‘We’re All Adults Here’: Actor Tom Hanks Blasts Censorship of Old Books

Actor Tom Hanks blasted old books being censored by cancel culture in order to appease modern sensibilities. He declared, “We’re all grownups here!”

Hanks appeared on NBC News to promote his upcoming novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, and revealed that he refuses to censor anything just because it might be deemed offensive to someone. Hanks told NBC News he refuses to censor something that some might deem offensive.

Hanks said, “I’m of the opinion that we’re all grown-ups here. Let’s have faith in our own sensibilities as opposed to having somebody decide what we may or may not be offended by. Let me decide what I am offended by and what I’m not offended by. I would be against reading any book from any era that says ‘abridged due to modern sensitivities.’”

Numerous books have been given “updates” to appease the offended, as of late. Some of those include Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories and even Roald Dahl!

Breitbart reports:

Artists, including left-leaning ones, have on the whole opposed such efforts. Director Steven Spielberg, for instance, even expressed regret over his past decision to censor his beloved masterpiece E.T. by removing the guns from federal agents during the climactic bike chase scene.

“Nobody should ever attempt to take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka! Ever!” Spielberg said. “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage,” he continued. “I do not believe in censorship in that way.”

Spielberg called his own self-censorship a “mistake.”

“That was a mistake,” he said. “I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.”

“All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there,” he added.

Write and director Martin McDonagh also noted that some of his plays have also been subject to censorship.

“In the last two or three years, yeah, I’ve had theaters ask me to change words in my plays from 20-25 years ago and refuse to put the plays on when I say no. And that’s dangerous,” he said. “It is much more problematic now than it has been for many years.”

“Only in the past few years have I had theater companies refuse to do my plays because they don’t like some of the wording in them,” McDonagh added. “And that’s for an established writer, who sells tickets.”

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