Tom Hanks welcomes the ongoing wave of sexual misconduct accusations sweeping through Hollywood because he thinks it’s time to clean-up the movie industry.
Harvey Weinstein, Brett Ratner, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Piven, Jeffrey Tambor, and Hanks‘ Toy Story boss John Lasseter have all been named in recent exposes as more and more women and men come forward with allegations of harassment and assault, and the Oscar winner can only hope the scandals lead to big changes throughout Tinseltown.
“There’s a lot of reasons people do this for a living,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Making a movie is a life experience that can create an awful lot of joy. You can meet the person you fall in love with, you can laugh your heads off. That’s the good stuff.
“The bad stuff can happen on a movie as well. There are some people who go into this business because they get off on having power, and the times they feel the most powerful, which is why they went into the business, are when they are hitting on somebody who’s underneath them, (and) I don’t necessarily mean completely sexually. There are predators absolutely everywhere.”
He adds, “Somebody said, ‘Is it too late to change things?’ No, it’s never too late. It’s never too late to learn new behaviors. And that’s a responsibility of anybody who wants to obey a code of professional ethics.”
