Micheal Conner Humphreys - Little Forrest Gump | Military Service | Finding Yourself After Fame

He was eight years old when he taught Tom Hanks how to talk. Michael Connor Humphreys played the young Forrest Gump — the voice, the walk, the mannerisms Hanks would go on to win an Oscar for were lifted straight from an eight-year-old kid from Mississippi. Decades later, he's driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck, and it might be the most honest conversation we've ever recorded.

We connected with Michael after years of being genuinely curious — Rush had shown Forrest Gump to his kids and found himself wondering, whatever happened to that kid?

We cover what it's actually like to shape a Best Picture-winning performance without knowing it at the time, the three years of global fame that hit before he'd even turned eleven, the identity crisis of being defined by a role he barely remembers, joining the Army partly to escape being "the Forrest Gump kid," the Battle of Ramadi and the reunion he's organizing for the soldiers who served alongside him, a script find in the making of Stupid is as Stupid Does, and what it means to still be chasing the difference between who you are and what you're known for.

LINKS
Stupid as the Superdust by Steve Starkey
The Gary Sinise Foundation

REFERENCED
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton (authors mentioned)
Ron Chernow's Mark Twain biography

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 — Cold open — meeting Michael and the "no-prep" philosophy of the show
3:00  — The stats: life now, Coca-Cola truck driving, small-town Mississippi
6:30  — Being an uncle to nephew Fox — and the Matrix family down the street
11:00  — Growing up worldly-minded — European trips, military history, grandmother's history lessons
15:00  — Landing Forrest Gump at eight — home movies, VHS, and one lucky audition
19:00  — Three years of global press tours before age eleven
22:00  — Confirming the legend — Tom Hanks learning to talk like him, not the other way around
26:00  — The saturation of attention and why he almost avoided the movie for 20 years
30:00  — Acting out in high school — "if I can't be cool, I'll be the kid who's nuts"
34:00  — Joining the Army to escape being asked about the movie
38:00  — Identity, expectation, and doing things "under his own steam"
43:00  — What contentment actually feels like — and what he's still working through
47:00  — The Battle of Ramadi reunion and the Gary Sinise Foundation
51:00  — The most interesting thing about you isn't the movie
53:00  — The walkaway

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The Most Interesting Person in the World — hosted by Rush Witt & Joe Keller.