Tom Hanks admits it. He was nervous about playing astronaut Jim Lovell.

"At first I was very intimidated by it," Hanks says. "Because along with a lot of the PR assumptions that had been made both by the media and sort of fomented by NASA as well, there was this sort of all-encompassing hero aspect of what an astronaut is. As though there is only one type of astronaut."

When filmmaker Ron Howard chose Hanks to play the famed astronaut in his 1995 film, Apollo 13, the Oscar-winning actor was faced with an unusually personal challenge: He would be portraying one of his childhood heroes.

By the time Hanks was in grade school in northern California, the two-man missions of Project Gemini were in full swing. "If it was happening during the school day," Hanks remembers, "we'd go over to the auditorium to see the launch …which was being covered on all three channels."

And he was hooked. But before too long, Hanks came to realize that his passion for space wasn't shared by the public.

In May 1969, when the Apollo 10 astronauts made history's second voyage to the moon, Hanks was frustrated by a lack of excitement. It had been only a few short months since Apollo 8, the first piloted lunar voyage, captured the world's attention at Christmastime in 1968. For Apollo 10, Hanks says, "I couldn't understand why we weren't making the same big deal."

Especially, Hanks says, because Apollo 10 was even more ambitious than its predecessor was; this time the astronauts were testing both the command ship and the lunar lander -- in lunar orbit. "Look, guys are back orbiting the moon now, and they're in two different spacecraft -- this is an incredibly important moment!"

He vividly recalls watching the Apollo 11 moonwalk in July 1969. Of course, that time, the world was watching too. After that, while public interest in human spaceflight slowly flagged, Hanks’ passion for the subject only grew.

As it happened, the next time the public’s fascination with the program matched Hanks’ was in April 1970, during Apollo 13 -- though at the beginning of the mission, even his interest had waned a bit.

"I didn't watch the launch. I was just aware that they were up there," Hanks says. "I'm not absolutely sure -- I can't make sense of it because I've now gone back and seen all this stuff over and over again -- but I believe I was watching prime-time television on the West Coast when they broke in to say there had been an explosion."

And for Hanks, like the rest of the world, that put the mission in a different light.

"Oh, I nearly wet my pants…I couldn't believe that it was happening -- and it was the worst case scenario."

"Throughout the course of the evening I was paying attention because, of course, they stopped everything. And then I had to go to bed. And then the next day at school it was, in some ways, almost refreshing because people were talking about Apollo again, which they didn't do on Apollo 12." When school was over, Hanks says, "I did run home to keep track of what was going on."

In the years that followed, the Apollo program and visits to the moon came to an end. And Hanks gave up his boyhood dream of being an astronaut and turned to acting.

Almost a quarter-century after Apollo 13's dramatic rescue, Ron Howard decided to film the saga, and Hanks took the job of playing the mission's commander. By this time, he was a major Hollywood star with two Oscars under his belt. His passion for space hadn’t faded, however, and he was nervous about meeting the famed astronaut -- and playing him on the big screen. But as he got to know Lovell, his perspective changed.

"I went from worrying if I could actually prove credible being cast as an astronaut, to meeting Jim and thinking, ‘I'm perfect casting for Jim Lovell.’ There are the people who describe Jim as being…a perfect PR man for NASA and for the astronaut corps. He's very personable; he's very funny; he's not overly serious."

During the production Hanks got to know other Apollo veterans, and the image of all astronauts as a homogenous cast of earnest, yet dull military types was peeled back. "In the course of meeting all of these guys, and then also doing an awful lot of the reading and the research," Hanks learned differently. "They're very different individuals, one from the next."

"The only thing I can say about all astronauts that I've known is that I think they're all very competitive guys. Competitive, some of them for very good reasons, some of them for very…you know, different kinds of reasons," he says. And that spirit, Hanks says, applies even to easygoing Jim Lovell.

"Oh, I nearly wet my pants... I couldn't believe that it was happening -- and it was the worst case scenario."
     

"If there's gonna be a guy who's going to be the commander of a mission," Hanks says, "Jim would like to be the guy that's the commander of the mission, thank you very much."

The desire to command was so ingrained, Hanks says, that during the final minutes of the Apollo 13 mission, Lovell almost forgot that flying the reentry was a job that belonged to his command module pilot, Jack Swigert.

"Jim told me that when they were coming back on Apollo 13, by total habit he just got into the left-hand seat. And we actually have that in the movie: He sits down there and it looks like Jack Swigert isn’t going to get to fly the thing back in. And then Jim says, ‘Oh, sorry, old habit.’"

As commander of Apollo 13, Lovell looked forward to the chance to land on the moon -- a chance that vanished when an oxygen tank exploded aboard the spacecraft. In his conversations with Lovell, Hanks was eager to understand how it felt to give up that dream -- but he didn't get a detailed answer. "I asked Jim, probably point blank, 'Was that a disappointment?' He said, 'Yeah.' I don't think he banged the dashboard with his fists."

"That's the interesting thing about these guys as engineers," Hanks explains. "The poetic aspect of it wasn't the first reaction they had."

"These are guys who had been flying in airplanes and it was, ‘We gotta land.’ It's not like, ‘Oh, damn, we don't get to fly all the way on to Denver,’ No…‘We gotta land this thing right now'…. They just deal with it. And later on comes everything else."

After the film Apollo 13, Hanks went on to also produce the HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon, based in part on the book, A Man On the Moon by SPACE.com’s Andrew Chaikin. The series retells the story of all the Apollo flights, each in a different style and shot by a different director. In re-retelling the story of the Apollo 13 mission for television, Hanks decided to take a different approach from the film, and portray events from the point of view of reporters covering the mission.

Even though the HBO series allowed him greater freedom to tell the Apollo story, Hanks was still forced to leave out interesting details.

"There was a constant stream of things that we wished we could have been able to incorporate," Hanks recalls. "There were a lot of things in From the Earth to the Moon that I was dissatisfied that we couldn’t include."

Did he have the same frustration while making Ron Howard's film Apollo 13?

"There was a lot of procedural stuff that I wish we had been able to be more accurate with," such as the sequence in the film when the astronauts had to manually fire the lander's engine, a maneuver that the computer would normally have handled.

"Cerebrally it was a dicey thing that they were trying to do. But it wasn’t as nearly riotous a roller-coaster ride as we had in the movie," Hanks says.

Such minor misgivings aside, however, Hanks' experiences filming Apollo 13 came about as close to the real thing as he could have hoped.

"I’ve been able to go through and totally exhaust my inquisitive nature as far as what interested me about the space program," Hanks says. "It educated me an awful lot as to the things that NASA does extraordinarily well, as well as the sort of thing that a big organization like NASA can’t do, nor could any organization do."

Hanks is proud that his passions have been proven out, that what he thought was amazing about the Apollo missions resonates with the public -- even if they needed a little added Hollywood drama to understand.

Hanks has treasured the opportunity to act as a spokesman for the Apollo veterans, re-telling their stories for a new generation that had almost forgotten.

"I think the thing that I feel best about…I was always right, that I thought even before we made the movie: ‘That is an amazing story to tell.’"