Cover Story : He’s Serious About This One : For Tom Hanks, it’s been a long ride from ‘Splash’ to ‘Philadelphia,’ in which the likable comedy actor plays an AIDS patient who’s fired from his job. What made him take the leap? It has a lot to do with what he’s done so far, the times and, well, life

“There are two kinds of romantic leading men in American movies,” says Nora Ephron, who should know--she directed Tom Hanks in this year’s surprise box-office smash, “Sleepless in Seattle.”

“There’s the godlike person you’ve never met, like Cary Grant,” she continues, “and there’s the boy next door you’ve known all your life, like Jimmy Stewart. Tom falls in the second category, and that’s what makes him such an inspired choice for the lead in ‘Philadelphia.’ There’s something familiar about Tom, and people find it very easy to relate to him, and that hammers home an important truth about AIDS: that it’s in your neighborhood and could happen to anybody.”

Everybody pretty much agrees that Tom Hanks is one of the most innately likable actors in Hollywood, but his likability quotient will probably never again be put to the kind of test it undergoes this month with Jonathan Demme’s “Philadelphia,” being released Wednesday. In the role of Andy Beckett, Hanks plays a closeted gay lawyer who contracts AIDS and is fired from his job and sues his former law firm for a civil liberties violation. Hanks is being counted on by all of Hollywood to see its first high-profile AIDS movie safely into port. That this film is widely regarded as “difficult” and “risky” is indicative of just how conservative the Hollywood film industry is; to gauge just how far the industry has come, however, try to imagine an actor of Jimmy Stewart’s ilk and era portraying a gay character. It simply couldn’t have happened.

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“Philadelphia,” made by TriStar for $25 million and directed by Demme, whose 1991 “The Silence of the Lambs” Oscar sweep no doubt gave him the clout needed to get this picture made, is already awash in controversy. The chief criticism leveled against it thus far by gays who have attended screenings is that it soft-pedals its handling of homosexuality (see story on facing page).

Hanks--who seems more than willing to examine any criticism the film elicits--feels this line of thinking misses the point of “Philadelphia.”

“The guys in this film are not gay activists, and the point of the film is not to promote some bold and different aspect of the gay lifestyle,” says the 37-year-old actor over a late dinner in a private club in West Hollywood. “This film is going to have all the big billboard phrases attached to it--’the first movie about AIDS,’ ‘the first movie about homosexuality’--but ultimately this is a movie about how we treat each other.

“Having thought about AIDS a good deal for quite a while now, I’ve come to think of it as a test of us as a civilization, among other things,” adds Hanks, who lost 35 pounds for his portrayal of Beckett. “Is man more enlightened than he was during the Black Plague in Elizabethan England? I don’t know. I do know there are still a lot of people who think this disease is about hedonism and is therefore deserved. All I can say about that is, that’s not a very Christian response to suffering.”

Although the carping about the politics of “Philadelphia” has already begun, the early word on Hanks’ performance is that it’s above reproach. “I’m sure he’ll win an Oscar--no other performance comes close to his this year,” Ephron declares, and her opinion is shared by many. “Philadelphia” is a stretch for Hanks, who established himself as a master of light romantic comedy in 1984 with his second film, “Splash”; scored a knockout punch in 1988 with his brilliant portrayal of a 13-year-old boy trapped in the body of a man in Penny Marshall’s “Big,” and has survived several less-than-stellar films relatively untarnished--among them the exhaustively chronicled catastrophe “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

“I’ve made far too many movies--I’m on my 17th right now--but when “Splash” came out and I started getting offered things, I didn’t really know you could say no, so I worked every chance I got,” says Hanks, picking half-heartedly at a bowl of pasta. “In retrospect, I can see that was a mistake because I plowed through several mediocre movies. I don’t regret making those choices because those were the only choices I had, but I did seem to get offered an awful lot of goofy, silly roles. I guess it’s just that non-threatening likability I seem to carry in my wallet everywhere I go,” he says with a good-natured shrug.

Hanks’ “likability” turns out to be a recurring theme in the conversation. He discusses it with an odd detachment, as if it were some sort of offspring he had produced--and in talking with people who know him, it invariably comes up.

“In addition to the great imagination Tom brings to his work and the incredible ability he has to communicate his characters’ intentions, there’s just something about him that makes you trust him and root for him,” says Demme. “You met him--isn’t he great?! It’s just an aura he has as a human, and it’s a great plus for our movie.”

Adds Marshall, who directed Hanks in “Big” and “A League of Their Own”: “Tom has a kind of charm that’s not threatening to men and makes women want to take him home and take care of him. He’s got this built-in cuteness that really comes through on a movie screen and just makes you like the guy.”

