Chet Hanks, Tom Hanks’ 35-year-old son, has said he’s currently based in a trailer park as his personal and professional situation shifts.
Born Chester Marlon Hanks, Chet has spoken openly in the past about difficult periods in his life, including challenges tied to addiction, while also working to carve out an identity beyond his father’s enormous fame.
In recent years, he’s drawn attention for his own pop-culture footprint—whether through viral social media clips showcasing a convincingly delivered Jamaican patois accent, or by launching a phrase that briefly took on a life of its own.
That phrase was “White Boy Summer,” the title and hook of a song that became a moment online. Now, during a recent appearance with Jimmy Fallon, Chet explained that his efforts to build a music career have led him to set up home in a trailer park near Nashville, Tennessee.
“You didn’t tell me that you were gonna move to an RV park,” Fallon remarked to Chet on an episode of his talk show that aired last week.
Chet—who is set to appear in the second season of Netflix’s Running Point after a period of turning things around—has also been putting energy into a new country project: a band called Something Out West.
Unlike his Oscar-winning dad, though, he said he’s still in the phase where he has to keep things practical and keep working his way up. “I didn’t want to get an apartment,” Chet explained to Fallon, “Because I literally just got a condo in LA and I furnished it.
“I didn’t want to do that again and I didn’t want to furnish it. So I was, like, staying in Airbnbs and hotels and that gets really old because I just like having my own space.”
So rather than staying at his parents’ $26 million home in Pacific Palisades, Chet is opting for a more stripped-back, on-the-ground setup on the edges of Nashville—living out of an RV.
He framed the decision as something he felt good about, saying the idea clicked after a road trip to Carmel-by-the-Sea in California, where he stayed in an Airstream and found himself unexpectedly drawn to that style of living.
“I really loved it,” he told the talk show host. “I was like, man, I want one of these, I want to get one of these. So I did. I got a trailer.”
To support his current goals, Chet said he’s now living in a Jayco Eagle. It’s not the Airstream experience that first sold him on the idea, but he indicated he’s comfortable with where he’s at and called himself “really happy” with the arrangement.
Chet shared: “[It has] everything I need. I got my kitchen. I got, you know, a walk-in shower. That’s a big deal with trailers, if it’s a walk-in shower, because sometimes they combine the toilet and shower. It’s called a wet bath.”
He also addressed common assumptions people make about trailer parks, saying he stands out because of his age and that the atmosphere isn’t what many imagine. Despite how most people perceive trailer parks as ‘sketchy’, Chet shared that he’s ‘probably, like, the youngest person in the trailer park by like 30 or 40 years. He added: “It’s not what you think, you know?
“You think, oh, you’re gonna live in a trailer park. It might be a little sketchy. It might be a little dangerous. It’s all just, like retirees, you know? Great people.”
Even with the new “outdoors” aesthetic, he said his daily habits aren’t all that different from the routine many people fall into at home. And Chet even manages to have the same routine as the rest of us, despite now living as a new kind of rugged outdoorsman. “I do have a campfire outside of it. I have a fire pit and I have used it,” he shared.
“But most of the time, I just do exactly what I do at home, which is just stay inside and lay in bed and watch Netflix and things like that.”