Tom Hanks became a star after Philadelphia
Tom Hanks occupies a uniquely rarefied position in Hollywood. He is acknowledged as one of the great leading men of the past 30 years—but also as an outstanding character actor.
What’s easily forgotten is that, before he was Tom Hanks, Spielberg collaborator and Lord of the Romcom, he was Tom Hanks, that clowning kidult from Big(whose director Penny Marshall recently died). But then, 25 years ago, Hanks starred in a movie that radically upended perceptions of who and what he was as an actor.
That film was, of course, Philadelphia, in which 37-year-old Hanks played a gay man wasting away from Aids. It was released in the US on 22 December 1993 and carried with it the ambitions of a group of Hollywood talents whose careers had converged at an unlikely time and place.
The biggest impact was obviously on Hanks. Today, he is our foremost Everyman Movie Star—equally convincing emoting to a volleyball (Cast Away), throwing sad glances at Meg Ryan (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail) or exuding gale force gravitas for Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan, Bridge of Spies).
But such a status was hard won and for long time seemed beyond his reach. Hanks’s early years of stardom were all about him being the gentle punchline in his own films. He was a big lolling puppy, the most adorable one in the room even when acting opposite an actual adorable pet as he did in 1989’s Turner and Hooch.
Hanks regarded Philadelphia as, among other things, an opportunity to prove himself a serious performer. He’d already flubbed his first chance to cast off the comedy shackles when starring in Brian De Palma’s disastrous 1990 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.
So Philadelphia was a shot at redemption. Which is why Hanks instructed his agent to pursue it at all costs when word began to circulate in late 1992 that Jonathan Demme’s next project, following the Silence of the Lambs, would be Hollywood’s first serious movie about Aids.
Hank’s enthusiasm came as a surprise to Demme, who was shocked to receive a cold-call from the actor’s representative. Demme was aware that the script was perceived as hot property and that several high powered stars were interested. But for someone at Hanks’s level to be clamouring to play dying lawyer Andrew Beckett was more than he had dared dream.
“A lot of wonderful actors wanted to play Andrew,” Demme recalled in the 2003 documentary People Like Us: Making Philadelphia. “I got a phone-call one day from Tom’s high-powered Hollywood agent—‘tom has asked me to call you to let you know he wanted to throw his hat in the ring for Andrew Beckett’.”
Hanks had become frustrated with the lightweight parts flowing his way. Twenty years before Matthew Mcconaughey begat the “Mcconaissance” by instructing his advisors to say “no” to every romcom that came through the door, Hanks had pulled the emergency brake in similar fashion. Philadelphia represented the first flowering of the Hank-aissance.
“At one point in my midthirties when I was making an awful lot of movies about the goofy headed guy who can’t get laid, I realised then that I had to start saying a very very difficult word to people, which was no,” Hanks would recall.
Demme’s plan was for Andrew Beckett to be sympathetic to mainstream audiences, who might have never met a gay person let alone possess a nuanced understanding of Aids. Hanks, for his part, saw something of himself in the character. Beckett was a regular guy, personable but who also just happened to be gay and dying of Aids.
“I recognised him,” he said. “I saw myself there—a non-threatening, passionate, competitive guy.”
Hanks wasn’t alone in wishing to leave the past behind. For Demme, Philadelphia was an opportunity to make amends.
Silence of the Lambs was widely acclaimed but also accused of pandering to the stereotype of gay people as bogeymen. The killer Buffalo Bill was a deranged transexual whose murderous instincts were explicitly linked to sexual deviancy. Someone stopped Demme one day and asked how he would feel if he was a 14-year-old gay boy struggling to come to terms with his sexuality and presented with Buffalo Bill as an archetype. Yet in the media, gay people were often portrayed as somehow having brought the terrible “curse” of Aids upon themselves—as if their “lifestyle” was the reason their health was in jeopardy.
He wanted to honour Botas —who would die 18 months before the film’s release—and also confront the ignorance about Aids of which he had been as guilty as anyone.
To do so, he felt had to craft a movie that would appeal “to the malls”. That is, to average Americans who regarded homosexuality as, at best, unnatural, at worst, mortally sinful, and whose terror of Aids was eclipsed only by their lack of understanding of the condition.
Hank’s character is sacked by his high-powered law firm after a senior partner spots a tell-tale lesion on his forehead (a instant giveaway of Aids in the Eighties and early Nineties). The official reason for the firing is that he’s a sloppy employee. But Beckett, even as he is dying, isn’t lying down and sues his former employer for workplace discrimination and wrongful dismissal.
The story was far from implausible, as several lawyers been jettisoned in just such circumstances. Indeed, the family of one Aids suffer, Geoffrey Bowers, would later sue the producers of Philadelphia, claiming that their late son’s story had been ripped off beat for beat. The case was settled in 1996, with the defendants acknowledging Philadelphia had been “inspired in part” by Bowers experiences.
The plan was to cast a comic white actor in the Robin Williams or Bill Murray vein; someone who would have the viewers’s trust from the outset. But then Demme’s co-producer, Edward Saxon, found himself seated close to Denzel Washington on a flight from New York to Los Angeles.
Washington enquired what Saxon was reading. It was the script for Philadelphia. Washington was immediately drawn to the character of Joe Miller—a somewhat shifty lawyer who journeys from committed homophobe to Andrew’s passionate advocate in court.
The actor called Demme out of the blue several days later. The director chose his words carefully. He had always wanted to work with the Oscar-winning Washington and was mindful of not burning bridges. However, he also had to convey the painful fact that Miller was supposed to be an insider.
Casting an African-american would mean the story was told from the perspective of two outsiders – a gay man and a member of a racial minority. And, besides, the Miller character had to be funny.
“I said, ‘there’s a big problem… it is intended for an actor with a gift for comedy,” Demme recalls. “He [Washington] said, “I can be funny.” The matter was settled.
If Philadelphia offered Washington an opportunity to test his comic chops, for Hanks it was his introduction to De Niro-style method acting. As preparation, he consulted at length with the noted Aids authority Dr Julian Falutz and talked for hours with sufferers of the disease. “I asked… how did find out you had Aids?,” he recalled. “How did you feel the moment you were told?”
It was also decided Philadelphia should be filmed chronologically—rare in Hollywoodto facilitate the actor’s dramatic weight loss as Beckett goes from healthy young man to walking corpse. Hanks exercised obsessively and slashed his calorie intake. By the end, he resembled a translucent spectre.
“I didn’t know many people with Aids,” said Hanks. “I knew of people with Aids. I had to be educated, to literally know what the virus does to you…it was a substantial eye-opener. It was much more simple than I thought it was.”
THE INDEPENDENT
If Philadelphia offered Washington an opportunity to test his comic chops, for Hanks it was his introduction to De Niro-style method acting. As preparation, he consulted at length with the noted AIDS authority Dr Julian Falutz and talked for hours with sufferers of the disease.