In the HISTORY docuseries, you narrate all 20 episodes. What was that process like?
It was the opposite of just coming in and reading the words someone came up with. None of us wanted to come in and say, “OK, here’s another haiku of narration from Hanks.” There was some stuff that, as soon as I read it for the first time, I turned to the control booth and said, “Has this been vetted? Is this true?” And they said, “Yeah.” It ended up being a constant education for myself of saying: I. Did. Not. Know. That. There were times where we all said, “if you were going to put this in a fake movie, you wouldn’t believe it.”
If American high school students could all glean one thing from the series, what might that be?
For a populace to say, “We did not really know that our neighbors were being rounded up and sent away” is just as though today we would say, “I don’t really see any signs of homelessness in America.” No. It’s obvious. And it’s happening. And it’s not pleasant. But we cannot be complicit in 2026 to this kind of thing going on. Otherwise, look what we might recreate.
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