Tom Hanks Felt This Hilarious Scene Was The Hardest One Of His Career

Tom Hanks is an American treasure who has been making us laugh and cry at the cinema for over 40 years, and he's tackled some pretty challenging roles in his lengthy career. He played Captain John H. Miller in Steven Spielberg's gruelling World War II epic "Saving Private Ryan" and portrayed a man stranded by himself on a desert island in the Robert Zemeckis adventure film "Castaway," so he's put in his time going through difficult moments onscreen. There's one scene from early in his career, however, that the actor claims was far and away the hardest moment to get on film. 

In an interview with Collider in 2023, when Hanks was promoting his drama "A Man Called Otto," which features a cat co-star, the actor revealed that the most exhausting scene to film in his entire career was one that was mostly just him and a dog. The movie was the 1989 comedy "Turner & Hooch," where Hanks plays straight-laced, uptight investigator Detective Scott Turner, who is forced to relax a little when he's given custody of a French Mastiff (Dogue de Bordeaux) named Hooch, who witnessed a murder. "Turner & Hooch" is something of a 1980s comedy classic, and it was even used to help sell Hanks on the idea of voicing Woody in "Toy Story," but it sounds like it was kind of a nightmare to make.

In the interview, Hanks shared that the scene in "Turner & Hooch" where he has to try to wrangle the large, terrifying-looking dog into (or rather near to) his car was the most difficult thing he's ever filmed, saying, "It was the most physical, exhausting, time-consuming thing. And because it could only happen in the real world, this is not a moment of CGI to it; there's not a moment of a stuntman being involved in it. Hanks continued:

"It was just me and Beasley, who was the dog who was playing Hooch at the time, and it was steady cams, multiple, multiple versions of it. And the thing that was exhausting about it was, it was just me and that dog every step of the way. It happened in real-time, and it happened over a number of hours, and my body was beaten to a pulp by the time we got to the end, and it was also full energy the entire time. I had to be petrified of this dog at the same time I was commanding that dog."

In the scene, it's just Hanks using two animal catch poles to navigate the dog, who is supposed to be resisting completely and possibly aggressive. While the dog actor seems to be having a lot of fun playing tug-of-war with the poles and Hanks, Mastiffs are ridiculously strong, and trying to wrestle one for a full day of shooting sounds beyond exhausting. When you add to that the fact that Hanks had to perform with his face and voice while physically maneuvering over 100 pounds of dog, the sheer amount of slobber involved, and the sunny outdoor shoot, and it's no wonder Hanks looks sweaty and dead tired in the moments where he's actually gotten into his car and can rest for a moment. 

While canine co-stars can be tricky to work with, "Turner & Hooch" director Roger Spottiswoode said that Hanks and the dogs had a great working relationship. Hooch gets up to some serious chaos in the film and totally destroys Detective Turner's apartment, but there are moments where you can see the connection between Hanks and the different dogs that played Hooch. Not only that, but I'm going to be honest: if that dog had wanted to launch Hanks into the water while shooting the catch pole scene, it could have done so pretty easily. 

"Turner & Hooch" is a great buddy comedy (with a totally bummer ending) that only works as well as it does because Hanks is so locked in with the dogs playing Hooch that it feels like the relationship between their characters is real. With his fantastic kid-in-an-adult-body comedy "Big" in 1988 and "Turner & Hooch" in 1989, Hanks cemented his place as a family-friendly comedy star for the ages. It just took one serious workout wrestling a dog on a dock to make it all happen.