‘I embrace the mystery’: Tom Hanks on his obsession with space, from Stanley Kubrick to The Moonwalkers

Tom Hanks at Lightroom: ‘There’s only one place in the world that can do this.’ Photograph: Justin Sutcliffe

Tom Hanks became obsessed with space travel at almost exactly the moment that he became obsessed with film. Listening to him talk, the two events – their ability to manufacture wonder – remain interchangeable in his mind.

The first awakening came when he went to watch Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I can tell you the day,” he says. “It was a Sunday, it was kind of rainy and it was cold. It was the day the Oakland Raiders beat the Kansas City Chiefs, November of 1968.” He’d have been 12 years old.