Tom Hanks is officially wearing Mister Rogers' classic red cardigan.
On Thursday, Sony Pictures released the first image of Hanks as Fred Rogers in "You Are My Friend," an upcoming film that has Hanks playing the pioneering children's television host.
The film is "not a biopic,” director Marielle Heller told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. “It’s really not. It’s a movie that’s largely focused on a reporter and (Mr. Rogers’) relationship to his life, and how (the reporter’s) whole world changes when coming in contact with Fred Rogers.”
"You Are My Friend," with its title taken from one of Rogers' signature songs, is inspired by a real-life friendship between Rogers and journalist Tom Junod. Junod is depicted as a cynical scribe who begrudgingly accepts an assignment to write an Esquire profile on the iconic Mr. Rogers. He finds his life-perspective transformed in the process.
"(It’s about) one man who’s in a critical point in his life – becoming a new father, having issues with his own father – and meeting Mr. Rogers to write a piece about him, thinking it’s going to be a bit of a puff piece, but it ends up changing his entire life,” Heller told EW.
Hanks last appeared as legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in Steven Spielberg's "The Post."
