Tom Hanks has labeled this year's presidential election "Crapfest 2016" and made a veiled reference to Donald Trump as a "gasbag."
The Oscar-winning star of "Forrest Gump" and "Philadelphia" discussed the state of American politics in Italy where he is being awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Rome Film Festival.
"Every four years, the circus comes to town in the United States," Hanks said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
"Every four years, we decide who's going to be the leader. Sometimes we're in an era when it seems that the country is at a crossroads — it's always at some form of crossroads.
"Oftentimes there is a fever pitch of fear and anxiety. Sometimes it's warranted, and other times it's manufactured."
Hanks also said the world is "going through something quite profound in which the future is shaky, in which the future is mysterious, in which great parts of the world are dealing with problems that seem as though they have no solution.
"When America has faced those circumstances and times, we have never turned to a simplistic, self-involved gasbag of a candidate ... They are out there. They have been there ..."
"There's always been some version of the current nominee of the Republican Party that holds sway ... But we never invest our future with them. We have never done it, and we will not do it now."
Hanks is also weighing the sexually-explicit comments Trump made about grabbing women in a 2005 conversation with TV's Billy Bush — a tape of which was disclosed last Friday in The Washington Post.
While Trump has apologized and chalked up his lewd quips as "locker room" banter, Hanks doesn't agree.
"He was at work. He was showing up to do a thing on camera," Hanks told an interviewer at a press junket for his new Ron Howard-directed drama, "Inferno," The Wrap reports.
"I'm offended as a man. I'm not offended as a husband or a father — I'm offended as a guy. That's just not right."
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