Tom Hanks said on the “TODAY” show Tuesday that the acts people can take to prevent spreading the coronavirus are “simple.”
“The idea of doing one’s part should be so simple,” Hanks said in his first live interview since he and his wife were diagnosed with COVID-19 in March.
“Wear a mask, social distance, wash your hands,” Hanks said. “It’s such a small thing, and … it’s a mystery to me how somehow that has been wiped out of what should be ingrained in the behavior of us — all simple things to do your part.”
Hanks said he thinks “a huge majority of Americans get it,” but he’s confounded by people who don’t want to do their part to “help our street, our neighborhood, our city, our state, our nation.”
“Let’s not confuse the fact, it’s killing people,” Hanks said of coronavirus. “You can argue what the numbers are … it’s killing people.”
Hanks, 63, posted on Instagram on March 11 that while in Australia, he and his wife, actor and producer Rita Wilson, came down with symptoms resembling a cold, as well as body aches and slight fevers.
“To play things right, as is needed in the world right now, we were tested for the Coronavirus, and were found to be positive,” Hanks shared before the U.S. began to see a staggering spike in cases.
The couple was in Australia, where Hanks was working on an Elvis Presley biopic. Production of the film was officially postponed a few days later.
“We’ll keep the world posted and updated,” Hanks wrote in the post. And he did.
He twice thanked the healthcare workers and others taking care of him and Wilson while they were in isolation, and on March 16, the couple’s son, Chet, said they had been released from the hospital and had moved to self-quarantine at their Australia home. Two days later, Hanks said the two had “no fever but the blahs.”
Hanks and Wilson returned to the U.S. at the end of March. And in mid-April, when “Saturday Night Live” returned for a “live from home” show, Hanks was the surprise host.
The actor called himself the “celebrity canary in the coal mine for coronavirus” and joked that he was thrown when medical workers in Australia took his temperature in Celsius.
“Turns out 36 is fine,” Hanks said. “Thirty-eight is bad — how Hollywood treats female actors.”
