UNLESS YOU COUNT two presidents and Woody Allen, that is. With this month's cover appearance, Hanks becomes a six-time cover subject, tying him with Allen and putting him behind only JFK and Nixon, who appeared mostly on Dubious Achievements issue covers. Anyway, Nixon and Kennedy are dead, and we hear Allen has the sniffles. Hanks beats Sharon Stone, Muhammad Ali, and David Letterman (four appearances each); Madonna (three); and Alan Thicke (zero). Of course, one cover subject beats them all: Esky, our mischievous little mascot, has appeared on the cover more than five hundred times. Beat that, Oprah.

AS TOLD TO CAL FUSSMAN

You know how you see a photograph and can suddenly remember what you did before that moment and what you did afterward for the rest of the day? Even in movies that I haven't thought about in a hundred million years, the ephemeral qualities of doing them come back when I see these photos.

I can look at a photo from Turner & Hooch and remember what the dock smelled like at San Pedro. I can remember the chicken and rice that I had every day for lunch. So these photos--some taken of me, some that I've taken myself--have become sort of a family album of my work.

Before a scene begins, you can approach a set and say, Look how ridiculous this is. You've got the absurdity of a camera crane, C-stands, tools, and apple boxes. Maybe you're in a fake room and have this interested and, at the same time, exhausted group of people who're holding boom mics, laying cable, and setting up lights.

A snapshot can capture that. And that's a great thing for me. Because when I'm acting, I'm no longer aware of that stuff. I mean, if you're paying attention to the artificiality of it all, then you aren't in character. Your concentration has to be this protective snow bubble, a sphere all around you.

A lot of times a crew member will ask, "Am I okay here? Am I in your light?"

And I'll say, "I don't even see you."

What I'm reminded of when I look at the photos from Forrest Gump--oh, here's one of me in the football uniform--is coming to New York when I was young and trying to make it as an actor. My oldest son wasn't even two years old. We were getting by on unemployment from the state of Ohio after work I'd done in the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. I would get the unemployment checks and take them to Chemical Bank at Forty-fourth and Broadway, but I couldn't cash them. I had to deposit them and wait for them to clear.

It got to the point where I was down to my last twenty-five dollars. I can picture myself on a cold February day, standing in line at that bank, with desperation in the air. I had to have a plan. No, two plans: One, the check will clear and I can pay certain bills. And two, the check won't clear and I can take out seven dollars.

Well, now at that very corner at Forty-fourth and Broadway stands a Bubba Gump shrimp restaurant.

I don't get a dime from it. I'm not connected to the restaurant in any way. But when I first saw it, I said, "Oh, my God."

I mean, what more can I say about Forrest Gump?

You know, I thanked Hooch at the Academy Awards. Actually, there were three dogs playing Hooch. This one was the oldest and the biggest--also the sweetest. Hooch taught me a lot, mostly about how free-flowing a movie can be. It doesn't have to be: The phone will ring, and you'll pick it up with your right hand and say, Blah, blah, blah.

If I had to give Hooch a bath, I didn't know what he was going to do when I tried to put him in the tub. And nobody could tell me, because who knows what Hooch will do? You can go in literally without a script--all you need is a scenario--because you weren't acting; you were reacting off Hooch.

Turner & Hooch freed me up quite a bit. And you can see it on the beach when the bombs go off in Saving Private Ryan. You'd be surprised at how often I can trace work I did in other films back to Hooch.

When we were making Cast Away, we needed four Chucks. On the left is the photo double, then me, then there's the stunt double, and at the end is a very famous guy who lives in Fiji--Jon Roseman. You remember how Chuck gets on that little makeshift raft not long after he's been stranded and heads out into those twenty-foot waves that almost kill him? We needed a guy who was incredibly good in the water to do that. Jon Roseman does that for fun. He knows the point, the breaks, and the coral underneath. So he just grew out a beard and we dyed his hair.

You asked before if I take something out of every movie. Well, you can do transcendental meditation, you can go to church and pray, or you can lie down on a shrink's couch and slowly try to let aspects of yourself bubble up to come to some degree of self-awareness. Why am I like this? Why do I do these things? Why am I always attracted to these situations? You can also come to an understanding working on a movie. Not on every movie, but on quite a few. When it happens, that's the windfall profit you get from taking on the gig.

When we started working on Cast Away, I just thought it would be a funny, unique movie about a guy who spends four years alone on an island. I didn't realize that it would also be an examination of what solitude can do to you and why I'm overjoyed to have a wife and four kids.

