Big

When a boy wishes to be big at a magic wish machine, he wakes up the next morning and finds himself in an adult body.

All of a sudden, at the end of a decade filled with comedies, musicals, and adventure movies, a new actor took Hollywood by storm. Born in Concord, California, the young man had an early inclination toward acting, which he began exploring when he took on roles in stage productions while still in high school.

When we interviewed Tom Hanks for the first time, in September of 1986, he was mere two and a half years away from his first Golden Globe. Hanks was finally making strides in his career as a feature film actor, after a false start in 1980 in the horror flic He Knows You’re Alone (his character was supposed to die at the hands of the psycho killer, but director Armand Mastroianni found him so engaging that he decided to ax the death scene in the editing suite).