By MOAA Staff

Global headlines aren’t rare for Tom Hanks, but his recent stay atop worldwide news feeds has had little to do with his acting prowess.

While he and wife Rita Wilson have been released from an Australian hospital, they remain in self-quarantine. And while filming of Hanks’ current project, a biopic of Elvis Presley in which Hanks plays Colonel Tom Parker, has been suspended, the two-time Academy Award winner connected with freelance writer Todd Gilchrist for Military Officer magazine to discuss Greyhound, the tale of a fictional Allied convoy in the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic during World War II.

The movie’s release has been pushed back until at least June 20 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Hanks produced the film and will play the fictional Cmdr. Ernest Krause, a career naval officer squaring off with Nazi U-boats in the war’s early days. He also penned the screenplay, an adaptation of 1955’s The Good Shepherd, a novel by C.S. Forester.

“I’ve been pondering the physiological sense of stasis that permeated the days of those alive during the war,” Hanks told Gilchrist. “Time and history came to a standstill. I’d been looking for material that would explore that period of ‘hang fire’ when no end, no conclusion to the war was in sight.

“The Good Shepherd delivered a canvas for that stasis perfectly — the middle of the Atlantic, the relentless sea, only a horizon, and then, only in the daylight, the unseen enemy, with time and distance not mattering beyond the next hour and the next page of the charts.”

Hanks is keeping fans updated on his real-life, modern-day battle with an unseen enemy via social media. MOAA members can read more about Greyhound from the star and director Aaron Schneider in an upcoming issue of Military Officer; learn more about the magazine, and check out back issues, here.