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. After the documentary was released, Bob and his wife, Mary Ann Broberg, faced a ton of criticism for their roles in what happened to Jan — and now Hanks is a bit protective over Bob.
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“Whether I’m playing somebody who actually really exists or making a documentary about their life, I’m not in the business of screwing up their lives. I want to be respectful of their story,” he says. “I always want the person whose story I’m telling to feel like they’re in safe hands. So I always feel a little bit protective of the people whose story I’m telling, and the Broberg family is no different.”
Embodying Bob was not an easy task. While he made multiple mistakes as a father and husband, he was also a man who cared deeply about his family and doing the right thing.
“There was no aspect to this that was not challenging,” Hanks says. “I just went in so petrified, and was just grabbing any straws I could to try and understand Bob, because I really looked at him like, ‘I don’t have anything in common with this guy.’ What I found to be really helpful was this phrase that Jan had told me about, something that he said quite a bit: ‘Every day is a bonus.’ That was such an important thing that I came back to quite a bit, because no matter what is happening, no matter the fear that is paralyzing him, the decisions that he’s making, him being just out of his depth and not understanding what is going on, to still have that point of view — even on the darkest of days — that every day is a bonus, that was so helpful.”
Lacy and Hanks did the scene over the course of two different nights — weeks apart — because of bad weather, something the actor had experience with on “Fargo.” “We shot Jake’s half on the first night, and then the rain got to be so bad that then we shot my coverage two weeks later. That’s the magic of moviemaking,” Hanks says.
They needed to get it right, because the scene was pivotal in Bob Broberg’s life. “It’s the most vulnerable moments,” Hanks says. “Subject matter aside — and there’s no judgment on what the subject is — I know that that is a moment that changes his life forever, and is something that he carried with him until the day he died.”
The first four episodes of “A Friend of the Family” are now streaming on Peacock.