New Look at Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers

Mister Rogers
Last Wednesday would have been 91st birthday of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood creator Fred Rogers. To mark the occasion, Sony Pictures/Tristar released a new image of Tom Hanks as the beloved PBS children’s show host and Presbyterian minister from the upcoming A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

 

The new image captures a moment from the opening of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, when Mister Rogers, joyfully singing his opening song, tosses his dress shoe through the air as he changes into his sneakers. Dressed in the iconic red cardigan, Hanks perfectly captures the look and essence of the real Rogers, who sadly passed away in 2002 aged 74.

 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a partly fictional tale but inspired by real life events, telling the story of a cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) assigned to write a profile piece Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for Esquire. Though Vogel only begrudgingly accepts the assignment, he finds his perspective on life transformed by his meeting with America’s favorite neighbor, who turns out to be exactly the person he presents himself as on television. The film also stars the likes of Chris Cooper and Susan Kelechi Watson, among others.

 

The film is the second in recent memory to focus on the life of Fred Rogers. Previously, the Focus Features documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? released in time for what would have been Rogers’s 90th birthday. At a domestic total of over $22M, the movie is the highest-grossing documentary that served as a biographical drama. While that documentary covered the history of Rogers’ life, the Tom Hanks film will instead focus on a specific period in his life, albeit in a fictionalized format.

 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, directed by Marielle Heller, was filmed on location in and around Pittsburgh, where the real Rogers lived and worked for his whole life, and is due for release on November 22, 2019.