Philadelphia premiered in Los Angeles on December 14, 1993, as a benefit for the AIDS Project, then opened wide through TriStar Pictures on January 14, 1994. Jonathan Demme directed the 126-minute legal drama. Ron Nyswaner wrote it. Tom Hanks plays Andrew Beckett, a senior associate at Wyant, Wheeler, Hellerman, Tetlow, & Brown who is fired and then sues the firm over his AIDS diagnosis and his sexuality.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Home Entertainment India.
Tom Hanks and the 35 Pounds
Hanks read Paul Monette and worked with two personal trainers to lose 35 pounds, tracking Beckett’s decline as the film moves. The performance won him Best Actor at the 66th Academy Awards. Denzel Washington plays Joe Miller, the personal injury lawyer who first turns Beckett away, afraid of the disease and uncomfortable with a gay client, then takes the case after watching Beckett humiliated in a law library.
What the Cast Almost Was
The roles were nearly other films entirely.
| Role | Actors considered or cast | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Andrew Beckett | Andy Garcia, Daniel Day-Lewis, Matthew Modine, William Baldwin, Tom Hanks | Hanks cast |
| Joe Miller | Bill Murray, William Hurt, Nick Nolte, Tim Robbins, Denzel Washington | Washington cast |
| Miguel Álvarez | John Leguizamo | Turned it down for Super Mario Bros. |
Ron Vawter and the 53 Actors
TriStar refused to insure Ron Vawter, who was openly HIV-positive, and told Demme to recast. Demme refused and rearranged the shoot around a month-long hospitalization. Vawter died of AIDS complications less than five months after the premiere.
The American Film Institute counts roughly 53 AIDS-positive actors in the film. The source’s account of how many have since died is cut off mid-sentence, so that figure cannot be confirmed here.
The Trial and the Lesions
The firm’s partners testify that Beckett was incompetent and hid his condition. The defense contrasts him with a former employee of one of the law partners who was infected by transfusion. Miller has Beckett unbutton his shirt on the stand, showing lesions matching those on his face while employed.
Bruce Springsteen and the Box Office
- “Streets of Philadelphia” won Best Original Song.
- Nyswaner was nominated for Best Original Screenplay and lost to Jane Campion for The Piano.
- The film grossed $206.7 million worldwide, ninth-highest of 1993.
What the Film Got Right
Philadelphia is widely described, including by Wikipedia, as one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to address AIDS and homophobia directly and to show a gay man with dignity. Hanks said in 2022 that audiences would not “accept the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy,” and that this was “rightly so.”
He is right, and the film’s own record proves the cost of the old arrangement: a cast of actors living with AIDS, one of them fought for by his director, many of them gone. The courtroom mechanics creak. The lesions do the argumentative work a better script would have done through character. What survives is the plain fact of Beckett on the stand.
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