“I’m here to say congratulations. Congratulations to you chosen ones,” the 63-year-old actor, who recently recovered from coronavirus, said in a video message over the weekend.

“I am calling you ‘chosen ones’ because you have been chosen in many ways. First, by the temperament and discipline you’ve lived by. By the creative fires that are inside of you, and the instinctive lunges of your desires.”

He continued, “You succeeded because of the aid and the love of others that are in your lives, without a doubt. But you have succeeded mostly because you and you alone chose to do so. You are the chosen ones.”

Hanks also noted that the grads began their studies before the coronavirus and their lives will forever be shaped by the pandemic.

“You are the chosen ones because of a fate unimagined when you began your Wright State adventures,” he went on. “You started in the olden times, in a world back before the Great Pandemic of 2020 … Part of your lives will forever be identified as ‘before’ in the same way other generations tell time like, ‘Well, that was before the war,’ or ‘That was before the internet,’ or That was before Beyoncé.’ The word ‘before’ is going to carry great weight with you.”

But the “Forrest Gump” star reassured the class that eventually things will return to normal.

“You will have made it through a time of great sacrifice and great need and no one will be more fresh to the task of restarting our measure of normalcy than you — Our chosen ones,” Hanks concluded.

Hanks’ speech was for the University’s Department of Theater, Dance and Motion Picture. In 2016, he was honored by the university with the opening of the Hanks Center for Motion Pictures.

He was the first major celebrity to announce that he had tested positive for COVID-19. Both he and wife, Rita Wilson were hospitalized and eventually recovered.

Last week, Hanks shared that he was donating plasma which contains antibodies to help researchers develop a vaccine for the virus.