Tom Hanks’s son Chester has claimed that he did not have a “strong male role model” while growing up.
During Tuesday’s (16 February) episode of his YouTube channel Hanx Fit, the 31-year-old, commonly known as Chet, spoke about growing up as Hanks’s child.
While speaking about the disregard he faced from his peers about being perceived as “arrogant, entitled and spoiled”, Chet said that he “didn’t have a strong male role model to tell me ‘bro, f*** these people, they are just jealous of you’.”
“You have all these things that they want, so they are trying to f****** throw their shade at you so you can feel s***** about yourself because they are jealous,” he said.
The Empire actor recalled that people used to “make up their minds” about him even before meeting him.
Chet is Hanks’s third child, and his first with wife Rita Wilson. Hanks has three other children, two of whom are from a previous marriage.
Tom Hanks and his rapper son Chet
(Robyn Beck/Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
“It was extremely hard to break down their walls,” Chet said. “So, I encountered a lot of disdain, a lot of animosity and negativity because everybody was just prepared to hate my guts.”
He recalled that people “kinda did f*** with me a lot growing up”.
“It was never to my face. It was always behind my back in the forms of gossip and s*** talking,” he said.
Acknowledging that he loved his parents, Chet said that he faced a lot of resentment for being a boy whose father had won multiple Oscar Awards. “There’s a lot of advantages [of being a celebrity kid], but sometimes it can be pretty weird,” he said. “I got to do a lot of cool s*** that a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to do.”
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“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,” he added.
Chet claimed that his entire “experience was even more complicated because, on top of fame already being toxic, I wasn’t even famous”.
“I was just the son of somebody famous, so I hadn’t even done anything to deserve any sort of recognition, and that created a lot of contempt,” he said.
Chet generated ire last year for a number of outlandish statements, including that 2021 would experience a “white boy summer”.
