Before Colin Hanks was sent the scripts for his latest project, the true-story drama series “A Friend of a Family,” a writer friend called to give him a heads up.
“She’d reached out saying, ‘Hey, one of my best friends is going to come to you with a project that you’re perfect for.’ And I was like, ‘Great. Love hearing that,’” Hanks says. “And then I got sent the scripts and I was kind of disappointed. I’m like, ‘Oh, a really sweet, nice Mormon. Right. Exactly the thing I’ve been trying not to do.’”
Yet he remained open and when he began reading the scripts, he couldn’t put them down.
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“There was just something about the story that I could not get out of my skull,” Hanks says. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And after two years in the pandemic, I really wanted to start to really challenge myself, given the opportunity. And there was none more challenging than this one, so I just jumped in.”
“A Friend of the Family,” airing now on Peacock, is based on the true events of the Broberg family, a Mormon family whose daughter is kidnapped — twice — by their neighbor and family friend. Hanks plays the father, Bob Broberg, and early on received the blessing of Jan Broberg, the daughter who was kidnapped, who wrote to Hanks to tell him how perfect he was to portray her father. The two began texting often and one day Hanks asked if her father had a phrase he said often that she recalled from her childhood.
“And she said that one of the things he would say quite a bit was, ‘Every day is a bonus,’” Hanks recalls. “And that really struck a chord with me. Well, because I just thought, if this man can believe that and say that, even on the darkest of days — and he had some dark ones — what a unique individual. And that was really the ‘Thank God for that’ moment.”
Hanks, a documentary lover who produces them when he’s not acting, says he’s often looking for things that are “realistic and have almost a documentary feel” when it comes to roles.
“Really the thing that I’m looking for is not just the super nice guy that gets taken advantage of — but in certain cases, this and ‘Fargo’ being another one, these are people that are naive and are trusting, and they know that is considered a shortcoming and there’s an awareness to that, and at times an embarrassment. And so I’ve just always been trying to find the most dynamic characters that I can.”
Hanks will next be on the producing side with the upcoming release of “Say Hey! Willie Mays,” a documentary about baseball icon Willie Mays.
“I’m a gigantic baseball fan, and it just so happens I’m a San Francisco Giants fan, so obviously he looms large,” Hanks says of Mays. “But he’s never let anyone really tell his story as a documentary before. And he was always one that me and my team always looked at as, ‘Oh, that would be an interesting guy. What a fascinating story to tell.’”
Be it a dramatized acting role of a real-life person or behind the scenes of a documentary on someone’s life, Hanks says he always wants to stress to the real people involved how seriously he takes telling their story.
“I want to help tell their story. I want to help tell what they feel is the story and give them a true voice, and have the agreement that we’ll do everything they can to represent them well, but also have the ability to push back if necessary and say, ‘No, I think this is important,’” Hanks says. “It’s a huge partnership. I always say, ‘Look, I’m not in the business of ruining people’s lives.’”