As someone who “makes documentaries as a side business,” Colin Hanks is used to telling real stories. However, he was unaware of Jean Broberg’s kidnapping and assault before he received the scripts for Peacock’s “Family Friend”. And when he did, it wasn’t sold yet.
“I was judging the book right away by its cover, saying, ‘I don’t want to play a very nice Mormon going through a bunch of things. “There were a lot of things that made me, at first, say ‘No, thanks,'” Hanks says diverse. But after reading the first three scripts, watch the 2017 Netflix documentary, “Abducted in Plain Sight.”
“I couldn’t get their story out of my head—I’ve talked about it with a lot of people. It ended up dragging me in. And coming out of the pandemic, after two years of sitting around, I really wanted to do something that scared me and pushed me in a new direction, and made me challenge myself,” Hanks says. “I really looked at the story as a challenge, and so I just jumped off the cliff and got to work.”
In the documentary and series Peacock, Jan Broberg is kidnapped twice — once at age 12 and once at 14 — by the same man, close family friend, Bob “B” Berchtold, who plays Jake Lacy. In the adaptation, Hanks portrays Jean’s father, Bob Broberg, who Berchtold also cheats on and ends up having a sexual encounter with him. After the documentary was released, Bob and his wife, Mary Ann Broberg, faced a lot of criticism for their roles in what happened to Jan — and now Hanks is a little protective over Bob.
“Whether I’m playing someone who really exists or making a documentary about their life, I’m not spoiling their lives. I want to respect their story.” “I always want the person whose story I am telling to feel that they are in good hands. So I always feel a little protective of the people whose story I am telling, and the Broberg family is no different.”
“family friend”
Erica Doss / Peacock
Embodying Bob was no easy task. While he made many mistakes as a father and husband, he was also a man who cared deeply about his family and did the right thing.
“There was no aspect of this that wasn’t challenging,” Hanks says. “I walked in very terrified, and I was grabbing any straw I could try to understand Bob, because I really looked at him like, ‘I don’t have anything in common with this guy. What I found really helpful was the phrase Jan told me about, something he said often: ‘Every day is a reward.’ This was something so important that I went back to it a bit, because no matter what happens, no matter what fear paralyzes him, the decisions he makes He was so out of his depths he didn’t understand what was going on in me, so that the view remains – even in the darkest of days – that every day is a reward, and that was very useful.”
Lacy and Hanks did the scene over two different nights – weeks apart – due to bad weather, something the actor had experienced in Fargo. “We shot half of Jake the first night, and then the rain got so bad that we shot our cover two weeks later. That’s the magic of filmmaking,” Hanks says.
They needed to get it right, because the scene was so pivotal in Bob Broberg’s life. “It’s my most vulnerable moment,” Hanks says. “Whatever the subject matter—and there is no judgment on what it was—I know this was a moment that changed his life forever, and it is something he carried with him until the day he died.”
The first four episodes of “A Friend of the Family” are now streaming on Peacock.
[ad_2]
