Tom Hanks ‘Hated’ David S. Pumpkins As Much As You Do

When you think of Tom Hanks’ most iconic roles, you probably think of Captain Miller from Saving Private Ryan, or Andrew Beckett from Philadelphia, or that guy who definitely had sex with a volleyball from Cast Away. But, of course, the two-time Academy Award winner is also the David S. Pumpkins guy. 

Back in 2016, Saturday Night Live introduced the world to Pumpkins, literally just an annoying dude in a Jack-O-Lantern suit with two dancing skeleton sidekicks. For some reason, he’s the star of a Tower of Terror-esque haunted elevator ride despite being neither scary nor culturally relevant. “Is he from something?” the confused guests ask. “Why did you go all in on David Pumpkins?”

Possibly because everyone in the world needed a distraction from the 2016 election cycle, the sketch became a huge hit, inspiring countless David S. Pumpkin imitators on Halloween night, and spawning an animated TV special the following year. 

Hanks reprised the role in a 2022 episode, even though the central joke — that nobody knows who the hell David S. Pumpkins is — didn’t really work anymore now that the character is as famous as Freddy Krueger and Annabelle the haunted doll.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Bobby Moynihan, who played one of the skeletons and co-wrote the sketch with Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell, revealed that the idea began as an attempt to create a Santa Claus-like figure for Halloween. “We started joking around saying, ‘What if it was just a guy named David Pumpkins?’” Moynihan explained. “And then Mikey and I had another idea about these dancing things, and we kind of mixed up the two. It was 3 o’clock in the morning. It was a fever dream, and we went like, ‘I don’t know, man, what are we doing? I guess we’re just writing this for just to be weird.’”

Unfortunately, that week’s host, Hanks, wasn’t a fan of the script. In interviews, Hanks has said that his biggest worry was shooting a sketch that was reliant on the timing of elevator doors opening and closing.

But Moynihan admitted that Hanks genuinely disliked the premise. “Tom Hanks hated it and asked us to give it to somebody else,” Moynihan recalled (in a previous interview he admitted that Hanks suggested saving it for host Chris Hemsworth). “And we said no. And then in between dress rehearsal and air, Tom Hanks went like, ‘I’m just going to be weird.’ And we were like, 'Yeah, great.’ And he lost his mind on air and did something super weird and silly and it worked. We got lucky.”

So it was a happy ending. Especially for Lorne Michaels, or whoever got a piece of that David S. Pumpkins Halloween costume money.