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Hollywood has been celebrating straight actors playing LGBTQ+ characters for decades from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, to Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry, to even Hugh Grant in Maurice. Multiple actors have won awards, even Oscars, for playing such parts. Tom Hanks won his first Oscar in 1994 for playing gay and shunned lawyer Andrew Beckett in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia.
The 1993 film garnered five Academy Award nominations, winning two, and was praised at the time for its spotlighting the AIDS crisis and the stigma against those who have HIV, with Hanks’ Beckett being fired and eventually winning a lawsuit against his firm for such discrimination.
When asked about cultural shifts in New York Times Magazine, Hanks addressed the possibility of taking on a role of a gay man ever again, to which he replied no.
“Let’s address ‘could a straight man do what I did in Philadelphia now?’ No, and rightly so”, he said. “The whole point of Philadelphia was don’t be afraid. One of the reasons people weren’t afraid of that movie is that I was playing a gay man. We’re beyond that now, and I don’t think people would accept the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy.”
He went on to say he didn’t mean to sound preachy, but also having more of an authentic actor isn’t a bad thing.
“It’s not a crime…that someone would say we are going to demand more of a movie in the modern realm of authenticity.”
Hanks won his second Oscar playing Forrest Gump and when asked if he had any retrospective thoughts about Forrest Gump, the movie, and the character, Hanks agreed the premise alone would be picked apart by social media. “There’s nothing you can do about that,” he said.
Tom Hanks can soon be seen in regular collaborator Robert Zemeckis’ live-action adaptation of Disney’s Pinnochio where he will be playing Pinnochio’s maker and father figure, Geppeto.
