When you’re Tom Hanks, you really don’t have to promote your own movies. You’re Tom Hanks! So when the two-time Oscar winner just randomly visited Stephen Colbert, he came to help the children. “I’m not here to talk about me or my movies… or my legacy as a living legend,” he told Colbert during a special segment titled, “Stephen Ghoulbert’s Spooky Time Halloween Fun Guide.” “I’m here for the kids, with some great inexpensive costumes that will make for a great spooktacular Halloween.”

Well, actually, some of Hanks’ costume suggestions seemed oddly familiar — a cowboy, an astronaut, a hairy Fed Ex employee — and Colbert called him out on his “cynical manipulation of innocent children to plug your movies.”

Plug, plug away, Mr. Hanks. Watch the clip below until the very end, or you’ll miss a very special guest — who would rather be drunk, in a movie theater, heckling Argo. READ FULL STORY »

Theory: Tom Hanks’ new mustache is actually an alien parasite, and it’s been controlling the Oscar winner’s brain since it settled above his upper lip sometime in September. Luckily, the ‘stache has an awesome sense of humor — which explains why Hanks has been so fun lately.

Judging by Hanks’ appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon yesterday, the farcical facial hair shows no signs of toning down the silliness. ‘Stache prompted the Cloud Atlas star to share some Full House-inspired slam poetry with Fallon’s audience. Each character’s catchphrase makes an appearance, as do The Beach Boys. And for some reason, part of it is performed in Hanks’ best Bane voice. Want to watch? You got it, dude:

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Image Credit: NBC

Bruno Mars told us he was no comedian, but he was game for a surprisingly entertaining episode of Saturday Night Live. Was he of Justin Timberlake caliber? No, but who is? Mars was initially restricted to a lot of song numbers, which had me concerned. Still, the musical sketches were pretty funny, particularly one featuring Pandora, as you’ll see below. Thankfully, after the Pandora one, Mars mostly kept the singing to his duties as musical guest and turned up the charm as a sad mouse, a one-eyed hotel employee and a fake ID maker. I had my doubts about you as a host, Mars, but you showed me wrong. I’d like to see you back someday!

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Tom Hanks may be the coolest celebrity on the planet, so we’ll forgive him for swearing openly on national television.

Good Morning America host Elizabeth Vargas asked Hanks to demonstrate the voice of one of his characters from the upcoming Cloud Atlas. Hanks obliged — with the warning that “it’s mostly swear words — and proceeded to drop a guttural F-bomb.

The inadvertent gaffe caught both Vargas and Hanks by surprise, but Hanks gamely played it off by apologizing and suggesting that future interviews will run with a 7-second delay. A-list nonchalance and genuine contrition? Yep, he’s still awesome.

UPDATE: The Parents Television Council might not agree, and has criticized Good Morning America for airing the unedited segment. “Once again, a morning news show has allowed the harshest profanity to be broadcast into every living room and breakfast table in the country.  This is just another in a long, sad string of similar instances where all of the major network morning shows have permitted this inappropriate and offensive content. These cannot and must not be dismissed as ‘mistakes,’ and it’s time for the networks to step up, take responsibility for what they broadcast, and ensure that this never happens again,” PTC Director of Public Policy Dan Isett said in a statement.

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Image Credit: Joan Marcus

Winter is coming to Broadway. And so is Emilia Clarke, the Khaleesi from HBO’s Game of Thrones, who will play Holly Golightly in a new adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out), opening this spring.

In addition, Tom Hanks confirmed that he’ll make his long-overdue Broadway debut this season as the late tabloid columnist Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy, a new play by Nora Ephron (who died of leukemia in June).

Also booked for the Great White Way this spring: Eric Coble’s new comedy The Velocity of Autumn, starring Estelle Parsons as an 80-year-old who locks herself into her Brooklyn brownstone with a pile of Molotov cocktails to resist her family’s attempt to move her into a nursing home. (The 84-year-old actress, now appearing in the musical Nice Work If You Can Get Is, has been a firecracker on stage for years — I can’t wait to see her armed with the real thing.)

Of course, the biggest star heading to the stage may be a certain classic primate with sights on Melbourne’s Regent Theatre in June: This week, producers announced plans for a very large-scale King Kong musical, with a book by Craig Lucas (Light in the Piazza) and a rock score featuring tunes from Sarah McLachlan, Justice, Massive Attack’s Robert del Naja, and the Avalanches’ Guy Garvey. After the jump, check out EW’s take on the week’s biggest new openings in New York and Los Angeles. READ FULL STORY »

Tom Hanks will headline a new play from the late Nora Ephron.

Lucky Guy tells the story of the charismatic New York columnist Mike McAlary. The play will chronicle his rise to fame and his subsequent ruin from a libel suit that nearly ended his career, culminating with his coverage of the Abner Louima case, for which he earned the Pulitzer Prize shortly before dying in 1998.

Hanks will star as McAlary, and George C. Wolfe, whose theater credits include The Normal Heart and Angels in America, will direct. “It’s heartbreaking to consider [Nora's] absence, but we will continue on be guided by people who have no small desire to maintain her voice,” Hanks told EW. READ FULL STORY »

Tom Hanks continues to prove, again and again, that he is the coolest A-list celebrity on the planet. After winning an Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries or TV Movie for HBO’s Game Change, Hanks strapped the statuette to the hood of his Lincoln, Rolls Royce-style, and drove it around the parking deck. Talk about Pimp My Ride with some celebrity clout. Watch the video below:

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“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

Jay Leno quoted this moving couplet from John Greenleaf Whittier’s Maud Muller at Michael Clarke Duncan’s memorial service yesterday, getting choked up as he pondered what the Academy Award-nominated actor might have experienced if he hadn’t passed away on Sept. 3.

Leno wasn’t the only star who turned out to remember Duncan — according to People, Bones and The Finder creator Hart Hanson, The Green Mile author Stephen King, Holly Robinson Peete, David Boreanaz, Emily Deschanel, and Duncan’s Green Mile costar Tom Hanks were also among the mourners.

Even though the occasion was incredibly sad, speakers threw in a few bits of levity here and there.  READ FULL STORY »