TOKYO —Hardly showing any sign of jetlag after a 12-hour-plus long haul from the US, Tom Hanks sat for the following exclusive Conversation with the same cool composure with which he tackles an enviable menagerie of roles that have made him perhaps Hollywood’s most versatile actor — as the AIDS-stricken lawyer in Philadelphia which won him a Best Actor Oscar in 1994 and as a mentally-challenged guy who claims that “life is like a box of chocolates” and goes on to hurdle every challenge in Forrest Gump which won him the same award the following year, making him the first actor in 50 years to achieve that back-to-back honor; as the hopeless romantic in Sleepless in Seattle; as an astronaut in Apollo 13; as a foreigner stranded on a US airport in The Terminal; and now, reprising his role as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon in Angels and Demons which he first played in The Da Vinci Code, the first Dan Brown best-seller to be made into a movie which raked in more than $750 million worldwide.

Together with director Ron Howard, Hanks flew to this city for the Asian premiere last Wednesday, May 6, of Angels and Demons which is their fourth collaboration after Splash (1988), Apollo 13 and The Da Vinci Code which drew a backlash from the Church for its “radical” depiction of Christ.

In the highly-anticipated Angels and Demons, Langdon finds himself in the heart of the Vatican, attempting to save the Church from one of its oldest enemies: The Illuminati which will stop at nothing, even resorting to murder, to advance their goals. Will the suspense-thriller, far more breath-taking than The Da Vinci Code, spawn yet another international controversy?

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