Henry Winkler says he is still working on his perspective about the Henry Winkler Tom Hanks tension that has followed him for decades, and he is tying it once again to the moment he was fired 13 days into directing Turner & Hooch. The longtime TV star says the split still sits with him, even if he does not describe it as a feud.
That return to the subject matters now because Winkler is revisiting it in a new interview, reopening a Hollywood dispute that has lingered since 1989 and still draws attention whenever he speaks about the film. Turner & Hooch starred Tom Hanks, and Winkler’s account keeps the focus on how quickly the job collapsed after he was hand-picked for it by a Paramount executive.
Winkler has said he had reservations before taking the directing assignment in the first place. He said, “I went completely against my tummy, and it hit me in the face with a 2x4.” He also traced the friction to a location scouting trip in Carmel, California, where he said a woman ran out of a shop and recognized him as Fonzie from Happy Days. Winkler said he introduced Hanks to the woman, and later recalled the film’s director of photography telling him, “I knew that this was going to happen, on that day in Carmel.”
The dispute has also surfaced through a different kind of omission. Winkler said a Happy Days retrospective wanted 60 seconds of Hanks’s guest appearance on the show, but the request was not granted. In a 2020 comment to TMZ in, Winkler tried to draw a line under the talk around the pair, saying, “I don’t have a feud with Tom Hanks. What everybody says and what is true are two different things,” and he added that he had a warm run-in with Hanks and Rita Wilson at an awards show shortly before the pandemic.
That is where the story lands now: Winkler continues to describe a decades-long tension tied to Turner & Hooch while also insisting the relationship is not a feud. Hanks has never publicly addressed the matter, which leaves Winkler’s version as the only one in the open and keeps the old wound from closing completely.
