Hollywood has been celebrating straight actors playing LGBTQ+ characters for decades from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, to Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry, to even Hugh Grant in Maurice. Multiple actors have won awards, even Oscars, for playing such parts. Tom Hanks won his first Oscar in 1994 for playing gay and shunned lawyer Andrew Beckett in Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia.
The 1993 film garnered five Academy Award nominations, winning two, and was praised at the time for its spotlighting the AIDS crisis and the stigma against those who have HIV, with Hanks' Beckett being fired and eventually winning a lawsuit against his firm for such discrimination.
When asked about cultural shifts in New York Times Magazine, Hanks addressed the possibility of taking on a role of a gay man ever again, to which he replied no.
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