It’s Time to Watch Tom Hanks Tell Stephen Colbert About the Good Old Days

2 minute read

Between being everyone’s favorite wedding crasher and cheekily trolling his fans on Twitter, Tom Hanks has somehow found the time to pen a collection of 17 short stories, appropriately titled Uncommon Type: Some Stories.

During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, however, Hanks reveals that the volume wouldn’t have even existed if it hadn’t been for writer and director Nora Ephron, who’s arguably given Hanks some of the most the most beloved films in his repertoire, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.

Hanks, who dedicated the book to his wife Rita Wilson and “all the kids, because of Nora,” revealed that while working on Sleepless in Seattle during a very successful time in his career, he critiqued Ephron’s screenplay resulting in some Hank-suggested revisions for it, including a memorable scene where his character tells his son with some colorful language that he’s going go away for the weekend with a lady friend.

“When it all came out, I said to Nora, ‘Hey, that stuff really worked, those scenes were great,'” he shared. “And she said, ‘Well, you wrote that.’ And I said, ‘No, I complained during rehearsals!’ And she said, ‘Well, that’s what it is. You come up with things and you didn’t type it, but you wrote it.”

Hanks later shared that from that moment on, he and Ephron collaborated and critiqued each other’s works. Watch the full interview below.

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Write to Cady Lang at cady.lang@timemagazine.com