Almost everybody who was a kid in the early nineties is carrying around a Robin Williams. For a lot of them it’s “Hook” — the one where a grown, forgetful, meeting-drowned Peter Pan has to remember how to fly. And if you remember the movie at all, you remember the son. Jack. The boy in the little suit who gets stolen off to Neverland, where a pirate in a red coat sets out to convince him, patiently and cruelly, that he’s loved better here than he ever was at home.
The boy who played Jack was named Charlie Korsmo. He was thirteen.
For about two years there, he was everywhere. In 1990 he stood next to Warren Beatty in “Dick Tracy” as the orphan kid the detective takes in. In 1991 he was Richard Dreyfuss’s small, death-obsessed son in “What About Bob?”, the one who cannot bring himself to dive off the dock. And that same year he was Jack Banning, holding his own in the frame with Dustin Hoffman’s Captain Hook and Robin Williams’ Peter, in a Steven Spielberg movie that half the country went to see.
That is a career most working actors never get. Three big pictures, three heavyweight leads, before he’d finished the eighth grade.
So of course the next move was to keep the name warm. Another movie. A television arc. Something.
He went back to school instead.
Not a gap, not a hiatus with a comeback penciled in. He more or less closed the door. He finished high school like a normal Midwestern teenager, and when it came time to pick a college he did not pick one with a good drama department. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he studied physics, and in 2000 he walked out with a degree in it.
Sit with that for a second. The kid who played make-believe with Robin Williams spent his early twenties doing problem sets in a building full of people who had never once thought of him as famous, because at MIT nobody is impressed that you were in a movie. A differential equation does not care that Spielberg once pointed a camera at your face. It either works out or it doesn’t.
Then he did it again. After the physics degree he enrolled at Yale Law School, one of the hardest rooms in the country to get into, and in 2006 he earned his law degree there.
And here is the part that turns a fun bit of trivia into an actual life. He didn’t collect the degrees like souvenirs and drift back toward the cameras. He became a teacher. Since 2011 he has been on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University’s law school in Cleveland, and he isn’t a guest lecturer trading on an old credit. He holds a named chair. His full title is the Schott-Van Den Eynden Professor of Business Organizations, which means his days are spent on corporate law — the machinery of how companies form, merge, raise money and answer for themselves.
There are students in his classroom right now, learning the guts of securities regulation, who have no idea that the man drawing the diagram on the board once got kidnapped by Captain Hook.
It’s worth saying why this lands the way it does. The child-star story we all know by heart usually bends one way, and it isn’t this one. We brace for the sad third act. Instead the boy who was famous at thirteen looked at all of it — the sets, the premieres, the thing where strangers know your face — and decided, quietly, that he’d rather be good at something hard and mostly invisible. Physics. Then law. Then standing at the front of a room, handing what he knows to people who’ll use it after he’s gone.
Jack Banning got to grow up after all. Not into another movie. Into a professor with chalk on his sleeve and a name on a door, in a city far from Neverland, doing the least glamorous and most quietly impressive thing a former kid actor can do: an ordinary, serious, useful life.
And somewhere in a lecture hall in Cleveland, that’s exactly what he became.
