Turns out, Tom Hanks was put on this earth 63 years ago for the sole purpose of embodying Fred McFeely Rogers. Rogers died back in 2003, and just a year after the tear-jerker documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor captured his inspiring rise as the creator and star of his PBS show, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Hanks is bringing a new version of the Presbyterian minister to life in the biopic A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood.
Also starring Matthew Rhys as fictional reporter Lloyd Vogel, the film is based on real reporter Tom Junod's 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, and his experience getting to know the man who graced the living room of almost every child from 1968 to 2001. The trailer begins with Hanks singing the classic opening to the show, and you might even forget for a moment that it's not the real Mr. Rogers slipping into his red sweater on screen.
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The trailer also contains little nuggets of classic Mr. Rogers wisdom delivered via Hanks' soothing interpretation of the icon, such as, "We are trying to give the world positive ways of dealing with their feelings...there are many things you can do: You could play all the lowest keys on a piano at the same time."
"I think the best thing we can do is let people know that each one of them is precious," Hanks says later over top of a shot of an interpretation of one of Mr. Rogers' most iconic episodes: when Jeff Erlanger, 10-years-old at the time, came on the show to explain why he used a wheelchair. In the trailer, it seems the film has swapped a wheelchair for what appears to be an oxygen tank, but the short clip still has all the power the original episode did back in 1981.
A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood hits theaters November 22.