HOLLYWOOD - He's tall and slender with neatly cropped dark hair, a boyish grin, and glasses - just the kind of guy-next-door persona that allows the actor to walk the streets and not always get noticed. But study his features more closely and the resemblance to his famous movie star father becomes clearly evident. Indeed, the Sunday Times of London once wrote of Colin Hanks that his "lost-puppy eyes" confirm he is Tom Hanks's son.
At 6-foot-1, he said, he is taller than his dad, but as he points out, "he weighs more than me."
Over the years, Oscar winner Tom Hanks has perfected his everyman persona in films like "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Saving Private Ryan." And it's that same screen quality that his eldest son exudes as he pursues his own acting career. He appears opposite Diane Lane in the thriller "Untraceable," which opened last Friday. Also last week, "The Great Buck Howard," a comedy that stars John Malkovich and Hanks, had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
"He didn't want me to be an actor," Hanks said when asked what advice his dad gave him. "He wanted me to find out what I was passionate about. And it just so happened that it was acting."
The son harbors no illusions about where his acting career is in relation to his dad's. "He's been on top of Everest now for a long time," Hanks said, then quipped: "I may be at the lower base camp of Machu Picchu. We might be both climbing mountains, but they are very different peaks."
But Colin Hanks is no wet-behind-the-ears performer.
In "Untraceable," Lane and Hanks play FBI agents who pursue a tech-savvy Internet predator who tortures and kills his victims on a website.
Director Gregory Hoblit said casting Hanks, 30, was tricky because he wanted the agent to embody a certain innocence that would allow the audience to react with, "Oh, no! Don't do that to him!" when the killer begins stalking the FBI agents.
"Colin is a walking, talking personality," Hoblit said. "He can take a fairly pedestrian dialogue, inasmuch as it's there, and give it a little color and life and do it well." The director noted: "He's kind of at that gawky age - tall and slender. I think he is very appealing. He's probably an actor who will get more interesting as he gets older and his face gets more interesting."
In "The Great Buck Howard," written and directed by Sean McGinly, Hanks plays a recent law school dropout who answers an ad to be road manager for a celebrity performer, thinking this will be the big break that will get him into the entertainment industry. Instead, he discovers he has signed on to work for Buck Howard (Malkovich), a has-been magician trying to revitalize his career. Tom Hanks, who produced the movie, plays Colin Hanks's on-screen father.
"I don't really want to build it up too much," Colin Hanks said of the pairing. "We're in two scenes."
Although he might be considered part of Hollywood royalty, Colin Hanks points out that he was raised in Sacramento, Calif. His late mother, Samantha Lewes, divorced Tom Hanks in 1987. "I grew up like a lot of kids," Hanks said over lunch in Santa Monica. "I'm a child of divorce, which is obviously not a great thing. That's not to say I didn't see a lot of my dad."
He points out that his father wasn't always rich and famous. "It wasn't until I was sort of halfway through my adolescent teenage revolt that all of a sudden things really exploded for him," he said.
Hanks said he would hang out with his dad on movie shoots during summer vacations. The son worked as a production assistant on the set of his father's 1995 film "Apollo 13," and in 1996 he had a cameo in his dad's directorial debut, "That Thing You Do!" In 1999, he landed a regular role as Alex Whitman on the WB's teen sci-fi series "Roswell." His big break, though, came when he starred in the 2002 film "Orange County." His more recent films include Peter Jackson's "King Kong" and the Jack Black comedy "Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny."
On getting career breaks, Hanks said being the son of Tom Hanks can only get you so far. "It might get you a little more attention," he said. "It might get you a meeting. But they're not going to give you a job. And the people that would, I wouldn't necessarily be wanting to do those types of movies anyway."