It's funny, when I consider Cast Away in the abstract, I think of the loneliness. But when I see myself in this photograph, it's, Oh, the hungry guy. I dropped more than 60 pounds to get down to 169. And that was after pigging out to reach 235 to shoot the beginning of the movie.

Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there's less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what's the fun in eating anything you want to?

It's when you can't eat anything that everything looks great. You get incredible pleasure out of the simplest things: a certain type of apple that's sweeter than another type. Buckwheat pancakes! Let me tell you, when you're in the big weight-losing phase, four buckwheat pancakes with one-third-calorie syrup is big-time.

We shot the first half of the movie and then we took a year off. There was no way for me to be fat and then all of a sudden become skinny and replicate starving. Not only did I need a year to lose the weight, but I also needed to grow a beard. There was no way you could put on a fake beard there. The spirit gum won't stay in 98 degree heat. So I went home and grew the beard out. I still have pictures from a charity event for the Women's Cancer Research Fund. Everyone's looking really nice in tuxedos, and I look like a banshee.

Look at us roasting out there in the heat. You know, I have permanent damage on my neck from that sun.

Oh, here's one from Philadelphia--when I'm supposed to be dying of AIDS.

Philadelphia was a bit of a Hail Mary pass from Jonathan Demme's perspective. And that was: We're going to make a movie about a subject that no one has really touched. And it's not going to be a small art-house movie; it's going to be a full-budget, major-studio release playing in your local multiplex next to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We were going to need to attract an audience to make it profitable. Given that, you have to make sure you're touching on everything you need to touch on.

It was also a big change for me. Until that time, I'd made movies with kids, girls, and dogs. This was the first time I was working with another guy. And that guy was Denzel Washington. Denzel was not only a peer but also a hugely accomplished peer. By that time, he'd already made Malcolm X.

Denzel's part was actually much more sophisticated than mine because he had to play a lawyer who went from thinking a certain way about gays to representing me. He also got to have all the great speeches in the courtroom, while I sat next to him at the table.

But I remember this joyous day for me as an actor. We were shooting the scene where I come into his office and ask him to take my case. I find out he's just had a baby and congratulate him, and he says, "What's the matter? You don't look so good." When I tell him I have AIDS, he backs away, wondering if I'm contagious. I reach for a cigar on his desk, and you feel how uncomfortable that makes him.

Sometimes you've gotta be on your toes. You've gotta kiss the girl, or you've gotta get the dog into the bath. In this one scene, we had to communicate a huge amount of the dynamics of the movie itself. And Denzel isn't a guy who says, "Are you going to say it like that?" He's going to throw something at you, and he's going to act off whatever you give him. You cannot fake Denzel. You cannot shake him. I'd sandbag him a little, and he'd come back in a way that said, I can take that, how 'bout this? And that scene became this fabulous tennis match between me and him.

In a way, our characters were always competing, and then it's game over--kind of a tie. That was wonderful to go through. Your game gets better when you play with the best.

This next one is a wardrobe-continuity photo taken by Wyatt Bartlett on the set of The Da Vinci Code. As soon as we've done a scene, she has to take a photograph so she can make sure that when we continue shooting, my shirt is untucked just the right amount. Wyatt has eight bajillion photographs of me in this nondescript dark suit in various stages of untuckedness.

I don't think The Da Vinci Code taught me anything new about the way I view divinity and religion--which is probably a result of the polarization in the book itself.

You know, it can be almost dangerous to start talking about God, because it's such an incredibly personal value. Some people can look at an object and hold it as priceless. And other people can look at that object and say, "Dude, that's just an old Pepsi-Cola bottle."

"But it's a Pepsi-Cola bottle made from the bottling plant that closed in 1952!"

As far as organized religion goes, I've been around. I went to Catholic church when masses were still in Latin. Then I lived with my aunt for a while; she was a Nazarene, which is as hardcore Methodist as you can get. I had a stepmother who converted to the Mormon church when my dad was still married to her, so you had the Mormon elders coming by. In junior high school, all my best friends were Jews, and I'd have seder feasts with them. My older kids' mom and I were married in an Episcopal church that we went to regularly, and now I'm Greek Orthodox.

I once made a movie in Jerusalem. It was called Every Time We Say Goodbye. I don't think I have a photo here. But I can remember being in a car in Israel and the driver saying in passing, "That's where David slew Goliath." And I was like, "Whoa! Stop! Back up! Back up!"

