Tom Hanks Remembers Peter Scolari: “We Were Molecularly Connected”

Tom Hanks spoke to the molecular connection he had with Bosom Buddies co-star and longtime friend Peter Scolari while remembering the late actor, who died Oct. 22 from cancer.

While appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Tuesday night, Hanks — who was there to promote his new movie, Apple’s Finch — shared several anecdotes about his time working on the ABC sitcom with Scolari for two seasons between 1980 and 1982. In addition to showing photos and clips from their time together, Hanks spoke to the chemistry and fun the two had on set, adding, “I’ll miss him every day.”

“He and I met, we picked up the scripts and we started screwing around,” Hanks said while sharing a story of how he and Scolari first interacted on set. “I actually thought, ‘Oh, this is it. This is how this works. This is like a hand inside a glove.’ And for two years at Paramount Studios on unlucky Stage 25, we cut it up.”

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Hanks went on to describe how the two men became very close during filming, hanging around each other’s dressing rooms and discussing their lives “in our pantyhose and our lip gloss and our hairnets.”

“We were molecularly connected in a way that we started speaking the same language,” Hanks explained.

In another anecdote, the Finch star illustrated their bond while recalling how they “started screwing around” during 14-hour Thursday dress rehearsals. As the directors were working “upstairs in the booth that we have no idea where they are,” Hanks said, he and Scolari made up new lines and played with the props, to the frustration of the directors.

“We’d always hear on the studio talkback, ‘Hey, guys, guys, guys. Are you gonna say that?’ ‘We might.’ ‘Well, it’s not in this script.’ ‘Yeah, but we might say it because it works. If it works, it works, right?'” Hanks said of the back-and-forth communication that happened as they were improvising. The duo would repeatedly do this during dress rehearsals and, in one instance, it resulted in one person getting particularly angry due to them getting “so backlogged.”

Hanks said that the unnamed person finally snapped, telling them, “If you could do a better job, why don’t you come up here and direct the show yourself?” to which Scolari responded, “I’m on my way!”

“Peter would say, ‘I could do that job,’ and I’d be like ‘Dude, I have ADHD, you have rage issues,'” Hanks shared to laughs. “We had two years of doing this in which, you know, you shoot for three weeks and have one week off, and every week was some brand of cuckoo adventure.”

Toward the end of the sit-down, Hanks got choked up while thanking Kimmel for allowing him to remember Scolari. “Peter has a lovely family,” Hanks said, acknowledging Scolari’s wife and two kids. “We lost him to the emperor of all maladies.”