Playing The Part

People are saying that I was bold to do this, that it was courageous choice. I don’t see it. It’s bold for me to what? To play a man who goes to sleep in Antonio Banderas’s arms every night? Who has sexual intercourse with him somehow? Is that what’s bold? As a society we should be beyond that.

Fine, you know. And if we had shot a love scene, they’d be saying, “Are we supposed to applaud the fact that Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas dared to kiss each other?” These guys have been together for nine years. They’re once-a-weekers at best. I’ve been with my wife now for 10 years. And the number of times we actually smooch in public is probably declining. It’s just the nature of things. I mean, if we have to live up to the kiss-ometer, how fair is that? I look at Andy and Miguel together and I just think they’re adorable. When they’re dancing in their little sailor suits, I thought that was just the coolest thing in the world. I like these guys.

I wasn’t close to anybody. High-school friends, a cousin. People who worked on the movie. You’d give them a hug at Christmas because you’re shutting down for two weeks, and geez, you can feel the sweat coming through their shirt, from the fever they’re fighting. Talk about taking it out of the abstract. It’s like, my God, you’re burning up. And they are, you know.

It’s politicized me, which is kind of a pain in the ass. But the assumption is that I’m changed drastically by what I saw, and I’m not. I began this being a pretty enlightened guy. An enlightened, white, heterosexual, punk boy from Oakland, California. But when I was preparing for the movie, I found huge areas of my life that I had in common with people who are gay. Paul Monette’s books were like a map to a new country. He lives in Los Angeles and he was describing streets I knew, neighborhoods I drove in. It was like a travel guide of the town that I lived in, but from a completely different point of view. The way he felt about who he was in junior high and high school was the way I felt about myself. This was the foundation for all the work that came after. Andy Beckett was no longer this faux creation. What he wore, the family he came from, his boyfriend-I could find reflections of them in my own life. And the way guys I talked to described where they would be without being openly gay was the way I felt before I came to grips with being a man and a father and a husband and being in love with a wonderful woman.

There were times when I got hit on by guys. And I was just as discombobulated as if I’d been hit on by a woman.

No, no. It upset my sense of equilibrium. I honestly never thought boo about my own sexuality. It’s not a choice. Either you are or you aren’t.

Well, yeah. I had a task, stuff I had to have answers to. But the guys I talked to were very forthcoming, very selfless. I would say how did you find out you had it? And it always starts off with, you know, a few white specks on the inside of your mouth or the cold that never goes away. And the doctor calls and says you have to come down. And you know what he’s going to say and when he says it, you look out the window and you say, Well, there’s the sky How much longer will I see the sky? And, Oh, there’s a bird flying by. How many times will I see a bird fly by?

We were at home watching Phil Donahue. And they showed all the people who had appeared on his show who had died of AIDS. You know, Ryan White, plenty of others. But then he held up the most beautiful little black baby. That was it. All of us, my wife and my mother-in-law and I, we were just absolutely gone. Because my own son was there. He was 2. And he’s running around in his cowboy hat and his cowboy boots which he refused to take off and his toys are all over the place. When do you start judging these little creatures?

It’s not a choice. I mean, you know, I don’t care. I have two boys and a girl and I want them to be well adjusted and I want them to be funny. That’s it. I don’t know, maybe funny first and well adjusted later. But that’s it. Anything past that I don’t care.

PHOTO: ‘I don’t see how there’s anything bold about playing as great a guy as Andy Beckett’ Hanks with costar Washington (right) in ‘Philadelphia’

PATRICK ROGERS

“Philadelphia” held few surprises for Charles Bowers. Six years before the film opened, Bowers, 36, says he met with a Hollywood producer to tell the story of his late brother Geoffrey, a Manhattan litigator fired by his law firm after he contracted AIDS. Charles says he recounted that Geoffrey, who successfully sued his former employers, was worried about the effects of a trial on their mother. “I told him she didn’t raise any of us to sit at the back of the bus. The next time I heard those words spoken was by Joanne Woodward [who plays Tom Hanks’s mother in ‘Philadelphia’],” says Bowers.

Last week the Bowers family sued the film’s makers for $10 million. At least 11 details o the film, they say, were taken from the life of Geoffrey Bowers without credit or compensation. Among them: Hank’s lover, played by Spaniard Antonio Banderas (Bowers’s was Filipino-Mexican), and a dramatic courtroom scene in which Hanks bares his chest covered with red lesions. Geoffrey died in 1987 at the age of 33.

Proving the similarity won’t be easy. The family never signed a contract with the producer, Scott Rudin, who left the project early on. TriStar Pictures insists “Philadelphia” is a work of fiction. “[It’s] not the story of Geoffrey Bowers,” says spokesman Ed Russell. Media coverage of the Bowers case placed much of it in the public doman. And stories of other lawyers with AIDS had already begun to circulate. Even in his ordeal, Geoffrey Bowers was not alone.

Subject Terms: HANKS, Tom – Interviews ; PHILADELPHIA (Motion picture)