On a single day in Israel, you can see the holy sites of three major religions. If you want to say this site cancels out their site and that site cancels out their site, you can if you want. I never saw the point. It's much better to say, This is where Jesus split the loaves and fed the multitudes. And that is where Muhammad ascended to heaven.

We all ponder the religious questions at some point. But really, who knows? Ultimately you operate on, What do I view as being important? What leaps of faith am I going to make that are essentially unshakable?

So doing The Da Vinci Code wasn't a "Holy cow! I never knew that" kind of experience. But what's great about it--and the reason why I think it's such a phenomenon--is that it doesn't make any arguments. It just makes connections. And these connections can be the stuff of the most idiotic conspiracy theories or the simplest Zen-like statements of consciousness.

In the movie, we say, What matters is what you believe. What in the world can be more real than that?

Oh, man, I had a great one of Lloyd Bridges from Joe Versus the Volcano that I took on a Minox. There was this lightning-bolt thing behind him, and he had this goofy look on his face. I searched everywhere but couldn't find it. It's a lot easier to keep these organized now that they're digital.

There are a number of phases in an actor's career. Well, not in every actor's career, but there were in mine. There was a time when I viewed my job as if it were repertory theater: Get all the good parts you can. They're doing that play? I can play that part! And I can play that part, too! When are they doing that shoot? And I just kind of lunged at everything.

John Patrick Shanley wrote this screenplay for Joe Versus the Volcano that was unlike anything I'd ever read. It was this dream state of a narrative about this guy who finds out he's going to die of a brain cloud within six months. And I thought, That's the most glamorous thing in the world! Imagine the freedom he must feel. All the rules are off. I can do everything I want and do it now! I reacted to that and ended up lunging at it in order to do it. But in the end, all movies end up being huge adventures unto themselves, and that movie was not the least of them.

You know, the odds are against making a truly successful movie. The truth is, it's made three completely different times. A guy writes it, and it's beautiful. But then you've got to make it as beautiful as that guy imagined. You might--and you might not. And then people have to work it over in the cutting room.

In the end, movies are binary: They're ones or they're zeros. That's actually George Lucas's theory. They work or they don't.

Bonfire of the Vanities didn't work. I wasn't the right guy to play the part, and there were plenty of other things wrong with it. I don't think that's any secret. Plus, it's hard to make a movie out of something that entered into the national consciousness as strongly as Tom Wolfe's book.

But the truth is, the only thing you're in a position to say when the shoot ends is, I had no fun making this movie. That's about it. And I didn't even have that to say about Bonfire of the Vanities because it was a lot of fun to make.

So maybe in the end, it's not a matter of whether they're good or not. I've made--what?--thirty-five movies. Sometimes you end up appreciating a movie in a way that others will never understand.

I remember showing up on the set of Joe Versus the Volcano and Meg Ryan was dressed as the first character she played in the film--DeDe. I didn't know it was Meg; I thought I was talking to some goofy chick at the coffee table. Things like that happen. So you look at Joe Versus the Volcano and see Joe Versus the Volcano. I look at Joe Versus the Volcano and see how it took Meg and I on to Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail.

We're in Nashville here, at a former prison, one of the saddest-looking places you've ever seen. It's grotesquely hot, and we're wearing those incredibly thick, Depression-era guard uniforms. The old-school baseball gloves were props. Hey, let's throw a ball around.

What did I learn from The Green Mile? Well, I have to go back to the reason I said I'm going to do this movie in the first place. And that is, Okay, I get this. I get that there's a guy whose job is that of the executioner. Brass tacks, bring it down to a basic level: What do you do for a living? Well, I execute people. I execute them after I have taken care of them for months and months. I bring them their food. I talk to them. I listen to them. I get to know them. I keep them calm. I keep them orderly. But when the time comes, if I have to, I break their arm when they try to escape or crack them in the head with my billy club to make them shut up and I drag them off and I strap them in a chair and I kill them. Then I go home to my wife.

So I'm able to do this job with a complete and utter disconnect from the reality of what that is and then go home. Not pretending not to have a care in the world, but to actually not have a care in the world. Until this thing happens, until the great change comes. Until he comes to a point where he says, I just can't do it anymore.

Now, I can kind of understand that. There are a lot of places in your life where you can go to--that are all relative, that are not nearly as horrible as being an executioner--where you can say, I was able to make a great disconnect within this period of time. I just put my head down and didn't let anything bother me.

