Hanks draws on love of space for immersive doc

Actor narrates British film that brings NASA’s famous Apollo space missions to life

You won’t see Tom Hanks on one of those space tourism flights that whisk celebrities and millionaires on a suborbital jaunt for a few hours. He says it wouldn’t be enough time out of this world.

“I don’t need to go up and down,” Hanks said Tuesday. “I think I’d need a little bit longer in paradise.”

Going to the moon is another matter — and the subject of “The Moonwalkers,” an immersive documentary co-written and narrated by Hanks.

“I’d do that in a second,” Hanks said. “I don’t have the math. I do not have those abilities, but I’m sure there’s something I could do in order to help the program.”

The two-time Academy Awardwinning actor is a lifelong space buff, and he has channelled his passion into “The Moonwalkers,” which opens Wednesday at the Lightroom, a London venue specializing in interactive art and film experiences.

Visitors sit on benches surrounded by imagery as the 50-minute film brings NASA’s Apollo space missions to life. The focus is on the 12 men who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, the thousands of people who helped them get there and a new generation of astronauts set to return to the moon as part of the Artemis program.

It’s a high-tech blend of archive film footage, drawings, animation and digitally remastered photographs — but not, Hanks stresses, any computer-generated images.

“The Moonwalkers,” which runs to April 21, 2024, is subtitled “a journey with Tom Hanks.” The actor narrates in his warm, avuncular style and co-wrote the script with British documentary filmmaker Christopher Riley.

Hanks, 67, has been enthralled by lunar exploration since he was a kid trying to simulate zero gravity by sitting at the bottom of a backyard swimming pool. His performance as Jim Lovell, commander of a space mission in jeopardy, in “Apollo 13” helped revive popular interest in the Apollo program in the 1990s.

Perhaps the signs were there early on that he’d become an actor, not an astronaut. What hooked Hanks on space was not so much the cuttingedge science as the human drama. His interest is in the people up there.

“The science is cool, when you can grasp what the science is, but the science always goes hand in hand with, you know — Do they drink coffee up there? Do they have hot water? Do they need a shave?”

Hanks said the first time he was entranced by space was as a 12year-old in 1968, seeing an image on his TV of the Earth beamed live from the Apollo 8 spacecraft orbiting the moon.

“It was a live broadcast, and you could see the cloud, you could see the grey of the ocean, you could see the darker grey of the land,” he said. “I didn’t view it as politics. I didn’t view it as news. I viewed it as something that was like a great adventure out of Jason and the Argonauts … a storytelling artistic achievement equal to all of the technological brilliance.”