Tom Hanks Defends The Da Vinci Code

Da Vinci Code star Tom Hanks has said the film of Dan Brown's controversial best-seller is just "a good story" that should not be taken too seriously.... "If you are going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you'd be making a very big mistake."

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Leading figures in the Catholic Church have called for a boycott of the film, which they claim is blasphemous and an attack on their faith. Author Brown's book includes a tale that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had children, a secret bloodline that has been covered up by the Catholic Church. But Hanks, who plays a Harvard professor in Ron Howard's film, said the film was "a lot of fun", likening it to a "scavenger hunt". "We always knew there would be a segment of society that would not want this movie to be shown," he said. But he claimed that it "never hurts" for a film to provoke "dialogue" about religious issues and history.