Chet Hanks says he grew up inside a spotlight he never asked for. The 33-year-old actor and musician, the third child of Tom Hanks and the first child he had with Rita Wilson, said fame felt toxic long before he had done anything to earn it.
“On top of fame already being toxic, I wasn’t even famous,” Hanks said in a 2022 YouTube video. “I hadn’t done anything to deserve any sort of recognition and that created a lot of contempt for me.” He said people assumed he would be “a really arrogant, entitled spoiled brat,” even though, as he put it, “I’m really privileged but I wasn’t spoiled.”
The comments land with extra weight because Hanks has spent years building a career of his own while carrying a famous last name. Tom Hanks, a two-time Academy Award winner, married Rita Wilson in 1988 after first becoming a father with Colin Hanks in 1977 and Elizabeth Ann in 1982. Chester “Chet” Marlon Hanks arrived in 1990, followed by Truman Theodore Hanks in 1995, and the family has long lived with the collision of celebrity and ordinary life.
Hanks said acting came into view early. He signed with an agent at 16 and landed his first role in the 2007 film Bratz while still a sophomore. He later appeared in 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and in 2016 played a wealthy kid going to rehab in the TV series Maron. By 2026, he had a record deal and a recurring role on Netflix’s Running Point, showing a career that moved between music and screen work.
He also described that first acting job as a break from the restrictions that came with being Tom Hanks’ son. “This was the family business,” he said of taking the role in Bratz. “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 added. “It was the perfect first gig.”
That account fits a life that has rarely stayed quiet. The broader public image around Hanks has included controversy over bizarre antics and a vaccine rant, even as he has tried to establish himself in acting and music. He got sober in 2014, a turn that now sits alongside the rest of his public life as part of the story of a man born into attention and still trying to define what comes after it.
The tension is that Hanks did not reject the advantage that came with his name; he said he knew exactly how privileged he was. What he rejected was the idea that privilege and entitlement were the same thing, and that distinction still shapes how he talks about his past. For him, the question is no longer whether he was born into fame. It is whether he can be seen as more than the son of Tom Hanks.
