Tom Hanks gives virtual commencement speech to Ohio college students

Tom Hanks on Saturday gave a virtual commencement address to students at an Ohio university to which he has ties, while Steven Spielberg, Jon Stewart, Oprah Winfrey and Malala Yousafzai spoke one-on-one with graduates on John Krasinski's webcast "Some Good News."

"You are the chosen ones," two-time Oscar winner Hanks, 63, said in a five-minute video played during a virtual ceremony for students graduating from Wright State University's Department of Theatre, Dance and Motion Pictures, in Dayton.

"You are the chosen ones because of a fate unimagined when you began your Wright State adventures," he continued. "You started in the olden times, in the world back before the Great Pandemic of 2020. You will talk of those earlier years in your lives just that way: 'Well, that was back before the COVID-19. That was before the Great Pandemic.' Part of your lives will forever be identified as 'before,' the same way other generations tell time like, 'Well, that was before the war,' or 'That was before the internet,' or 'that was before Beyoncé.' "

They were graduating, he told them, during "the Great Reset, the Great Reboot," and that through sheltering in place to help stop the spread of the coronavirus they have "made the sacrifices that have saved lives."

He went on to say, "Your 'after' is not going to look the same as your 'during' or as your 'before.' You will have seen the movie, you will know how it ends." 

Hanks — who with his singer-actress wife Rita Wilson has recovered from a March bout with COVID-19 and the two are now supplying their antibody-rich blood plasma to scientists trying to develop a vaccine — did not attend Wright but performed there on occasion during his years with the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland. Afterward he moved to New York, where the college's future Theatre, Dance & Motion Pictures artistic director, W. Stuart McDowell, cast Hanks in a showcase through which the young actor acquired his first agent.

Meanwhile, actor-director Krasinski, on his feel-good show Sunday, brought on filmmaker Spielberg, comedian Stewart, media mogul Winfrey, and human-rights activist and Nobel laureate Yousafzai to each answer a question posed by four new graduates.

Spielberg, 73, told Benjamin Montero, who asked how to hold on to one's dreams in an unaccommodating world, that "dreams are great tests because a dream is going to test your resolve." The filmmaker added that a dream “becomes something greater and allows us to be game and … to get over our fear and to go forward no matter what obstacles are thrown in our path."

Winfrey, 66, advised Harvard graduate Amanda Gorman, "Failure is an opportunity to move yourself in a different direction. It gets better, because you've learned the lessons from the first time."