Tom Hanks reveals 'insane' process behind losing 100lbs for Cast Away

Tom Hanks has had more iconic roles in Hollywood than almost anyone else, between Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, and Catch Me If You Can.

He has added yet another to that list with the recently released Toy Story 5, returning for the fifth and potentially final instalment in the Pixar franchise as Woody.

As is standard however in press tours Hanks has been talking about far more than just Toy Story (and Woody’s bald spot) and revealed a pretty bonkers story about his role in the film Cast Away.

For those living on a rock (or even some sort of isolated island) Cast Away stars Hanks as Chuck Noland, a man who ends up stranded on an island in the pacific after a plane crashes.

Chuck tries to survive on the island totally alone, except for Wilson the volleyball to keep him company, and ends up losing a great deal of weight.

To achieve the look desired for the film however Hanks not only needed to put on weight in order to look like an average out-of-shape middle aged man, he then needed to lose a great deal of weight to portray and emaciated man trapped on an island.

Rather than a rubbish fat suit or CGI however Hanks and the director Robert Zemeckis wanted it to be done practically, and the actor has now revealed the bonkers way they managed to have him actually gain 50 pounds, return to normal, and then lose 50 pounds and grow out his beard and hair.

To achieve this Hanks and Zemeckis suggested filming the scenes a year apart. Speaking on We’re Back with Brian Williams he explained it by saying he had to go from being ‘very fat’ to ‘very skinny’ and that filming a year apart was Zemeckis’ idea.

He said: “Bob took that to 20^th Century Fox and they thought we were insane and he had to come up with this whole other deal.”

To get Fox on board he had to agree to make a whole other film in the meantime, What Lies Beneath, a horror movie with Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Once Fox agreed Hanks still had the tough task of explaining how he gained and lost the weight, telling Entertainment Weekly at the time: “"The hardest thing was the time.

“I wish I could have just taken a pill and lost all the weight but the reality was that I had to start in October knowing that we were going to go back in February.

“The idea of looking at four months of constant vigilance as far as what I ate, as well as two hours a day in the gym doing nothing but a monotonous kind of work-out – that was formidable. You have to power yourself through it almost by some sort of meditation trickery. It's not glamorous."