Tom Hanks Made the Grave Mistake Of Eating a Burrito Before Skydiving

Take it from Tom Hanks: Don’t have a breakfast burrito before skydiving.

On Tuesday, the A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood star recalled making the uninformed decision while visiting The Ellen DeGeneres Show. After being roped into skydiving by his daredevil son, Chet Wilson, 29, Tom admitted that the consequences of eating a burrito before jumping out of a plane never occurred to him.  

“When he turned, I think, 21, he wanted to go—I said, ‘What would you like for your birthday?’ And he said, ‘I wanna go skydiving!'” the Oscar winner told host Ellen DeGeneres. “So, we went tandem skydiving—tandem, so you’re attached to somebody who knows what they’re doing.”

After describing the terrifying feeling of free-falling into the air, Tom explained how the burrito betrayed him. “Then [the instructor] popped the shoot and we stopped. And she was doing this thing of swinging us around—steering us around,” he said while demonstrating the nausea-inducing movements. “And I had had a huge breakfast burrito before the plane went off.”

“And so, I truly—I begged her, I’m just…I was like a rag doll hanging from this harness, like, ‘Please, stop. Please, please, stop, stop,'” he continued. “And we landed on this grass strip. And all I could do was sit on my rump. And I just had to sit there for about seven minutes waiting for my stomach to calm down while other people were coming down and landing.”

After hearing the story, Ellen was quick to call out Tom for making such a rookie mistake. “Well, I have to say, maybe having a huge breakfast burrito before you were going to jump out of a plane—bad,” she said. “Had I been with you, I would have said, ‘Don’t eat the whole thing.'”

But, really, Tom had no regrets: “It was a damn good burrito, though. It was really good.”

Switching gears, the duo discussed Tom’s latest role of Fred Rogers and what it took to prepare him to take on the television legend—particularly when it came to mastering his voice.

“Marielle Heller, our boss—the filmmaker, would come to me and say, ‘Slow down,'” he said. “She was going for this obtuse thing, which was sort of like aggressive generosity—and I think that’s what Fred practiced.”

Though Tom knew there would be an enormous amount of pressure on him to play the role perfectly, he never imagined that most of it would be from the people of Pittsburgh. In fact, while on set in the Steel City, the Toy Story 4 star had an interaction with a Mister Rogers fan that he’ll never forget.  

“I was going up in the elevator one day—and all of Pittsburgh knows you’re there shooting a movie and everybody’s very cool about it—and they said, ‘Oh, Mr. Hanks, you’re shooting Mister Rogers here?'” Tom recalled. “And just as the elevator was closing, he said to me, ‘You know, we take Mister Rogers very seriously here in Pittsburgh.’ And the door closed. It was a veiled threat. That was literally, ‘Don’t screw this up somehow.'”

Watch Tom talk skydiving, Pittsburgh and what playing Mister Rogers has taught him in the videos above!