Tom Hanks has described a moment from years after The Green Mile was released that most fans of the film have never heard. It happened in a recording booth during an interview about the production. Hanks began talking about Michael Clarke Duncan and stopped mid-sentence. Not for dramatic effect, and not because he was searching for a word.
He stopped because whatever he was about to say had grown too large to fit comfortably into the frame of a professional interview. He collected himself and then said, “Michael Clarke Duncan was not acting. He was being. ”
Hanks has spoken generously about many of the people he has worked with over four decades and two Academy Awards.
But the way he speaks about Duncan is different. It carries a specific weight, a gratitude that seems to go beyond the professional, as if what Duncan gave him on that set was something he is still trying to adequately account for. Given what the film required of both of them, that makes a certain kind of sense. The Green Mile is not a film you walk away from easily, and the people who made it did not walk away from it easily either.
The project arrived at a defining moment in Hanks’s career. He had risen from lean early years in show business to become, by 1999, the most trusted actor in America. After a single season of the sitcom Bosom Buddies and small film roles, his breakthrough came with Splash in 1984, which gave him his first leading role. Big, A League of Their Own, and Philadelphia followed, the last of which earned him his first Academy Award.
Forrest Gump brought him a second consecutive Oscar the next year, an achievement that has not been matched since. Saving Private Ryan, released in 1998, required something from him that no previous role had. Steven Spielberg shot the Omaha Beach landing sequence without the grammar of heroism that war films had long used to make violence bearable. Hanks has described standing on that beach on the first day of shooting while Spielberg explained the positions and effects.
The air mortars were marked with red flags in the sand, but the crew removed them before the cameras rolled. Something very hot then landed on Hanks’s neck, and the burn scar is visible in the film from that point forward. Shortly after, Frank Darabont approached him about The Green Mile. Darabont had already adapted Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption to critical reverence and commercial disappointment and was returning to similar territory: a prison, a period setting, men in proximity to death, and the question of what justice means when the machinery that administers it is run by human beings.
The story centered on Paul Edgecombe, a death row corrections officer who encounters John Coffey, a massive, gentle man convicted of murdering two young girls who possesses an inexplicable gift for healing. The film asks you to believe in that gift and to follow Paul’s gradual reckoning with what it means to execute someone he has come to understand is innocent. Michael Clarke Duncan was 31 when he auditioned for John Coffey. He had grown up on the South Side of Chicago, the son of a single mother who worked multiple jobs and raised him largely alone.
The neighborhood was not gentle, and money was not plentiful. From a young age, the world made clear to him what category it assigned to a large Black man. He was eventually 6 feet 5 inches and close to 300 pounds, and the category society reserves for such men has very little room for gentleness or vulnerability. He dug ditches, worked as a bouncer, and then became a bodyguard for Will Smith and later for Martin Lawrence.
That work put him inside movie sets, but his own acting parts were small, the kind that require a large man to stand in a doorway and look threatening. His manager convinced him to audition for The Green Mile. Duncan was not convinced he should, believing he was not actor enough, in his own words, for something so complex. The role required him to project childlike innocence and otherworldly wisdom in the same body, often in the same scene.
It required him to be the largest person in any room and also the most vulnerable. It required him to make audiences love him before asking them to watch him die. He auditioned anyway. He delivered a monologue, and the room went quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet when something unexpected has just happened.
Darabont said afterward that he knew immediately. Hanks, who was already attached to the film, agreed completely. Hanks became a mentor on set in the most organic sense. Duncan was terrified, and Hanks was the person with the most experience and the least ego about using it for someone else’s benefit.
Between takes, when Duncan was doubting himself, Hanks was there, not with instruction but with presence. Duncan spoke about what that meant. Hanks has spoken about what he received in return, something he did not expect: the education of watching someone perform without the protection of technique. Duncan had never learned to manage the instrument the way trained actors do, and when the scene required grief, he grieved.
When John Coffey told Paul Edgecombe he was tired of people being ugly to each other, Duncan was tired. The exhaustion was not performed. It was present in the body and the eyes. Hanks has said that watching him work changed how he thought about acting.
The production itself was designed to deepen the effect. Production designer Terrence Marsh, who had won Oscars for Doctor Zhivago and Oliver, built the death row set with historical precision, down to the shade of green linoleum used in southern prisons of that era. Darabont gave the cast an afternoon before filming to simply occupy their positions in complete silence, not as a rehearsal but as an immersion. The execution sequences were shot with multiple cameras to minimize takes because the practical effects were expensive and emotionally exhausting.
Sam Rockwell, who played the volatile Wild Bill Wharton, described the atmosphere of those days. The cast could not avoid confronting what the film was asking audiences to feel about executions, and they felt it themselves while making it. The film was released in December 1999 and earned $136 million on a $60 million budget. Then it kept going through home video and cable television, becoming one of the most watched films in American television history.
Duncan received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, a rare recognition for an actor with so limited a prior resume. He did not win, but the nomination transformed his life. He went on to appear in Planet of the Apes, The Whole Nine Yards, The Scorpion King, and Daredevil, and he lent his distinctive voice to animated films and video games. Those who knew him on The Green Mile set have consistently said that the man who showed up every morning was the same man who appeared on screen: gentle, genuine, and unwilling to perform being something other than what he was.
He died on September 3, 2012, in Los Angeles, after suffering a heart attack in July from which he never recovered. He was 54. Tom Hanks was among those who spoke after his death, and what he said carried the same quality his public statements about Duncan always carry: the sense that he is still arriving at the full truth of what that working relationship was. He said Duncan was a man of tremendous strength and gentle kindness, that the world was better for his having been in it, and that he would miss him greatly.
In the years since, he has circled back to the same subject, each time using slightly different words and arriving at the same place. On the set of a film about what it means to take a life and what it means to be innocent, Michael Clarke Duncan gave everything he had without reservation and without armor. That is what Hanks has been saying for 25 years: he was in the room when something true happened, and the truest thing he knows how to say about it is that Michael Clarke Duncan was not acting.
He was being.