My parents basically pioneered marriage-dissolution laws for the state of California. So my three siblings and I had so many different step relatives and parents and brothers and sisters. By the time my sister was thirteen and my brother was going to the same school and I was seven and in grammar school--guess what?--we did it without a care in the world. We were basically living alone. My dad was working long hours in a restaurant, and we were, like, raising ourselves. We didn't do it from a perspective of Oh, gosh, poor us, we have this terrible situation, how are we going to make it? This was what our lives were. We made our peace with it, and we went on and enjoyed what was going on around us. That's the type of thing I'm talking about.

So I got to examine something there that had a lot to do with not just killing people for a living but also sharing that experience with other folks. Because the guards had created their own haven. It was, If we're going to be on death row, let's make it the most pleasant experience of our lives. We're going to have trust for each other. We're going to have a nice trade-off of jobs. We're going to have a nice pot of coffee brewing all the time. We're in this together. And what came out of the filming was a tremendous sense of family.

The Green Mile brought together as diverse a group of actors as you're ever going to come across on the same set: Jeff DeMunn and Barry Pepper, Doug Hutchison, me, David Morse, and Michael Clarke Duncan. A lot of times, you can be in a big cast and move all over the place. But The Green Mile was a very small set. We were in the inner sanctum--death row. You couldn't go anywhere, so everybody was always just hanging around. You'd go for a walk and see Doug taking a snooze in one of the cells. We ended up spending huge amounts of time with each other, talking about the movie, our careers, our lives, and we invested in each other very quickly. We fed off each other's goofy strengths and personalities and probably had a bigger love fest on that movie than on any other. Even when we weren't involved in a scene, we'd come out of our trailers to watch every guy's coverage.

There's a connection between that and working with Denzel because we were all playing like we were on this all-star team. And you're just better by pulling for each other.

This next one is from Volunteers. There I am, totally falling in love with Rita [Wilson, his wife]. And there's John Candy, God bless him.

We're deep in the jungles of Mexico. You fly out of Mexico City to Veracruz, get into a car, drive two and a half hours down the coast, and then go inland. This was before e-mails and what have you. You'd see farmers walking their horses down the middle of the street pulling loaded wagons. There were great sunsets and sunrises. I look at this picture and feel the spirit of the place--so beautiful and peaceful. It was a magical setting to fall in love and very reflective of our love ever since.

Every night we'd take over the coffee shop. It was a beautiful thing to fall in love around John Candy. Life is always a party--more papas fritas! So much fun, so ideal. Rita and I looked at each other and--ka-boing--that was that.

Well, yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, I did happen to be married at the time. And there's nothing to celebrate about that. But the reality is, it was a young marriage and a difficult marriage. I had two kids, great kids. And I wasn't so naive not to think that there were going to be repercussions. But I knew what was and was not. I asked Rita if it was the real thing for her, and it just couldn't be denied.

My first marriage was a very tough thing all the way around. The good news is the fact that two fabulous kids came out of it.

You know, I was five years old when my mom and dad divorced, and I was the only one of my siblings who didn't go live with my mom full-time. To me, she was just my mom whom I didn't live with.

After I was remarried, my mom and I started having some longer talks, and I saw her in a completely different way. I realized that instead of being a convenient thing for her or my dad to do, breaking up the family was really an act of desperation that caused both of them all sorts of pain. Oh, I see, they did what they had to simply to retain their sanity.

I went from She's my mom and I don't live with her to She's my mom and she's been through all these amazing adventures herself. She had divorces, and now she's married to a great guy longer than to any of her other husbands. It took her four times in order to get it, but God bless her, she's found it.

It's binary: Either it works or it doesn't. The language of the universe is math.

No, this isn't from A League of Their Own. It's from when we were filming Nothing in Common in Chicago. We were playing the crew of Ferris Bueller's Day Off in a game of fatball. Immigrants invented it. They used this big ball, and they didn't use gloves. Lot of broken fingers.

It was a doubleheader. I won the first game when I came up with the bases loaded and clobbered a big fat hanging pitch, high and inside--cleared the right fielder's head by a mile and just kept rolling to the fence as I circled the bases. In a bizarre fluke, I came up with a chance to win the second game, but the catcher said, "Don't give him anything high and inside," and I popped out in the opposite direction.

But you always remember your grand slams, don'tcha?

