The night in 2008 that Tom Hanks had his own son kidnapped: “You’re coming with us”
As ‘America’s Dad’, Tom Hanks is viewed as the beloved and benevolent patriarch of an entire nation. As the father to his own children, though, the actor has been known to show some tough love.
That might be selling him a little short, though, seeing as he once orchestrated the kidnapping of his own son. If you know anything about the extended Hanks clan, then you can probably take an educated guess at which one of his four sprogs was forcibly removed from the family home in the dead of night.
Nominative determinism might be more of a hypothesis than a fact, but look at the two-time Academy Award winner’s kids. There’s Colin Hanks, who looks like a Colin, sounds like a Colin, acts like a Colin, and has been about as inoffensive and under-the-radar as you’d expect a fella called Colin to be.
On the other hand, there’s his younger sibling, Chet Hanks, who looks like a Chet, acts like a Chet, and when he’s not putting on that weird accent he adopted for a while, sounds very much like a Chet. His antics have made him something of a cult figure in certain circles of the internet, but during his high school days, his old man opted to take drastic action to save him from himself.
In 2008, when he was still in high school and struggling with substance abuse issues, Hanks’ second-youngest child was awoken in the middle of the night. “Bald heads, like military guys looking like bouncers,” he remembered. “And I’m like, ‘What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?’ They’re like, ‘You’re coming with us. We could do this the easy way or the hard way.'”
He didn’t have much of a say in the matter, so he went with them, all the way to southern Utah, which was nine hours away. Tossed in the back of the car and driven across the country, Hanks claimed that his parents’ solution to his problems was to pack him up and send him off to a wilderness therapy camp.
“They just hiked us in circles with an 80-pound pack,” he reflected. “There’s a lot going through your mind. You’re under observation, they’re psychoanalysing you and picking you apart. I was there longer than anybody else that I had seen come or go in the whole programme, except for one kind who was there for six months.”
Wilderness therapy has become increasingly controversial for its ties to the “troubled teen” industry, and the lack of scientific backing to say with any degree of certainty whether or not whisking young people away from their homes and families to try and straighten them out in the great outdoors has any discernible or tangible effect on their positive well-being.
Clearly, Hanks and Rita Wilson thought it was just what Chet needed at the time, although he was well within his rights to be shit scared when it happened.
