Tom shows his wild side

Question. Which would you rather do? Sit in a hotel room chit-chatting about movies with some amiable guy you've just met in the lobby, or sit in a hotel room discussing the limits of human endurance with one of the most successful movie stars in the history of cinema?

Answer. If it's Tom Hanks, relax. They're the same person.

Buoyed up by a "gazillion" dollar opening (to use a typical Hanksism - $110 million in the first week) for Cast Away, his new desert-island yarn of loneliness and redemption, the man is loaded with reasons to be amiable. Gone is the mad, birds-nest beard and returned are some of the 55-odd pounds he shed to create his withered and desperate central character. There's no indication that Hanks took the biggest risk of his acting career and carried most of a two-and-a-half hour, $85 million film alone on the screen without resort to soundtrack, animal or any other supporting character to, well, support him. Here is the breezy, funny, salt-of-the-earth megastar the Hollywood production notes say he's meant to be.

Of course the Hanks persona has to be too good to be true. Rumours have circulated that he might, under-neath it all, be a tough task master on set; that he may be ambitious and driven and even, Lord help us, a fraction less than utterly, honestly, heart-warmingly nice. Indeed William Broyles Jr, who worked closely with Hanks for six years to polish the screenplay for Cast Away, has revealed that the ultimate nice-guy hero of Sleepless in Seattle and Saving Private Ryan does, at times, have "irritated moments".

Yes, it's hard to countenance. But there's another, more interesting, story that pursues Hanks wherever he enters the clammy embrace of the Press: that he's a latter-day Jimmy Stewart, a popular vehicle for all America's yearning to believe in a world where goodness and honesty win out against manipulation and cruelty. The analogy is more interesting because, in Stewart's career, the on-screen goodness didn't last. After It's a Wonderful Life, everyone's favourite salesman of honesty transformed himself into a more complex figure, bordering on insanity in Vertigo and becoming the embittered anti-hero in westerns like Winchester '73 and Bend in the River.

So can Hanks bear any more comparisons with Stewart, even if they suggest that with Cast Away he may be moving into more demanding territory?

"How can I stop it?" The amiable guy in the hotel room manages to laugh and groan simultaneously.

Hanks's charm offensive allows very few glimpses into something harder and darker, but they are - just - available. In February he starts shooting a film with Sam Mendes, and Hanks says he expects the director of American Beauty to draw him into unknown territory or, in his own more homespun phrase, to "kick my butt every day for the next four or five months".

In The Road to Perdition, based on a long-running DC comic, Hanks is set to play a hit man in Depression-era Chicago hellbent on revenge for the murders of his wife and children. It sounds dark enough and, Hanks acknowledges, "without question it is". But the man who created Forrest Gump can't quite leave things without secreting a little moral for his audience. "It's also hellbent on justice and retribution," he chimes. "And that's where you get into a great number of grey areas. You know, how does a human being rationalise what he does for a living and then justify his acts?"

Cast Away seems to take what Hanks does for a living in a distinct new direction. He plays the strenuousness of his part down, calling the period during which filming stopped so that he could lose weight and grow his beard merely a matter of changing perspective. It's a job, not a life.

"Look, I've got a great job," he says. "But that's no guarantee that it spills over into any other aspect of how you really leave your mark in this world. In regards to my family and my [four] kids and the other people important to me, I have to be pondering other questions than 'how am I going to be wearing my hair in this movie?' or 'what's the next gig?'."

Yet the film, born out of his own original idea, creates a closing image of Hanks's character at a crossroads. Chuck Noland, who started out as a time-obsessed FedEx systems manager before being ditched onto a remote Pacific island after a plane crash, finally stands in an empty Mid-western landscape having lost all the important bits and pieces, as well as all the important people, of his life. He has only one American homily left to cling to: wait for what the tide brings in next.

Hanks shies away from revealing what the film cost him, in terms of effort, as an actor. But he is proud that he and director Robert Zemeckis, teaming up again after the huge but simplistic success of Forrest Gump, stuck to a principle that Chuck Noland would receive only the sparest of props, leaving him isolated from the support of desert island clichés.