Jack Banning, Robin Williams’s son in Hook, was brought to life by a kid named Charlie Korsmo. These days, Korsmo holds the Schott-Van Den Eynden Professor of Business Organizations chair at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland.
Before Hook arrived in 1991, he had already made his mark as the Kid in Dick Tracy (1990) and shown up in What About Bob? He was 13 years old when production on Hook wrapped.
In a 2023 interview, he explained the exit: “I didn’t know anyone my own age anymore” and “it was good that I quit when I did.” He also copped to a more practical reason, saying he mostly just wanted to get out of school and buy a Nintendo.
One return appearance came in Can’t Hardly Wait (1998) while he was studying at MIT, where he finished a physics degree in 2000. From there, he moved through stints at the EPA and the House of Representatives before picking up his law degree from Yale in 2006. He then clerked for a Second Circuit judge, put in time at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, and taught briefly at Brooklyn Law School.
His wife is someone he met in law school. He has said big-firm life wasn’t compatible with actually knowing his kids (he has two), so he left it behind. Case Western became his home in 2011.
That same year, President Obama appointed him to the board of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.
Acting has never fully disappeared from his life. Small turns in Chained for Life (2018/2019) and A Different Man (2024) kept him in the game. As of 2018, four or five royalty checks for $122 were still showing up every three months. He continues signing Hook and Dick Tracy memorabilia for fans.
“I’m a proud transplant to Cleveland,” he said in 2023. On where he’d be in five years, his answer was that it “is more or less the same as what I’m doing now.”