Colin Hanks

About this episode

Colin Hanks sits down with Brent Spiner and Jonny Frakes on Dropping Names and starts where it started, on a sidewalk on the Fox lot in the late nineties, terrified before his Roswell screen test, when a passing Jonathan Frakes told him to do well and somehow made the whole day survivable. From there he opens up the parts of that story nobody knows: getting asked to test for two roles at once to double his odds, spending the day auditioning alongside Heath Ledger, sitting in a cast meeting about people not showing up while William Sadler quietly modeled how a professional behaves, and learning off camera eyelines from Julie Benz. Then comes the reveal about The Great Buck Howard, the film he made with John Malkovich, Emily Blunt, Steve Zahn and Adam Scott. His father Tom Hanks produced it and campaigned hard for a completely different actor in the lead, and the name is William Shatner. Colin also explains why a George Takei joke had to survive every draft, and why one small scene with Jack Carter still lands as the saddest moment in the picture. There is a lot more where that came from. Colin talks about surviving Dallas in 108 degree heat on The Good Guys with Bradley Whitford