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It’s true that it’s hard to find anything bad to say about Hanks. He arrives for a meeting with a reporter punctually after a very long day on the set of the Robert Zemeckis’ film “Forrest Gump,” which wrapped last week. “Forrest Gump,” described by Hanks as “the story of a guy with a very low IQ who can only operate at the speed of his own common sense,” also stars Robin Wright but relies on Hanks to carry just about every scene, so he’s been working hard. Clearly exhausted, he’s also been struggling for weeks to shake off a cold but is nonetheless unfailingly polite and generous with his time. He has old-fashioned manners (“Would you like some of my pasta?” “Is this table too dark?”) and uses quaint bits of slang like “oh landy” and “gosh darn.” Open and friendly, yet guarded and strictly professional, he clearly knows his way around an interview.

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“If people don’t know the real me or know what my life’s about, that’s good, because I don’t want them to,” Hanks says when one comments on his skill at creating the illusion of speaking openly while actually revealing little. Hanks’ ability to throw up a protective veneer of likability is a talent one assumes he acquired out of necessity as a child. Although Hanks--ever the trouper--describes his childhood as “different, but really not that bad,” it was in fact wracked by upheaval and change.

Hanks, who was born in Concord, Calif., in 1956, began bouncing from one household to the next when he was 5 and his parents divorced. The third child of four, Hanks and two of his siblings lived with his father, a nomadic cook who ambled from job to job. Hanks’ father had burned through two more marriages by the time Tom was a teen-ager, and Hanks rarely saw his mother, who remarried three times.

“By the time I was 10, I’d lived in several different places under many different circumstances,” the actor says, discreetly blowing his nose, then finally abandoning his dinner in favor of herb tea with lemon. “I didn’t just change houses--I had different parents, siblings, cities, schools and friends. I’m sure all that change played a role in my developing the social skills I have. I was always the funny guy in school who, despite the fact that I wasn’t a great student, never got in trouble because I was funny.

“It’s odd, but even as a child, all the change I experienced at home made me feel ahead of everybody else. I thought it was a great way to live and that people who lived in the same house all their lives were slow, dull and uninteresting,” he continues.

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“The downside of this is that once I was on my own, I found it impossible to root myself anywhere and continued to move every six months for years. It wasn’t until my second marriage (in 1988 Hanks wed actress Rita Wilson, whom he met in 1985 on the set of “Volunteers”) that I began to get comfortable with the idea of home. Everything made sense for the first time, but that was a long time coming.” (Hanks, Wilson and their 3-year-old son, Chester, live in West L.A.)

Hanks, who was voted male class cutup in his senior year at Skyline High School in Oakland, spent much of his teen years going to movies (he says seeing Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” at age 13 was a pivotal experience) and searching for some kind of anchor.

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He describes the cultural milieu he grew up in as “whatever you wanted--I was pretty much left alone.” He loved J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” wasn’t too interested in music--odd for a kid in the Bay Area during the ‘60s--and watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau on TV. Hanks’ spiritual landscape was up for grabs as well.

“Because of all the different people I lived with, I had a checkered religious upbringing. Then when I was in high school, I had a serious born-again experience,” he says. “A great group of people ran a church near where I lived, and they provided a safe, nurturing atmosphere at a time when there wasn’t much else I could count on.

“The beliefs I embraced at that time don’t mean the same thing to me now,” he says. “When you’re young and idealistic you tend to view things in absolute terms, and the absolutes didn’t pan out, even within the confines of that place. You begin to see the contradictions without looking too deeply.”

The secular world began to beckon Hanks more urgently when he was 20, and he enrolled in a drama class at a community college in Sacramento. Initially working as a stagehand, he knew immediately that he had found the vehicle for his creative sensibility. “The theater was a total blast,” he says, visibly brightening at the memory. “I couldn’t believe my luck in finding this place where it was not only accepted, but expected that you be creative in this really energetic way. I was in heaven.”

While living in Sacramento, Hanks also met actress Samantha Lewes, whom he married in 1978. (Hanks has a 15-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter with Lewes, whom he divorced in 1987.) Also in 1978, Hanks’ fledgling career took him to Ohio, where he worked as an intern with the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, then to New York, where he worked with the Riverside Shakespeare Company in Manhattan.

Hanks usually played the comedic parts in Shakespeare, although the actors who ignited his passion for the profession were known for their work in contemporary dramas. Citing Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson as important influences, Hanks says: “I loved the kind of work those actors were doing, but for years that stuff seemed completely unapproachable for me, and I can remember watching them and being unable to fathom how they did what they were doing. Actually, I think I could tackle that kind of work now--but, of course, there’s always the possibility that old likability factor is going to kick in.