Nothing in Common was my fifth movie. It was a big deal. It had a degree of drama to it that I was seeking in order to be authentic. I had a certain level of physical technique but not much as far as the actual acting process. If it was a comedy: Be funny. If it was a serious part: Be serious. That's all I was operating on. But this film was really dictated by the writers and Garry Marshall, who directed it. He said, "You know, you're going to have to go through something on this film. This is about the character's relationship with his father and mother. What about your daddy and mama?"

That was the first time I had a big chunk of time on a movie in order to wonder, What happened to me that was like this? What did I go through that's emblematic of this? Okay, you're a guy going into his thirties now, your dad's dying, what are you going through? Well, my dad was dying. What was I going through?

My dad and I weren't particularly close. He was the polar opposite of me: He was shy, not outgoing, didn't communicate very well. He was a man who was really good with his hands. And I was good with my verbs.

I didn't talk to my dad while we were actually doing the film. But he ended up going to see it, and I said, "Dad, you're all over this. I went back and thought a lot about you and about being your son."

It opened up a few years when he and I were really close. We traveled a lot together; he came to Israel with me. At that point, he'd lost both his kidneys, so wherever we went he had to find dialysis. But it was my art, to lay a highfalutin claim to it, that brought us together. Our relationship is what our relationship is, Dad, there are reasons for it, and that's okay. The movie got us there.

Jackie Gleason played my dad in the movie. And at the end of it, he says, "You know, of all the people in the world, the last person I thought I could count on would be you." And, man, my dad said something very much like that to me. But it was on the total opposite end. He said to me, "I don't know how you get up there and do that." Because he knew he could never get up there. And when he said that, he was looking at me in awe.

This was the very first time any of us filming Apollo 13 were up in the Vomit Comet. We were doing a research trip in Houston, and they let us go up for the experience while NASA experiments were going on.

The Vomit Comet is like a 707. You climb through one of the small hatches off the wing to get inside. The first thing you notice is the smell, like a million people have thrown up. Actually, it's a combination of vomit and the disinfectant they use to clean it up. So you have to make your peace with that really quick.

The inside is padded, but it's also kind of scarred up. There were a lot of experiments going on that day: Bicycle riders were hooked up to a bunch of wires. There were some women onboard testing new ways for females to pee in zero gravity.

As you go up, everyone is seated in what looks like five rows of airline seats. The rest of it is empty. You take off, get out over the Gulf of Mexico, and then horns start blowing, which means you're going to start the ascent. You go up, up, up, up, and then the horns blow as the parabola's about to start. And as you go over and start coming down, that's when you rise up, because you end up falling at the same rate that the plane is going down. So it's artificial zero gravity.

We were buckled in, and the first time felt like I was on an amusement-park ride turned upside down. The blood is up in your brain. You hear things a little differently. Your vision is almost too clear. And then we unbuckled and began to float.

You adapt very, very quickly. Kevin Bacon said it was like swimming in a pool, except you don't get anywhere when you kick. About twenty seconds later a horn goes off, which means we're about to reach the bottom of the parabola. Then you go down very quickly, and you're on the floor and you're lying there, pulling a couple g's, so it's pressing against you a bit.

If you're vomiting, too bad; you just have to deal with it. Because they don't stop. I think we were scheduled for five groups of ten parabolas. There are what they call airman's blossoms--vomit bags--in case you start heaving. None of us did because we took this stuff called scop-dex. It's scopolamine in order to fight the nausea and Dexedrine to fight the drowsiness brought on by the scopolamine. It makes you feel like you're exhausted but just had so many cups of coffee that you're never going to fall asleep.

As time went by, we'd kick off the back of the plane, sail all the way down the middle, reach the other end, reverse ourselves, and kick back to our starting point before the parabola was down. What a blast! We had a badminton set, threw the football around.

We talked them into giving us another ten parabolas, and all the workers were overjoyed. They go up with very specific experiments to do; they never get to play around like us. I watched them all flipping, going up and back as happy as little kids, and I thought, Man, I'm so happy that I'm an actor.

I was at the Oakland Coliseum when Willie Mays came up for his final at-bat. It was during the World Series. I wish I'd had a little camera in my pocket at the time. I'd love to have captured that moment.

You know, the sporting analogy for an actor is that you're the center fielder. You're standing out there and you start moving on the windup. If the batter's swinging, you're making a judgment on the speed of the pitch. Even just with that, you have this innate sense of where the ball will go. It's all so fast and instinctive. The difference between leaning the right way and the wrong way is the difference between Willie Mays making a catch or not. You have to be completely prepared and completely instinctive. You've got to be concentrated but ready to go wherever that damn dog takes you.