Henry Winkler is looking back on his longtime rift with fellow actor Tom Hanks.
In a recent interview on talk show In Depth with Graham Bensinger, the Happy Days icon, 80, recalled being fired as the director of Hanks’ 1989 movie Turner & Hooch amid simmering tension between him and the Oscar winner.
Winkler said he had agreed to direct Turner & Hooch despite his “instinct” warning him that he wouldn’t be a good fit for the movie.
“I guess, being insecure at that time, I talked too much,” Winkler said of working with Hanks, 70, and costar Mare Winningham. “I gave them direction … which I thought was my job. I wanted to do [a scene] over again, and apparently that pissed them off.”
Have Tom Hanks and Henry Winkler really been locked in a decades-long feud? Rumors about bad blood between the two actors have been swirling for years, but neither of them have directly addressed the speculation. Even when Winkler discussed his history with Hanks in a May 2024 interview, he kept his answer coy. During an […]
Winkler said that after 13 days of filming, he was called into Walt Disney Studios chair Jeffrey Katzenberg’s office and admonished. “I then go to the set, I drive home [and] I’m fired as a director,” he claimed, adding that he didn’t handle the firing well because he was “devastated.”
Asked about the “genesis” of “any negative feelings” between him and the Castaway star, Winkler said, “I don’t know,” recalling that Hanks once made a guest appearance on Happy Days.
“I’m still working on my perspective,” the actor responded when asked about his thoughts on what went wrong between them.
Host Graham Bensinger then asked, “You think that relationship ever repairs itself?”
Celebrity feuds are so captivating that there’s even an award-winning Ryan Murphy anthology TV series devoted to the topic. While some A-list beefs seem inevitable — Nicki Minaj vs. Cardi B, for example, or Jef Holm vs. Arie Luyendyk Jr. — others seem to come out of nowhere. Freddie Prinze Jr., for instance, spoke ill […]
Winkler responded, “Sure.”
Winkler previously spoke about his experience working on Turner & Hooch, a buddy cop comedy about a detective and a dog, on the “How to Fail” podcast in May 2024.
“I did 11 weeks of preparation. I knew this dog, this slobbery mastiff, and I became friends. The star did not become my friend,” he said, referring to Hanks.
At the time, Winkler speculated that the tension between him and Hanks may have been because a fan recognized Winkler for his work as Happy Days favorite, The Fonz, rather than spotting Hanks.
From rom-coms to dramas, Tom Hanks has become one of the most popular film stars in the world. The Terminal star was born in Concord, California, in July 1956 and developed his interest in acting by performing in high school plays. Hanks went on to study theater at California State University, Sacramento, however, he dropped […]
“We were in Carmel, this little seaside wonderful town on the coast of California, looking for a location, and a woman comes, honest to God, comes running out of a shop and says, ‘Henry, Fonz! Oh, my God!’ and I say, ‘And of course you know Tom Hanks,’” he said. “The director of photography, when I was fired 13 days into filming, said, ‘I knew that this was going to happen, on that day in Carmel.’”
For his part, Hanks has never publicly commented on the rift between the two stars.
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