The first image for Saving Mr. Banks, Disney’s film about the making of Mary Poppins, has been released. It shows Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as author P.L. Travers.
Time Magazine debuted the image, which shows Hanks looking much happier than Travers at Disneyland. She never wanted a studio to turn Mary Poppins into a film and it took Disney several attempts before she finally approved the idea.
“She’s the most difficult person I’ve ever played,” Thompson, an Oscar winner, said about playing Travers. “She was a woman of quite eye-watering complexity and contradiction.”
Thompson, who won an Oscar for Howards End and starred in Ang Lee’s Sense & Sensibility (which she won another Oscar for the screenplay), told Time that “Often I play people who are controlled by some very clear guiding moral principles...There are very clear moral prisms these women pour life through, and I understand that very well. And [Travers] was not like that at all. She was far more chaotic and confused and morally various.”
Cinemablend notes that photos of Hanks in the disney makeup leaked in November. In one of the photos, Hanks mimicked a portrait of Disney that hangs in Disneyland.
Saving Mr. Banks is being released in limited theaters on Dec. 13 and goes wide on Dec. 20. That puts it right in the middle of the OScar rase, as Hanks hopes for his first nomination since 2001.
image: FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/DISNEY