Have you ever noticed how often Walt Disney used to point with two fingers? If you look at enough archival photos from his lifetime, you’ll notice him gesturing this way a lot. Personally, I’ve wondered why that was a go-to pose of his. Now, because Tom Hanks played him in Saving Mr. Banks, he actually learned the reason why Disney did this and shared the story behind it.
While Hanks was playing Mr. Disney in the 2012 movie about the making of Mary Poppins, he learned the secret behind the pose. In his words:
He did smoke a lot, as did everybody. And in the earlier photographs in the 30s when he’s just working on Mickey Mouse, cigarettes are very much a part of it. But later on, they didn’t necessarily want to show that habit as it became less and less popular. But there are a lot of photographs of Disney showing people around the lot or showing people around Disneyland itself, and he would also be pointing with two fingers… that’s because he usually had a cigarette between those two fingers, and they airbrushed them out as time went by.
Whoa! I don’t know about you, but I thought Disney just pointed that way. But the secret is Walt Disney was a heavy smoker and never gave up the addiction. So, the studio ended up hiding his habit by airbrushing his cigarettes from photos later on. Reportedly, Disney didn’t want to set the example for children. As Hanks also revealed in a throwback interview on The Ellen Show:
He smoked cigarettes, as many people did in that generation. And, the great tragedy is he did pass because lung cancer took, which is not a great story, nothing fun about it.
Disney died at the age of 65 in 1966 due to lung cancer. He was diagnosed just weeks before his death when doctors discovered a tumor in his left lung, per OncoDaily. He had surgery to remove the tumor, but the disease had already advanced too far, and he died on December 15, 1966. Nowadays, the outlook for patients with lung cancer is much better than it was at the time.
Interestingly enough, cast members also point with two fingers at Disney Parks. In some cultures, it’s actually offensive to point with a single finger, and from a distance it’s easier to see two fingers rather than one. But now I have to wonder if it was in part inspired by Walt Disney’s smoking addiction.
When Hanks played Walt Disney for Saving Mr. Banks, he thought it was important to portray him accurately, which included bringing attention to his heavy smoking. As he shared:
We want to be as authentic as we can in the film, and so we had a scene where he was going to be smoking. If you light a cigarette in a movie and inhale it, it’s automatically an R-rated film. So, the reality is we wanted to show the fact that he smoked, so he coughs a lot… we had this one engineered moment where I am putting out a cigarette, and that’s the best we could do. But you got to pay homage to what really happened.
If you haven’t seen it already, in Saving Mr. Banks, you can see how Hanks implemented what he learned about Disney. You can check out Tom Hanks’ performance as Walt Disney right now with a Disney+ subscription, along with numerous documentaries featuring the man himself. Hanks is also the star of the most successful Disney movie of the year so far, reprising the role of Woody in Toy Story 5. It’s now playing in theaters.