Philadelphia at 25: How Tom Hanks fought homophobia and transformed his career

Director Jonathan 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, writes Ed Power

Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks in 'Philadelphia' (Rex)

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 mid-thirties 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.

“Saying yes, then you just work. But saying no means you made the choice of the type of story you wanted to tell and the type of character you want to play.”

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.

The criticism stung Demme, who was unaware of the cinematic tradition of demonising gay people until it was pointed out to him.

In his private life, meanwhile, he was learning in the most painful fashion possible just how differently members of the LGBT community were treated. His wife’s gay best friend, a larger than life illustrator named Juan Botas, had been diagnosed with Aids and had, over a matter of months, been reduced to skin and bones.

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.

Demme was thus upset but also weighed down with guilt. He recalled his early reaction to Aids – how, along with many others, he had instinctively flinched as though sufferers of the disease were tainted and unclean.

“My wife and I were on a train from Manhattan to Chicago in the early Eighties,” he told the directors of People Like Us. “We were more or less the last people to leave the dining car. There was this one guy left. The waiter asked, ‘where are you going?’ And he said, ‘I’m going home…I’ve got Aids.’ I remember being really chilled and even frightened by it.”

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.

To take what he presumed would be a sceptical public by the hand, Demme’s tale would be told partly told from the perspective of an Average Joe wrestling with his own homophobia. He would serve as a stand-in for the audience as he went from recoiling from Andrew to becoming his friend and ally.

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 Hollywood – to 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.

“He didn’t eat for months,” said Antonio Banderas, who played Beckett’s romantic partner Miguel. “He was eating lettuce every day. He was very, very thin.”

“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.”

Philadelphia was not universally beloved among the gay community. The Beckett character was attacked in some quarters as two-dimensional and desexualised, with the decision to cut a scene in which Beckett and Miguel cuddle in bed attracting criticism (Demme said it just didn’t work dramatically). One of the loudest fault-finders was gay rights activist Larry Kramer, who described Philadelphia as “legally, medically, and politically inaccurate”.

“The Hanks character is an utter cipher," Kramer said. "I couldn't tell you anything about him – his beliefs, his likes and dislikes, his feelings. I couldn't even tell you he's gay. In fact, I did not for one second believe he was gay. Tom doesn't act in this movie. His makeup does all his acting.”

Hanks was respectful of Kramer’s position. However he felt that, in order to reach a mainstream audience, care had to be taken in how Andrew was presented. If he and Banderas had been filmed passionately entangled, the hoopla over movie star Tom Hanks snogging another man on screen would have overshadowed the movie’s message of compassion and empathy.

“As an actor I would want to avoid the artificial attention that would have gotten… that thing people are going to be sitting there waiting for – ‘I want to see the scene where Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas make out’.”

The film had gone through a number of titles in pre-production. Demme favoured “People Like Us”. But when it was decided to shoot in Philadelphia – close to New York and substantially cheaper to shoot in – he was reminded of its unofficial title of City of Brotherly Love. And what was the message of the film if not, “love thy brother”? Thus Philadelphia became Philadelphia.

Demme, as already pointed out, was eager to the point of obsession, about appealing to “average” Americans. To that end, he’d mocked up the opening credits with Neil Young’s bar-band anthem "Southern Man" as theme music.

But when he called Young and asked him to write a theme song for the film, the music Young presented was too haunting too work as curtain raiser (the track, "Philadelphia", ended up playing over heartbreaking closing footage of Beckett as a child).

In desperation, Demme turned to Bruce Springsteen, whom he know through his music business contacts (Demme had directed the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense). Springsteen read the notes and came back with a track of his own. Once again, however, "The Streets of Philadelphia" wasn’t the rollicking hard rock excursion Demme had wanted – at which point it dawned on him that that the last thing the project needed was a rollicking hard-rock excursion.

“I thought, ‘maybe these guys have more faith in the movie that you do’,” said the director, who passed away last year, aged 71.

With American’s cuddliest star in the lead, Philadelphia was a huge hit. It grossed $206m on a $26m budget. More than that, all involved felt that it had helped foster awareness about Aids and compassion towards sufferers.

Philadelphia was nominated for five Oscars, winning two – for Springsteen’s song and for Hanks’s performance. Receiving his Best Actor statuette, Hanks delivered a passionate, if somewhat flowery address that spoke of “the streets of heaven” being “crowded with angels”.

He did, however, catch some flack for allegedly outing the high-school teacher who had fostered his love of acting. In fact, Hanks had called Rawley Farnsworth ahead of the ceremony and received his blessing for the speech (the myth that Hanks had dragged his old teacher from the closet would nonetheless inspire the 1997 Kevin Kline movie In and Out).

“The educational empowerment of the movie has done some good,” Hanks would later reflect. “How much good I’m not sure. We might have been able to get to a place as a society as a whole where the truth is talked about. What it hasn’t done is wipe out Aids.”

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