Colin Hanks Nearly Said No to Playing Bob Broberg in ‘A Friend of the Family’: I Was ‘So Petrified’
variety.comEmily Longeretta As someone who “makes documentaries as a side hustle,” Colin Hanks is used to telling true stories. That said, he wasn’t aware of Jan Broberg’s abduction and assault before he received the scripts for Peacock’s “A Friend of the Family.” And when he did, he still wasn’t sold. “I was just instantly judging a book by its cover, saying, ‘I don’t want to play a super nice Mormon that goes through a bunch of stuff.’ There’s so much about it that just made me, at first, say ‘No, thank you,'” Hanks tells Variety.
But after reading the first three scripts, he watched Netflix’s 2017 documentary, “Abducted in Plain Sight.” “I just could not get their story out of my head — I talked about it with so many people.
It ended up dragging me in. And coming out of the pandemic, two years of sitting around, I really wanted to do work that scared me and pushed me in a new direction, and made me challenge myself,” says Hanks. “I really looked at the story as that challenge, and so I just jumped off the cliff and got to work.” In the documentary and the Peacock series, Jan Broberg is abducted twice — once at age 12 and again at 14 — by the same man, a close family friend, Bob “B” Berchtold, portrayed by Jake Lacy.
In the adaptation, Hanks portrays Jan’s father, Bob Broberg, who also gets conned by Berchtold and ends up having a sexual encounter with him.
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