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“I don’t do anything to manufacture this--I just wake up happy in the morning and pretty much stay that way throughout the day,” he flatly declares. “There have been periods in my life when I yearned to be the surly, brooding loner in the corner, but, try as I may, it’s just not me--I’m just innately good-natured. I used to be ambivalent about this likable thing because I felt it was causing the hard work I do to be overlooked--because I’m just so damned likable, people think my life is a total breeze, the work just rolls off me and it’s as easy as getting out of bed. Despite how it may appear, this work actually isn’t all that easy, and the hardest part of it is holding back the self-consciousness that goes with being in front of a camera. It takes a while to learn how to filter out everything that’s unnecessary and let yourself go 100% full tilt.”

Ephron agrees that Hanks’ natural charm has upstaged the solid skills that are the foundation of his career. “Tom usually plays a scene on six levels at once,” she says. “Say you have a scene where he’s supposed to be funny: He’s apt to throw in a little sadness and anger, then he might inflect the scene with some sarcasm and tenderness too. He loves to find out what else might be going on in a scene, and he basically rewrites every part he plays--he does it in this darling way, too. He sits with the director and the writer and says: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if this happened?’ Or, ‘Why doesn’t he say this?’ One of the reasons Tom survived his turkeys is that he always takes good care of his own part.”

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After making his film debut in 1980 in the mercifully forgotten “He Knows You’re Alone,” Hanks began to attract attention as one of the leads in the ABC series “Bosom Buddies,” which aired from 1980-82 (and had plots that revolved around the two male leads’ being in drag much of the time). It wasn’t until 1984, when first-time director Ron Howard cast him as the lead in the romantic fantasy “Splash,” that Hanks’ career took off.

“ ‘Splash’ was a terrific learning experience for me, because Ron took me aside every now and then and told me what I was doing wrong in this wonderfully quiet, sensible tone,” Hanks says. “He’d say, ‘Look, this is a movie, not a TV show, and what is required of you is different from what you’ve done before. Turn down the volume. Your job is to love her. You’re not here to be funny, so you can’t just do shtick.’ It was great advice, and I’ve been indebted to Ron ever since.”

With the release of “Splash” Hanks’ life changed overnight. “It was surreal,” he says, recalling the barrage of attention and work that came his way. “You suddenly find yourself going on location and living in places you’d never normally go in a million years. It all seems so glamorous, and you can’t believe the glamour is including you.”

The change in Hanks’ career put a tremendous strain on his already fragile marriage, and by 1985 he found himself headed for a divorce and at a major psychological crossroads.

“I’d been escaping into my work for months and had worked so much I was dead from the feet up,” he says of that time. “I wound up in therapy three times a week for several months. I was sad, confused and emotionally crippled--I guess the house of cards has to fall in before you start to figure things out. I remember the guy I saw saying to me, ‘You have a lot to be sad about, but you’re going to be all right,’ and though I didn’t believe him for the longest time, I felt like a world of good had been done after several months had passed.”

Hanks’ life took a major turn for the better in 1988 when he married Rita Wilson and starred in “Big.” Although he followed “Big” with five critical bombs (“Punchline,” “The ‘Burbs,” “Turner and Hooch,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Joe Versus the Volcano”), Hanks wasn’t held accountable for the failure of any of those films, and his movie-star cachet continued to grow, as did his access to serious roles. He’s now being touted as an Oscar contender, he was a featured character in a recent New Yorker profile of Steve Martin (Hanks played the lead role in a private reading of Martin’s new play, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile”), and last month he spent the night at the White House.

“There was a screening of ‘Philadelphia’ for the first family, and they invited us to spend the night. What can I say? It was wild,” Hanks says with a laugh. “During the screening Clinton got up and walked out after a scene where Antonio Banderas and I are dancing together in military uniforms at a costume party, but I don’t think he left because he objected to the scene.” (And no, Hanks did not ask the President about his position on the issue of gays in the military.) “He said he thought the film was very nice and that it would be effective.

“The next morning we ran into each other in the kitchen. I was looking for breakfast and there was the President in his running shorts, carrying the New York Times and a mug of coffee. I said, ‘Good morning, Mr. President,’ then we sat around for an hour and a half talking about everything under the sun.”

Clinton may believe “Philadelphia” will be an effective film, but Hanks himself isn’t so sure. “We’re not out to educate anybody with this film,” he says. “There are a jillion homophobic people out there--far too many to count--and I don’t know if a movie is going to change anybody’s mind. Yes, this is the first big-budget movie about AIDS made by a name director at a major studio, but I can’t say for sure that this is going to help other AIDS movies get made.

“I hope it does,” he adds, “and I’ve done all I can to make that come to pass: I’ve put the full force of my damned likability behind the idea.”*