There are great character actors, and there are those elite tier actors who “just happen” to pop up in some of your favorite TV shows and movies over and over again.
Stephen Root is one of those, and other great examples include Scoot McNairy, David Costable, and Megan Mullally.
And then there’s Colin Hanks, who played a small but significant role in an array of great TV shows – some of which stand amongst the best of all time.
The Band of Brothers moment
Let’s dial the clock back a quarter century.
I rewatch Band of Brothers, HBO’s brilliant and endlessly compelling World War II limited series depicting the journey of one group of soldiers, Easy Company, from military training in Camp Toccoa, Georgiathrough D-Day in Normandy and finally to capturing Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at the end of the war.
Every episode is special, but I particularly look forward to getting to the eighth edition, “The Last Patrol,” for a few different reasons. Chief among them is because the previous two episodes – “Bastogne” and “The Breaking Point” – cover the most brutal part of the war from the perspective of the soldiers the series tracks: The Battle of the Bulge during a cold winter in the Ardennes.
By the time we get to “The Last Patrol,” it’s clear that the Allies are finally on the brink of victory, and into that mix arrives Lt. Henry Jones, played by Colin Hanks, a spotless new graduate of West Point inserted into what’s now a dirty, scrappy, and battle-hardened group at the front.
Hanks stands out in multiple respects here – his earnestness and adherence to the protocols he learned at West Point are wildly and nearly comically out of whack with the men under his command, who have been taking live fire for many months at this point. And then throughout the episode, we see Easy Company slowly transition from annoyance to respect as Lt. Jones shows his mettle in the “last patrol” that earns the episode its title.
For any good TV nerd, Colin Hanks popping up in his father’s massive historical drama series – poppa Tom executive produced Band of Brothers – would have been noteworthy in any event, but Hanks was so good and well-cast as Lt. Jones that he instantly became an actor that I would look out for in other productions.
Check out Pop Thruster’s best 100 TV shows ever to see where Band of Brothers ranks.
Mad Men dabbles with religion
By the time of Mad Men’s second season in 2008, I was already an addict. While Peggy’s outside of work family life arc is one of the least rewatchable stretches in the show’s run, Hanks once again crushed as Father John Gill, a young priest straddling the line between old-school heavy-handed Catholicism and a more open approach to help attract a new generation to his faith.
Putting on a badge in the great FROZEN north
Fast forward now to 2014, and the TV adaptation of Fargo was a revelation both in terms of the shock that the hyper-specific Coen brothers movie was successfully translated to television, and most of all because it was just so damned good.
Colin Hanks was an important piece in the show’s early success, this time as an everyman Duluth cop named Gus Grimly up in the shivering north. When Grimly lets Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton, in a sinister and brilliant performance) go during a traffic stop when clearly it was the wrong thing to do in the professional sense, it’s entirely believable and helps ground the loopy and often dark terrain that Fargo explores.
An offer we can’t refuse
There are a number of other memorable TV roles that I’m skipping over here, including roles in American Crime Stories, Dexter, and Life in Pieces, but I’ll fast forward again to 2022 and The Offer, one of my favorite limited series of this decade.
This time around, Hanks plays Barry Lapidus the anal, number-crunching foil to the creative and ambitious Al Ruddy (Miles Teller) in The Offer, a fabulous fictionalized narrative about how the first Godfather movie came together.
If you are reading this and haven’t seen The Offer, I’m here to tell you that it’s supremely likely that you’ll have a ball with this one, especially in digging the dynamic between Lapidus, Ruddy, Robert Evans (Matthew Goode), and Francis Ford Coppola (Dan Fogler).
Pound for pound great
Great character actors elevate those around them by embodying a role and blending seamlessly in the ensemble they’re in. Very few have done just that over the course of multiple decades as Colin Hanks has.
Look out for Hanks these days in not one but two World War II-related things: in Nuremberg, released in 2025, he plays Dr. Gustave Gilbert, and coming soon he’s slated to appear in Lucky Strike, which is about an injured American soldier who gets trapped behind German lines during the Battle of the Bulge.
So it’s full circle of some sort for Colin Hanks, it seems.