Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were two of the first celebrities to test positive for COVID-19, and though they got through it, it wasn’t easy, the former has now revealed. As per Entertainment Weekly, the two-time Oscar-winner appeared on The National Defense Radio Show, on which he opened up about the ordeal, which happened in early March while they were in Australia, prepping to shoot a Baz Luhrmann-directed movie about Elvis Presley.
Hanks was to play his (in)famous manager, Colonel Tom Parker, but then he and his wife succumbed to the virus, forcing them to go into lockdown inside a hospital. The two periodically posted pictures of their two-week stay, which seemed to look relatively chipper and stiff upper lip-ish, but the truth was a bit more grim, with Hanks saying he had “bad body aches and was very fatigued.”
Still, he didn’t have it as bad as Wilson did. “Rita went through a tougher time than I did,” Hanks revealed. “She had a much higher fever. She had lost her sense of taste and sense of smell. She got absolutely no joy from food for a better part of three weeks.” He added that she “was so nauseous, she had to crawl on the floor from the bed to the facilities.”
Hanks also spoke about trying to exercise while in quarantine, but that he felt “wiped” 12 minutes into what was supposed to be a 30-minute set. He eventually told a nurse:
“Whoever it was, a doctor or nurse, would come into our air pressurized, isolation rooms. She said, ‘How are you feeling?’ and I said, ‘I just had the weirdest thing. I just tried to do basic stretches and exercises on the floor and I couldn’t even get halfway through … And she looked at me through her glasses like she was talking to the dumbest human being. And she said, ‘You have COVID-19.’”
Hanks and Wilson were able to return to their home in Los Angeles in late March. Last week, Hanks appeared, from his home, on the “at home” episode of SNL.
(Via EW)