Steve Granitz/WireImage(LOS ANGELES) — Tom Hanks recently gave his first public interview since returning from Australia and recovering from COVID-19 alongside his wife, Rita Wilson, giving a detailed description of the experience.
“Rita went through a tougher time than I did,” the 63-year-old actor tells Military Defense Radio. “She had a much higher fever. She had lost her sense of taste and sense of smell. She got absolutely no joy from food for a better part of three weeks.”
Adds Hanks, Wilson, also 63, “was so nauseous, she had to crawl on the floor from the bed to the facilities.”
As for Tom, he recalls having some “bad body aches” and feeling “very fatigued.”
Hanks was in Australia filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic, in which he plays Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Production on the film was halted following the diagnosis, and he and Wilson were quarantined in a hospital for three days.
“It was relatively early in Australia’s response to the coronavirus, and they wanted us to not give it to anyone else,” Hanks explains. “That’s why we were in lockdown.”
Hanks says the virus weakened him to the point where he couldn’t even do basic exercises, recalling, “I was wiped just 12 minutes into a 30 minute set.”
Hanks and Wilson announced their diagnoses in early March, making them among the first celebrities known to have come down with the virus. They returned home to Los Angeles in late March after two weeks in quarantine in Australia.
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