A game-changing moment: The Hilary Swank movie she believed society “needed”
One of the multi-time Academy Award winners to boast a 100% success rate, Hilary Swank has only ever been nominated for two Oscars, but she ended up winning them both.
That sort of success could hardly have been predicted right off the bat when her first two feature film appearances came in the forgettable Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie and learning under the tutelage of Pat Morita’s Mr Miyagi in The Next Karate Kid, but every aspiring actor dreams of landing a breakthrough role eventually.
For Swank, that came in October 1999 when Boys Don’t Cry was released, with the biographical drama finding her on towering form as Brandon Teena. A powerful tribute to the life and ultimately harrowing death of its subject, there were admittedly some criticisms levelled at the veracity of the events depicted therein. Still, it can’t be argued that the central performance came right out of the top drawer.
Of course, thanks to evolving attitudes in society, Boys Don’t Cry wouldn’t be made the same way if it were to happen today. For one thing, Swank admits that she regrets being a part of it despite the effect it had on her career, with cisgender actors playing transgender characters, something the industry has become increasingly mindful of avoiding.
Mainstream cinema wasn’t quite so welcoming in the 1990s, though, something Swank alluded to in an interview with The Times. “Now, for the most part, in most places, it’s accepted to be a trans person,” she said. “At that time, people weren’t even coming out as gay and lesbian. It was a career killer, or whatever. They weren’t ready to tell their family, or maybe they weren’t even ready to tell themselves.”
Looking back on the legacy of Boys Don’t Cry at large, Swank described it as “a jumping-off board to start a conversation that was needed, and we need this conversation to continue until everyone’s leading a safe life.” Teena’s murder was an awful and reprehensible act, but it did lead to an increase in lobbying to alter hate crime legislation in the United States, with the Oscar-winning film raising even more awareness of the horrendous incident.
As mentioned, Swank wouldn’t even consider playing the part again, given the strides made regarding trans representation in cinema across the last quarter of a century. She nonetheless maintains that Boys Don’t Cry was an important milestone in terms of opening the doors to a conversation that may not have been held quite as loudly beforehand.
There’s always work to be done, and even though Swank herself has voiced regrets over her star-making performance, Teena’s story wasn’t one that mainstream cinema typically found itself concerned with at the time it was being committed to celluloid.
