Tom Hanks recalls Penny Marshall telling him to gain weight for “A League of Their Own” so he wouldn't look 'cute'

"Well, you know, if I'm the guy who's 36 and I'm managing a girls' baseball team, there's got to be a problem with me," Hanks reasoned.

It's common for actors to feel pressured to get into the best shape of their lives before a big screen role. But for A League of Their Own, director Penny Marshall advised Tom Hanks to do just the opposite.

"On A League Of Their Own, Penny said, 'Put on as much weight as you can. I can't have you cute, because you're too young, and I don't want the girls to think, 'Oh, Jimmy's cute,'" Hanks revealed on a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

"So I said, 'Well, you know, if I'm the guy who's 36 and I'm managing a girls' baseball team, there's got to be a problem with me,'" he continued. "She said, 'Well, you're a drunk.' But then I said, 'Well, why am I a drunk?'" From that question, the actor and director went on to a breakthrough.

A League of Their Own chronicles the formation of the fictional women's baseball team the Rockford Peaches, and the team's progress through the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943. Hanks plays the team's manager, Jimmy Dugan, a washed-up former pro who at first treats the team and all its players like a joke. But the stellar ensemble of Lori Petty, Madonna, Rosie O'Donnell, and especially Geena Davis, with whom his character develops a relationship, convince him to give them a shot.

Hanks couldn't at first understand where Dugan got his damage, and why he'd take it out on the Peaches. But eventually he realized, "Oh, I know what happened. I blew my knee out trying to get out of a woman's hotel room. And that cost me my career." The actor described this part of his behind-the-scenes process as learning "how do you talk about the natural, recognizable compromises a human being has to make in order to get up the next morning and from then on?"

Related: A League of Their Own cast: Where are they now?

Hanks made only two films with Marshall, Big and A League of Their Own. They remain two of the biggest hits of his career, and stand out as Marshall's two most successful directorial efforts. It's impossible to reduce the success of a film to any one ingredient, but the deep character work Hanks and Marshall put in behind the scenes shine through in both films.

While making Big four years earlier, Hanks recalls that Marshall "was in kind of this underground, revolutionary phase of directing movies. I called it movie making by attrition after a while, because we would go so long and so deep into these individual moments, that I said to her at some point, 'Penny, for God's sakes, what do you want from this scene?' And she looked at me, she was mad, and she said, 'Tom, I don't know.'"

Related: Historic A League of Their Own baseball park destroyed in fire in California: 'A terrible loss'

Hanks remembered Marshall saying, "'All I know is six months from now, I'm going to be in an editing room, wishing I had a shot that I don't have.'" As soon as Marshall said that, Hanks responded, "'I completely understand that. My job then is to give you as much of the canned goods for the basement as possible, so you can weather the storm of editing it.'"

Marshall died in 2018 at the age of 75. Hanks publicly mourned her on the site formerly known as Twitter, writing, "Goodbye, Penny. Man, did we laugh a lot! Wish we still could. Love you. Hanx." In 2022, director Anne Fletcher honored Penny and her late brother Garry Marshall with a Hocus Pocus 2 Easter egg. In the scene, the Sanderson sisters fly past a window in which a couple are watching the Marshalls' play the satanic "Master" and his "Little Woman" wife.

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