at Clive Davis‘ pre-Grammy Gala in 2013 about their enviable number of years together. But, the two-time Oscar winner added, “We’ll sell it to you individually, for $17 billion.”
In case you’re a little short this month, we’ll do our best to fill you in.
Melissa Herwitt / E! Illustration
“Sometimes we’re just sitting on the couch talking or something like that…I don’t even have to ask for them,” Wilson, 69, told People in 2016. “He always gives me back and foot rubs. He’s just cool.”
And when Hanks was honored with the Golden Globes‘ Cecil B. DeMille Award for career achievement in 2020, he got misty-eyed.
“A man is blessed with a family sitting down front like that,” he said, “a wife who is fantastic in every way, who has taught me what love is.”
That moment happened to come 31 years after the Big star capped off his humorous yet thoughtful Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, acceptance on that same stage by giddily announcing, “I married a Greek babe…She was born right here in California, right here in Hollywood, but her folks are great, she’s marvelous, Rita Wilson—thank you, babe, for marrying me. You made my year already.”
They went on to welcome sons Chet Hanks and Truman Hanks, now 35 and 30, produce and act together, walk miles of red carpets and support each other through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, through clean shaves and bushy white beards, all the while becoming a living study of how to make it work in Hollywood.
Hanks claims he first thought Wilson was adorable in 1972 when his 16-year-old self spied her in her first-ever TV role, playing a cheerleader on The Brady Bunch.
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But they first laid eyes on each other in person in 1981 when Wilson appeared on an episode of Hanks’ short-lived but iconic sitcom Bosom Buddies, about two advertising creatives who moonlight as women because the only affordable apartment they can find is in a ladies-only building.
The actor was already a young husband and father, married since 1978 to his college sweetheart Samantha Lewes. Son Colin Hanks was born in 1977 and daughter Elizabeth Anne “E.A.” Hanks would arrive in 1982.
Fate brought Wilson and Hanks back together a few years later on the set of the 1985 comedy Volunteers. Hanks was fresh from his big-screen breakout role in Splash, which launched him toward becoming a leading rom-com star of the 1980s and 1990s.
“When we first looked at each other there was definitely a kind of like, ‘Hey, this is the place!’ I felt that, anyway,” he told Entertainment Tonight in 2015. “I think the end result is that we got married for all the right reasons.”
As a young father of two, “I didn’t smoke pot. I didn’t go into drugs, I was not a party boy. I didn’t drink too much,” he said on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2016. “I went to bed at 10 minutes after 10 p.m….The rules were in place and I’m not a cheater. I like to play by the rules. But later on, you’re 27, 28, you’ve learned what to say ‘yes’ to—and you end up meeting that other person, man, woman—that ‘Oh, she gets it!'”
He and Wilson were a couple by the end of 1986; his divorce from Lewes was finalized in early 1987. Then Hanks and Wilson wed on April 30, 1988.
Ron Galella, Ltd./WireImage
“I’ll never forget, we were standing on the corner of 57th and 5th in New York, or 58th and 5th,” Wilson recalled to Piers Morgan in 2012. “We were holding hands, and we were waiting for the traffic light to change. And he looked at me and he said, ‘You know, I just want you to know, that you never have to change anything about who you are in order to be with me.’
“Literally, a wave of—if love is a feeling, or a cellular thing that happens to your body, it went through me, and that’s pretty much who he is, and how he’s been,” she said.
But Hanks has admitted that it probably wouldn’t have worked out if they got together any earlier.
“The success of our relationship was a matter of timing, maturity, and our willingness to have an intimate connection,” he told Winfrey in 2001. “When I married Rita, I thought, ‘This is going to require some change on my part.’ I won’t deny that providence was part of us finding each other, but our relationship isn’t magic—the way it’s shown in movies. In real life, our connection is as concrete as me sitting here. Not that marriage doesn’t come close to being hell in a handbasket sometimes. But we both know that no matter what, we’ll be with each other—and we’ll get through it.”
He explained, “We deal with what has to be dealt with, but there is something natural to the foundation of our marriage. I am now at the point where I can’t imagine it any other way.”
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They’ve also been best friends “from the very beginning,” Hanks added. “We laugh just as much now at two in the morning as we always have. And we fight less and less.”
Fast-forward to 2013 and he quipped to Ellen DeGeneres, “I’m not one to suck up to the audience, but the only thing we argue about is who loves each other more.”
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Stagecoach
These two aren’t immune from the specter of split rumors—Hanks and Wilson won a rare public apology from the National Enquirer in 2016 when the tabloid erroneously reported that they were going to divorce—and sometimes a Hanks kid makes headlines.
But aside from interview-friendly anecdotes, illustrated in recent years by occasional Instagram posts featuring their adult kids, they stay fairly private (Hanks sharing graphic images from his bursitis procedure notwithstanding).
However, Wilson stepped outside her comfort zone in 2015 to share that she had undergone a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction after being diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I’m in public because of the nature of what I do,” she said, “but I don’t feel it necessary to let the world know what I’m thinking, where I’m eating. I’ve always liked being on the periphery of things.”
The Now and Then actress admitted to the New York Times that revealing so much about her personal life wasn’t easy, but she felt it was important to share her story in case it could help other women.
While Wilson underwent treatment, she and Hanks hunkered down at home in Malibu, catching up on Oscar screeners.
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“Who knew it would make you even closer?” she marveled. “You never know how your spouse is going to react in a situation like this. I was so amazed, so blown away by the care my husband gave me. It was such a normal, intimate time.”
Reflecting on his wife’s battle, Hanks told The Mirror in 2016, “All I can do is bow down before the courage of my wife.”
And at the end of the day, he and Wilson just like each other and really like being married to each other.
Andrew D. Bernstein /NBAE via Getty Images
“People say, ‘Jeez, it must be hard to stay married in show business,'” Hanks said. “I think it’s hard to stay married anywhere, but if you marry the right person, it might work out. We give each other a natural sense of support for whatever the other wants to pursue. Our marriage doesn’t require vast work. We have been married 28 years and dig each other a lot.”
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
At her induction into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019, where her husband spoke admiringly of her talent, Wilson told Us Weekly, “It’s like anything. We got married, we committed to each other, we love each other and we work hard at our relationship.”
“Not only do we love each other,” she added, “we really like each other, and we like being together, and we support each other and we keep the communication channels open. That’s always important.”
Check out Hanks and Wilson’s four-decade love affair in photos:
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Cindy Ord/Getty Images for 54 Below
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Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Presley Ann/WireImage
Ron Galella/WireImage
“People say, ‘Jeez, it must be hard to stay married in show business,'” Hanks said. “I think it’s hard to stay married anywhere, but if you marry the right person, it might work out. We give each other a natural sense of support for whatever the other wants to pursue. Our marriage doesn’t require vast work. We have been married 28 years and dig each other a lot.”
