It’s 1989 and Tom Hanks has just walked off stage with what would be the first of four Golden Globes. The film is Big, his first big-time starring job since his breakout role in Ron Howard’s magical rom-com Splash, in 1984. Rising from community theater to television and finally to movies, Hanks caught our attention right away – and we never drew away our gaze, nominating him nine times.
We interviewed Hanks for the first time in December of 1993, when he had just moved from light comedy to deep drama in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, playing an HIV-positive lawyer fighting for his rights in the depths of the AIDS crisis. He warned us about his limitations, though: “I’m not a chameleon. There are guys who are but I don’t absolutely disappear into any roles. (…) All the cheerful, likable stuff that I have had in all these other movies, I think I have it here as well.”
His performance would earn him his second Golden Globe.