You might think it’s cool to grow up with parents who everyone knows—aka being the child of two Hollywood celebrities. However, take it from someone who has lived it: It might not be all that it’s cracked up to be.
Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s 31-year-old son Chet Hanks vented in a recent YouTube video that he had no one to turn to during his upbringing from his very famous dad.
“I didn’t have a strong male role model to tell me … ‘Bro, f–k these people. They are just jealous of you,’” Chet said in the video.
“‘You have all these things that they want, so they are trying to f–king throw their shade at you so you can feel s–tty about yourself because they are jealous.’ I needed to hear that,” he said. “I didn’t have anyone to tell me that. This is me now telling the younger version of myself what I needed to hear then.”
Chet says that growing up, people had it in their head already that because he had celebrity parents, he was “arrogant, entitled and spoiled.” No matter how hard he tried to not come off that way, he said that it’s hard to convince people otherwise once they have something like that in their heads.
“It was extremely hard to break down their walls,” he said. “So, I encountered a lot of disdain, a lot of animosity and negativity because everybody was just prepared to hate my guts.”
A lot of the animosity occurred behind Chet’s back, which made things even worse—because it was so obvious it was happening. “People kinda did f–k with me a lot growing up. It was never to my face,” Chet said. “It was always behind my back in the forms of gossip and s–t-talking.”
Chet does acknowledge that perhaps people were just jealous—he did, in fact, get to do some unique things as a kids that others didn’t have the opportunity to do. And though he may have been teased and booed at, he wouldn’t change his upbringing.
“There’s a lot of advantages, but sometimes it can be pretty weird. I got to do a lot of cool s–t that a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to do,” he said. “I got to travel the world, stay in nice hotels, fly on private planes, and I’m very blessed for that. I wouldn’t change my situation.”
