Chet Hanks, son of actor Tom Hanks, is stranded in Colombia after traveling without his U.S. passport.
The 35-year-old musician and actor, best known for declaring “White Boy Summer” in 2021, took to Instagram over the weekend to share his predicament with his followers.
Hanks explained that he had been in Puerto Rico to celebrate a friend’s birthday party when he decided spontaneously to visit his friend a few hours away in Medellín, Colombia.
However, Hanks — who has dual citizenship after his parents were naturalized in Greece in 2020 — said he only brought his Greek passport because his U.S. passport was nearly expired.
Upon arriving at the airport for his flight back to the U.S., he said he was told that he needed a green card to enter his home country with a foreign passport, despite the fact that he is an American citizen.
“I literally have no f***ing idea what I’m gonna do,” Hanks said. “And the only embassy to get this s*** settled is in Bogotá. I don’t want to go to Bogotá, so yeah. Free me.”
Bogotá, the nation’s capital, is around 250 miles away from Medellín by road, or a one-hour flight.
In the comments of Hanks’s posts, most fans had little sympathy for the actor, who himself admitted there were “worse places” to be stuck.
“The one time you should’ve pulled the ‘my dad is…’ card,” one person suggested.
Others, predictably, shared GIFs and references to his father’s famous role in the 2000 film Cast Away, about a man who wakes up on a deserted island after his plane crash-lands into the Pacific.
Chet is one of the two sons of Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson. Tom has two other children, Colin and Elizabeth, through his first marriage to Samantha Lewes.
The star has previously defended his son from accusations of nepotism, saying: “Look, this is a family business. This is what we’ve been doing forever. It’s what all of our kids grew up in.
“If we were a plumbing supply business or if we ran the florist shop down the street, the whole family would be putting in time at some point, even if it was just inventory at the end of the year,” he claimed.
“The thing that doesn’t change no matter what happens, no matter what your last name is, is whether it works or not. That’s the issue anytime any of us go off and try to tell a fresh story or create something that has a beginning and a middle and an end.”
He continued: “Doesn’t matter what our last names are. We have to do the work in order to make that a true and authentic experience for the audience.”
