Tom Hanks is a great pretender

"Philadelphia" — which was directed by Jonathan Demme and also starred Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, and Antonio Banderas — made history. It was the first big-budget Hollywood film to deal with the AIDS crisis in the United States, and Hanks's performance of a gay man sick with what was then an incurable disease brought his formidable star power — and exceptional acting talent — to a story no major studio had previously been willing to put on the screen. The critic Roger Ebert likened it to " Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," the 1967 picture, also a Hollywood first, about an interracial romance.

Hanks's performance in "Philadelphia" was so memorable because Hanks is a gifted actor who entered into the role of Beckett with wholehearted integrity. "Honor and shame from no condition rise," wrote Alexander Pope . "Act well your part, there all the honor lies." Hanks did just that in "Philadelphia" and it may be that the film could never have achieved the success it did — it earned more than $200 million at the box office, the equivalent of almost $400 million in 2022 — without him. Its impact was not merely financial. "The film was a catalyst for conversations, acceptance, and other film projects that might never have made it out of the closet," wrote Holly Millea in a 2019 Smithsonian Magazine retrospective. "Thanks in part to that kind of AIDS education and awareness, the stigma of the disease is no longer as strong in the United States."

Hanks's exceptional performance had nothing to do with his own sexual orientation. He isn't gay. He also isn't a lawyer, he doesn't live in Philadelphia, and he never had AIDS. He acted all those things. He would be acting all those things if "Philadelphia" were being made today with Hanks in the leading role — just as he acted the part of a low-IQ Southerner who becomes an All-American running back and Medal of Honor recipient in " Forrest Gump," of astronaut Jim Lovell in "Apollo 13," of a young widower with a 7-year-old son in " Sleepless in Seattle ," and of a US Army Ranger captain who landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day in "Saving Private Ryan." To none of those acclaimed roles did Hanks bring the experience of someone who had lived them in real life. Did that diminish the believability and acumen of his portrayals? Clearly not. Did it undermine the impact of those films? The audiences certainly didn't think so.

Yet Hanks says that if "Philadelphia" were being made today, an actor who isn't gay would never be cast for the lead. "Could a straight man do what I did in ‘Philadelphia' now?" he muses in a lengthy interview with David Marchese for the New York Times Magazine. "No, and rightly so."

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. It's not a crime, it's not boohoo, that someone would say we are going to demand more of a movie in the modern realm of authenticity.

Does Hanks actually believe that? Or is he just saying it to keep the woke mob from his doorstep? The "authenticity" argument — the contention that dramatic roles must go only to actors who check the same demographic box as the people they portray — may line up with politically correct notions about "cultural appropriation," but it flies in the face of what good actors do.

Actors pretend. They embody characters and bring them to life. When Gal Gadot was named two years ago to play Cleopatra in an upcoming film, there were complaints about the casting of a "white" actress (actually, Gadot is of Middle Eastern/North African descent) to play the last of the Egyptian Pharaohs. "Great acting doesn't depend," I wrote at the time,

on whether the race, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, color, or physical condition of actors matches that of the character they are depicting. It depends on whether the actors can surmount such considerations — whether they can make their portrayals so believable, so compelling, that audiences see not the actor, but the character.

Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" cast non-white actors and actresses to portray America's founders in what became a mesmerizing theatrical experience. Liam Neeson, an Irishman, played the German Nazi industrialist Oskar Schindler with riveting humanity and moral insight. Eddie Redmayne, who appears healthy in every way, carried off the role of a severely paralyzed Stephen Hawking in "The Theory of Everything" so brilliantly that Hawking himself said: "At times, I thought he was me." Dev Patel, whose parents are Gujarati Indians, looks nothing like David Copperfield as Charles Dickens imagined him — but in a new movie, he brings the character to life more exuberantly and convincingly than many white actors have.

To attack actors for playing characters unlike themselves is to attack dramatic art itself. But by now identity politics infects great swaths of contemporary culture, from law to academia to business. There was never a chance that the acting profession would be immune. Scarlett Johansson came under fire in 2018 when she agreed to star in "Rub & Tug," a film about a transgender brothel owner, Dante "Tex" Gil. Tilda Swinton was blasted for playing the Ancient One in "Doctor Strange," a role adapted from a character that was Asian in the original Marvel comic. Disney was condemned for picking Jack Whitehall, a straight actor, to play a "campy gay man" in the adventure comedy "Jungle Cruise." Latina magazine rebuked moviemakers for filling Hispanic roles in at least 13 movies with non-Hispanic actors. The able-bodied Bryan Cranston was slammed for taking on the role of a quadriplegic businessman in "The Upside."

As a result of such attacks, movies have been killed before they could be made and actors browbeaten into disqualifying themselves from whole categories of scripts. The backlash against Johansson prompted her to give up the role of Gil, which resulted in the film being scrapped altogether . Darren Criss (who won Emmy and Golden Globe awards for his TV portrayal of gay assassin Andrew Cunanan) announced that he would no longer play LGBT characters because he doesn't want to be "another straight boy taking a gay man's role." And now even Hanks pays lip service to "the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy."

To insist that only actors who are X be tapped to play characters who are X is to insist that acting can never be more than skin deep. It is to declare that the extraordinary artistry and talent of great actors — their power to inhabit a role and make it real — must be restricted at all times to rigid lanes of race, gender, and whatever other categories the ideological commissars deem inviolable. It is to tell performers to stay in their own narrow lanes, to stick to characters just like themselves, and under no circumstances to transmit experiences and truths that they don't know from their own lives.

But transmitting experiences and truths that they don't know from their own lives is the very purpose of actors' careers. If anyone knows that, Hanks does. What a disappointment that he would avoid saying so.