Mister Rogers’ Widow Reveals That He Wasn't The 'Saint' Everybody Thought He Was

That's due to the upcoming release of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a film following a journalist's journey through writing a piece on the man himself, Mister Fred Rogers.

He initially passed on the project when he first read the script. However, when director Marielle Heller came on board, she managed to persuade him to give the film another shot.

The rest, of course, is history.

It took screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster a long time to earn Joanne Rogers' trust. A year and a half after their first meeting, she finally allowed them to read some of Fred's old letters.

"Once we read those letters in the archive between Tom Junod and Fred Rogers, hundreds of letters that they had written back and forth, that for us was a moment, like, 'Oh, this is the story,'" Harpster said.

"There's a mystery about Fred Rogers at the center of this film," Fitzerman-Blue said. "Which is, where did all of this hurt and suffering that he would absorb from other people go? How did he deal with it?"

"There was a mystery to him, and we don't think that we ever got to fully crack it. But we wanted to leave a lot of clues."

One of those clues was the humanization of him.

"Right before he died … he said that he wouldn't be allowed to do what he does now. He wouldn't be accepted, there would not be a place for him on television."

"And I think he was sad about that.

And I think we desperately we need him right now."

Fitzerman-Blue told The LA Times that her contribution to the film was this: "She really only had one request: that we not treat her husband as a saint."

What?! How could this be?!

Could it possibly be that Mister Rogers is not the man we all thought he was?

For instance, he was a huge fan of fart jokes.

"He would just raise one cheek and he would look at me and smile," she said.

He often did that when they were at an event they found particularly boring.

"He was not prissy. Not at all," she said. "He ran around the house in the droopiest drawers."

Mister Rogers? In baggy underwear? Well, according to her, that was his preferred way to be.

"They were at least three sizes too big, but they were comfortable, and he liked them. It didn’t matter if there was company here — he’d wear those and a T-shirt. He was not a modest person."

But that his political leanings were far more independent.

He never revealed his political leanings on the show. "[...] he just didn’t talk about it because he didn’t want to lose the children."

Though she's undecided on who she's going to vote for in 2020, she is not voting for Trump.

"Trump changed it," she said. "And I want to vote for whoever is going to beat Trump."

"He’s out there now as somebody who’s somehow way above all the rest of us," she said, remarking on how he's been remembered since his death.

I'm definitely guilty of that one.

"People invariably say, 'Well, I can’t do that, but I sure do admire him. I would love to do it.' Well, you can do it. I’m convinced there are lots of Fred Rogerses out there."

I think so, too.

The interviewer initially was hoping to find more of a "dark side" to Tom, like what Joanne Rogers suggested. "Yes, and finally, finally I’ll get to tell it to The New York Times," was Tom's quippy reply.

“Let’s not call this a dark side, but: I realize, and I used over and over again, the ability to seduce a room, seduce a group of people, and that it started off when I was very young as a self-defense mechanism but then turned into a manipulative kind of thing, because I didn’t realize that I was as good at it as I was," Tom said.

"You’re not going to get a huge amount of anger out of me or anything like that. I’m not coming in to dominate a room, but I am coming in to seduce it somehow.”

It sounds like both Mister Rogers and Tom Hanks are human, which is better than being saints — we're all humans, and we can all strive to be a little bit better.