Although Tom Hanks has popped up behind both the Oscars winner’s podium and the voice artist’s microphone more than once across his long and legendary career, he’s not moved by the idea that voice actors should have their own category at the Academy Awards. “I think they have enough categories,” Hanks noted drily in a recent interview for his upcoming Toy Story 5, when asked whether the Academy should follow groups like the Emmys in specifically recognizing voice work.
Hanks’ case, as laid out to Gold Derby, is pretty straightforward: Any voice performance is already eligible for a Best Acting or Best Supporting Oscar, provided it’s convincing enough to a sufficient number of Academy voters. (That’s in contrast to, say, the movement to recognize stunt performers or choreographers, who—until the debut of the Oscars’ first stunt design category in 2028—don’t have any categories where they could even hypothetically be recognized.) The fact that said voters have not once, across 98 extant Academy Awards, availed themselves of the opportunity to nominate a non-physical performance—with the closest probably coming back in 2013, when Scarlett Johansson pulled in rave reviews, and a few festival wins, for her wholly vocal performance in Spike Jonze’s Her—doesn’t seem to bother Hanks: “If they are moved by a human being’s performance, that is all that’s required.”
Ironically, Hanks is not only busy promoting a voice role in a movie, but fresh off an Emmy nomination for this exact kind of work: He was nominated last year for Outstanding Narrator at the Emmys, for his work on NBC docuseries The Americas. (He lost to Barack Obama.) Hanks—who’s been nominated for six acting Oscars, winning two back-to-back for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump in the 1990s—also brought up, in the interview, the frequent questions about Andy Serkis’ motion capture performances in the Lord Of The Ring films; Serkis himself has argued that there’s no need to create a separate category for motion-capture performances, and that he’d much rather Academy voters simply become more open-minded about the amount of acting work that goes into creating characters like Gollum or King Kong‘s Kong.
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