Henry Winkler Reflects on Years-Long Rift With Tom Hanks and Whether They Can Reconcile

Henry Winkler is looking back on his longtime rift with fellow actor Tom Hanks.

In a recent interview on talk show In Depth with Graham Bensinger, the Happy Days icon, 80, recalled being fired as the director of Hanks’ 1989 movie Turner & Hooch amid simmering tension between him and the Oscar winner.

Winkler said he had agreed to direct Turner & Hooch despite his “instinct” warning him that he wouldn’t be a good fit for the movie.

“I guess, being insecure at that time, I talked too much,” Winkler said of working with Hanks, 70, and costar Mare Winningham. “I gave them direction … which I thought was my job. I wanted to do [a scene] over again, and apparently that pissed them off.”

Winkler said that after 13 days of filming, he was called into Walt Disney Studios chair Jeffrey Katzenberg’s office and admonished. “I then go to the set, I drive home [and] I’m fired as a director,” he claimed, adding that he didn’t handle the firing well because he was “devastated.”

Asked about the “genesis” of “any negative feelings” between him and the Castaway star, Winkler said, “I don’t know,” recalling that Hanks once made a guest appearance on Happy Days.

“I’m still working on my perspective,” the actor responded when asked about his thoughts on what went wrong between them.

Host Graham Bensinger then asked, “You think that relationship ever repairs itself?”

Winkler responded, “Sure.”

Winkler previously spoke about his experience working on Turner & Hooch, a buddy cop comedy about a detective and a dog, on the “How to Fail” podcast in May 2024.

“I did 11 weeks of preparation. I knew this dog, this slobbery mastiff, and I became friends. The star did not become my friend,” he said, referring to Hanks.

At the time, Winkler speculated that the tension between him and Hanks may have been because a fan recognized Winkler for his work as Happy Days favorite, The Fonz, rather than spotting Hanks.

“We were in Carmel, this little seaside wonderful town on the coast of California, looking for a location, and a woman comes, honest to God, comes running out of a shop and says, ‘Henry, Fonz! Oh, my God!’ and I say, ‘And of course you know Tom Hanks,’” he said. “The director of photography, when I was fired 13 days into filming, said, ‘I knew that this was going to happen, on that day in Carmel.’”

For his part, Hanks has never publicly commented on the rift between the two stars.