Chet Hanks Has The Last Laugh

It’s easy to make assumptions about Chet Hanks, namely that the perennially up-and-coming aspiring rapper, social media sh*t-stirrer, and now breakout star of the Netflix comedy series Running Point craves attention. But on a sunny February afternoon, Hanks — sipping black coffee in a corner booth of a bougie restaurant in downtown Nashville, where he recently relocated to further his musical career — all but blends into the wallpaper. His well-documented tattoos are covered by a cream-colored tracksuit, his diamond stud earrings obscured by a Bulls hat (in matching cream, natch). Most disarmingly, his demeanor is less “holding court” than “held captive” as he settles in at our window seat for this interview.

That is, until the topic of his most infamous red-carpet stunt comes up. For reasons still unknown, Hanks hit the interview circuit at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards, where his — and America’s — dad was receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement, putting on… a Jamaican accent. The internet was abuzz: the wild-child son of two of our most beloved living entertainers — Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson — was acting out again. Half a decade later, he’s still getting a good laugh out of it.

“I did not expect that to go as viral as it did,” he tells me, getting animated. “If I’m all dressed up and I’m in front of the camera and you have a microphone and you’re asking me questions, why would I not make it interesting? Honestly, it was the thing that started the momentum for pretty much everything.”

Hanks has always fancied himself a disruptor. Prompting people to wonder what the hell he’s doing — that’s the MO. “I would do it just for my own entertainment, but to everybody else it was shocking, and that always blew my mind,” he says of what has become something of a laundry list of viral moments. There was that time, for example, when he proclaimed 2021 to be “White Boy Summer” (the ramifications of which lasted years). “Some people were completely perplexed,” he recalls. “‘What is he doing? Is he serious? Does he actually talk like that?’ The people that gravitated towards me were the people who got the joke. I never thought in terms of branding myself in any type of way, but I think that kind of became my default brand.”

The Chet Hanks brand extends from such stunts to music and acting, the latter of which, of course, is in his blood. “My dad’s an actor. My older brother’s an actor. My mom. This was the family business,” he says, “so I [knew] that was something I would go into at some point.”

“I literally said to myself, ‘If I don’t get this role, I should just quit.’”

The moment came when his younger brother, Truman, was looking for a way to earn enough money to buy a new computer and asked their mother to help him find an agent. Wilson obliged, and the then-12-year-old quickly booked his first job. Hanks, then 16, took notice and also signed with an agent, landing his first audition and then his first role in 2007’s live-action Bratz film.

“In the middle of my sophomore year of high school, I got to take two months off and go film this movie and hang out around a bunch of hot 19-year-old chicks,” he laughs. “It was awesome. It was the perfect first gig.”

But just acting was never the endgame for Hanks. He wanted to make music, too. “I became obsessed with ’90s rap. I would study it,” he says. “I would print up the lyrics to the songs and play the music and read along with it and look at how the words fit into the meter of the song to figure out: How are they doing this, and what exactly are they doing? I really wanted to try writing my own. I wrote my first rap when I was 16.”

As a college student at Northwestern, he had his first brush with musical infamy when his song “White and Purple” (a take on Wiz Khalifa’s hit “Black and Yellow”) went viral. “I was so naive. I didn’t think anybody would care. I literally just made it so me and my friends could play it at parties, but it got some attention, and I was a little campus celebrity. I started making more songs. They were f*cking terrible,” he says. “I guess it was a novelty or people kind of liked it, and I was performing around different colleges in the Midwest. I actually opened up for some big acts.”

“Kate Hudson used to have these awesome parties at her house where she would invite a bunch of people and play games, specifically Mafia.”

With momentum building, he continued to record music and take on the occasional acting gig, but it all came crashing down in 2015 when, after years of struggling with addiction (cocaine was his drug of choice), he entered a rehab facility in Nashville. The experience changed his life, he says, in more ways than one. “I was in treatment with a lot of good old boys from the South. We’d be riding around in the druggie buggy, going to AA meetings and sh*t, and they would play the radio. That was the first time I had ever listened to country music,” he says. “I started going back and discovering all the cool sh*t in country music like I did for hip-hop when I was 16.”

Renewed and sober, Hanks returned to LA ready to create. He landed parts in Shameless and Empire and began writing and recording more melodic music with his friend Drew Arthur. Still, getting to the next step took a while — nearly a decade, in fact. But in February of this year, the duo signed with Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records in Nashville under the name Something Out West and released their first track, “Leaving Hollywood,” a wistful breakup song wherein both Hanks and Arthur contemplate leaving a city where heartbreak abounds. “I used to think that I wanted to be a rap star, but the truth is that I just want to make music and perform,” Hanks tells me, with wide-eyed earnestness. (Between Post Malone and Jelly Roll, it’s a great time for white rappers reinventing themselves as country stars.)

Acting is still a priority. His scene-stealing work alongside Kate Hudson in Netflix’s Running Point, which dropped last month, has catapulted him to a new level of mainstream fame. When it rains, it pours: He’s also recently wrapped a film with Bryan Cranston and Lily Gladstone.

On Running Point, Hanks plays Travis Bugg, an ostentatiously outrageous basketball star who’s lousy with eff-you bravado, tattoos, and diamonds. (Travis also raps on the side, because of course he does.) Though Hanks says it’s not the case, the similarities between actor and character are so strong, it’s hard to believe that the show’s producers — which include Mindy Kaling — didn’t dream up the part with him in mind. “When I got the audition, that’s the first thing I thought, too,” he says, laughing. “It was the character description: Travis is the white point guard. He’s covered in tattoos. He’s a wannabe rapper, but he’s a huge liability because of the controversial sh*t he posts on social media. I literally said to myself, ‘If I don’t get this role, I should just quit.’”

“I used to think that I wanted to be a rap star, but the truth is that I just want to make music and perform.”

In many ways, the show was a first for Hanks, but it wasn’t his first time meeting Hudson, who plays team owner Isla Gordon. Hollywood, after all, is a small town. “[Hudson’s family] lives five minutes away from my parents, and Kate used to have these awesome parties at her house where she would invite a bunch of people and play games, specifically Mafia,” he says. (The Traitors Season 4, anybody?) That backstory, he says, buoys their onscreen chemistry: “It makes it easier when you already have a rapport with someone.”

Running Point is now a bona fide streaming hit: It’s sitting high in Netflix’s top 10 shows and has already secured a second-season order. All 10 episodes of the first season are out in the world, with more audiences discovering the show every day. Might this be a time to sit back and ride the wave? Hell no. Like the over-the-top baller he plays on TV, Hanks won’t be sitting still.

“I want to get on a tour. I want to go shoot Season 2. I want to keep working,” he says. “It’s been a long road getting here. It’s been blood, sweat, and tears, and I don’t take any of it for granted. Fortune favors the bold and I just want to keep doing it all.”