In 1989, Tom Hanks starred in The ‘Burbs, a dark suburban comedy that confused audiences and irritated critics. That same year, Joe Versus the Volcano arrived to near-universal ridicule. Entertainment Weekly placed him on a list of Hollywood’s most disappointing stars. His career appeared to be declining from the heights of Big into comfortable mediocrity.
Nobody predicted what came next.
Philadelphia arrived in 1993, and everything changed. Hanks played Andrew Beckett, a lawyer dying of AIDS who sues his firm for wrongful termination. It was the first major Hollywood film to address the AIDS crisis directly, and it was a genuine risk — for the studio, for the director, and especially for its leading man. At the time, playing a gay character carried real career risk for a straight male star in Hollywood.
Hanks did not hedge. He lost weight for the role. He committed fully to the physical and emotional deterioration the character demanded. Critics and audiences were stunned by the depth of his performance. The Academy agreed, and he won his first Oscar for Best Actor.
What happened next is the part film history sometimes glosses over: Hanks did not take a victory lap. He did not spend the post-Oscar period in celebratory limbo. He went directly into production on Forrest Gump, a film that required him to anchor two and a half hours of screen time almost entirely alone.
Forrest Gump was not a guaranteed success. Its premise — a man with a below-average IQ who accidentally witnesses every major American historical event of the latter twentieth century — sounded bizarre on paper. Studios had passed on the project multiple times. Hanks took it anyway.
The film earned over $680 million globally and won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Hanks won his second consecutive Best Actor Oscar, becoming only the second performer in history to achieve the feat, after Spencer Tracy.
What the trajectory of Hanks’s early career teaches is something essential about resilience in creative industries: the reviews that define you are rarely the ones written during your worst years. The critics who wrote him off in 1989 were evaluating projects, not potential. They were measuring output, not capability.
Hanks spent the years of poor reviews developing something that cannot be rushed: craft, range, and the judgment to recognize when a role is worth the risk. By the time Philadelphia arrived, he was ready for it. The preparation and the suffering of the difficult years had built exactly the instrument the role required.