In a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, actor Tom Hanks told the host:

I’m doing a play right now so I cannot get sick… I’ve had COVID enough in my life, I don’t need to do that again. So I’m wearing this for health reasons.

In the days before the broadcast, he had been photographed riding the New York subway wearing a high-filtration KN95 mask. Hanks and his wife, actor and singer Rita Wilson, were among the first major American celebrities to announce a COVID-19 diagnosis in March 2020 while in Australia. At the time, Hanks described the experience vividly. His bones felt like “soda crackers,” his muscles ached, and his energy vanished. He later became one of the early public figures to urge mask-wearing.

Tom Hanks: masked up

Tom Hanks made the remark while discussing his current stage production, This World of Tomorrow, which he co-wrote with James Glossman, and is starring in at The Shed through December 21. The play, based on stories from his 2017 collection Uncommon Type, follows a scientist from the future who travels back to the 1939 World’s Fair.

It marks Hanks’ first New York stage appearance in over a decade. During his conversation with Colbert, Hanks admitted that even though he helped write the show, he has struggled with forgetting his own lines. “I disappeared the other night,” he said, referring to a performance where he momentarily blanked, despite having co-written the play.

Separately from Hanks’ remarks, memory and concentration problems are among the common post-acute conditions following COVID‑19 infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Large scale cohort research has quantified measurable cognitive declines, for example showing that individuals with confirmed COVID-19 exhibited a reduction in cognitive functioning equivalent to around ten years of normal aging. While none of this establishes a direct cause for line-blanks by any individual performer, it provides a broader medical context for potential stage lapses.

Stephen Colbert

Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert himself has had multiple COVID-related interruptions on his show and in November 2023 underwent emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix, during which he lost 14 pounds and said he was “not aware of the amount of trouble I was in.” He returned to the show in December of that year and detailed how he’d been filming two episodes despite feeling like he was “dying,” and later learned his appendix had burst and led to blood poisoning.

Separately, a growing body of research highlights a statistically significant association between infection with COVID‑19 and the risk of unusually severe or complicated cases of acute appendicitis. A 2025 cohort study found that patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection had more than three times the odds of presenting with complicated appendicitis, compared with non-infected controls. Another 2024 population study observed that appendicitis appears to progress more rapidly after COVID-19 infection than in prior eras.

These findings complicate the earlier assumption that increases in appendicitis severity since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic are purely attributable to delayed treatment. While treatment delays remain relevant, the more recent research suggests a direct biologic effect of SARS-CoV-2 infection due to systemic inflammation. That said, it remains impossible in any single case to determine whether COVID-19 directly caused the rupture. Instead, the evidence suggests recent infections as an additive risk.

Speaking up – like Tom Hanks has

Tom Hanks’ decision to stay masked places him in a small but growing group of celebrities who are speaking publicly about COVID prevention. Earlier this year, Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar posted a masked selfie from the set of the show’s reboot. Gellar had previously discussed her experience with COVID in 2022, describing lasting respiratory problems and saying she would “wear a mask in the shower if that means I don’t get this again.”

Another example came from writer and Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton, who contracted SARS-CoV-2 for the first time this September after unmasking at a fan convention. He wrote on Instagram that he had “let his guard down” due to social pressure, calling the infection “so avoidable.”

These anecdotes connect to a larger conversation about occupational health in entertainment in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the end of formal COVID safety agreements by SAG-AFTRA in 2023, studios and networks have shifted much of the responsibility for protection onto individuals.

Individualising the problem

Productions now operate with fewer safeguards, and illness-related disruptions are mirrored across entertainment sectors, including cancellations continue across Broadway, the West End, and touring concerts. In the 2024-2025 season, several high-profile theatrical productions have been disrupted by illness within their companies.

On London’s West End, the Macbeth production starring David Tennant at the Harold Pinter Theatre cancelled multiple performances in late 2024 due to “company illness”, including one cancellation announced just two hours before curtain time. In New York, the Broadway revival of Gypsy starring Audra McDonald was forced to cancel seven performances in a single week between December 23 and December 28, 2024 owing to illness in the cast and crew.

At the same time, insurers and brokers in the entertainment sector continue to impose broad communicable disease exclusion clauses in production and cancellation policies, meaning illnesses like COVID-19 and associated production shutdowns are rarely covered under standard contracts. Meanwhile in film production, Blake Lively’s ongoing litigation with director and co-star Justin Baldoni alleges that inadequate COVID-19 protections on the set of It Ends With Us led to her and her infant son contracting the virus. Lively’s complaint alleges that Baldoni and his team have since hired a crisis management firm to manipulate online messaging and seed disparaging content about her.

Crisis PR?

This narrative management of the ongoing pandemic in entertainment extends to the growing movement of independent COVID conscious artists. The disabled theater makers behind Wake Up and Smell the C*VID: An Evening Without Eric Bogosian, a satirical play about the impact of Long COVID in the arts, was first staged in April 2025 and initially received coverage from independent outlets.

Since its debut, the theater makers have been documenting what they describe as “patterns consistent with crisis PR suppression”, including news coverage about the production seeming to disappear from search engines, professional and personal social media accounts experiencing cross-platform TOS flagging and reduced reach, and promotional materials from AMC using overlapping keywords and themes from their work.

In July 2025, the collective released a public open letter addressed to AMC Networks and to actor-playwright Eric Bogosian, who stars in the AMC series Interview With the Vampire, requesting transparency about any potential public relations activity that could have affected coverage.

The letter was accompanied by a public art action inside AMC’s New York headquarters, where an empty wheelchair was placed with a sign reading “Disabled Artists Will Not Be Erased.” A follow-up statement in October included a call for a disability justice-centered repair process and reported that neither AMC Networks nor Bogosian had replied.

Grassroots advocacy

In recent years, grassroots advocacy has emerged within theatre and live performance focused specifically on safeguarding artists’ health through airborne risk mitigation. Over in the US, performer and advocate Ezra Tozian (they/them) has published detailed guides in HowlRound, explaining how theater makers with long COVID or other chronic health conditions can begin negotiating for accommodations such as HEPA/ULPA air purifiers, KN95/N95 masks, remote audition options and on-site testing.

In the U.K., charity leader and policy advocate Dr. Sally Witcher OBE, founder of INN the Arts (“Indoor Safety in the Arts”), has published a framework dedicated to best practices for reducing airborne infection risk in theaters and venues.

At the same time, high-profile figures in the entertainment industry are quietly investing in enhanced air filtration systems.

Tom Hanks and others should be listened to

For example, at Adele’s Las Vegas residency, the venue reportedly spent approximately £400,000 (around US $474,000) on a state-of-the-art air-filtration system designed to “protect her voice”. KISS reportedly partnered with a Vancouver-based company to deploy UV-based clean-air technology on their farewell tour. Taylor Swift reportedly operated a tightly controlled touring “bubble” that limited backstage access and outside contact during the Eras run.

Advocacy for COVID safety in the arts has been led largely by disabled and clinically vulnerable artists, including those living with long COVID. Their work highlights the uneven distribution of risk across the performing arts, where below-the-line workers and independent artists face the greatest exposure but the fewest protections.

In that context, when high-profile figures such as Tom Hanks use national platforms like The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to acknowledge the continuing dangers of COVID-19, and explicitly link mask wearing to production risk management, it normalizes prevention in an environment where public discussion has declined since the official end of emergency declarations in 2023. And it implicitly validates the ongoing safety concerns of those with less visibility or bargaining power, but are shouldering the majority of the risk and advocacy labor.

Featured image via the Canary

By Christopher McDonald

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