The role that made Tom Hanks explore his own mortality
From bearded castaways to plastic cowboys; Tom Hanks has played an extensive range of characters over the course of his celebrated career in film. The talents of the Californian actor seem to transcend genre and style, and, as a result, Hanks has largely been able to avoid the issue of type-casting, which so many Hollywood actors fall victim to. For the most part, Hanks is revered for his roles in family-friendly classics like Toy Story, Forrest Gump and Big, but he has played a few darker parts in his time, too.
Despite his later reputation as a family-friendly actor, Hanks got his start in the world of cinema, starring in the psychological slasher He Knows You’re Alone. Following this often-forgotten film, Hanks made a name for himself by starring in a string of fairly successful comedy films, including the likes of Money Pit, Dragnet and Bachelor Party. Given that he had established himself as a light-hearted comedy actor, his sudden switch to deeply affecting drama in 1993’s Philadelphia was all the more shocking.
Philadelphia follows the story of Andrew Beckett, played by Hanks, who sues his former employee after being sacked for being gay and having contracted AIDS. As you might expect from that synopsis, the film is incredibly emotional and hard-hitting, made all the more so by Hanks’ stunning performance as the protagonist. In preparation for the role, the actor spent an extensive amount of time with doctors, AIDS sufferers and gay men who had been affected by the disease.
The experience of immersing himself in the horrors of the AIDS virus and the deep prejudice and discrimination faced by those who suffered from it allowed Hanks to bring a greater degree of depth to the role. Inadvertently, though, it also caused the actor to explore issues of his own life and mortality. “All the guys I talked to were very secure in who they were, their own sexuality and the concept of stigma,” he said in 1993, “The way they handled their own sense of mortality was an amazing thing to witness”.
Speaking on how the role affected him, the actor continued, “My view of my own mortality is quite paltry when you consider somebody who really has AIDS and is going through something that I only pretended to have,” explaining, “The calendar of my own death somewhere in my pocket is a small change, but, in fact, you can’t do something like this and not go back to your home, be a lover or a husband or a father and not realise your own human dimension in the whole story”.
The film deals a lot with the widespread injustice faced by AIDS victims throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, many of whom were shunned from society. Reflecting on this and how it affected his home life, Hanks said, “In the course of the movie maybe we wrestle with how fair that is to a degree, and I know that at home I’m just an actor who has this job, but I wrestled with it in ways that I had never been expected to before”.
This grappling with mortality and injustice clearly had an impact on Tom Hanks, culminating in one of his most celebrated and important roles across his entire filmography. Even today, Philadelphia remains a devastating account of the discrimination faced by homosexuals and those suffering from AIDS, in particular.
