Playing Robin Williams’ son in Steven Spielberg’s famous “Hook”, the young actor Charlie Korsmo completely disappeared from the screens at the end of the 90s. But what has become of him since then?
“As far as I remember, my main desire was to not go to school and earn enough money to buy a Nintendo. I never looked at acting with the ambition to make it my career.”
Thus Charlie Korsmo described his first steps in cinema, interviewed two years ago by the website of Case Western Reserve University, in which he now teaches law. However, in the early 90s, when young Charlie was barely ten years old, his early career in the Hollywood spotlight began auspiciously.
Like Macaulay Culkin or Edward Furlong (whom he almost replaced opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2), Charlie Korsmo was briefly among the child stars of cinema. Present opposite Jessica Lange and Joan Cusack in the comedy-drama Men Don’t Leave, he was also seen opposite Warren Beatty in the police comedy Dick Tracy, then playing Richard Dreyfuss’ son in What’s Up, Bob ? by Frank Oz.
But it was in 1992, when Steven Spielberg himself offered him a role in his adaptation of Peter Pan, that Charlie Korsmo experienced his most memorable filming, playing the young son of Robin Williams kidnapped by Captain Hook in the fabulous Hook.
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However, in addition to a final role in 1998 in the teenage comedy Big Party (alongside Jennifer Love Hewitt and Seth Green), Charlie Korsmo completely deserted the film sets at the very moment he left Neverland, at the end of the Spielberg film. But why did he decide to end his career? And what has become of him all these years?
As he later stated in an interview, after earning enough money to finance his studies (and his Nintendo!), the young actor decided to go back to school. He also continued to study for many years, going so far as to obtain a degree in physicist at MIT, before continuing to study law and obtaining a doctorate at Yale University. . Ironically, he ended up doing the same job as Robin Williams in Hook, as he himself later noted:
“I went to law school, where I met my now-wife. We decided to move to New York where I worked as a lawyer.”said Charlie Korsmo in an interview on Sienna Boccio’s channel.
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“Then when we wanted to have kids, let’s say working as a lawyer at a big firm wasn’t… let’s say if you’ve seen Hook, you know that my father in the film, Robin Williams, is a corporate lawyer. That’s a pretty accurate representation of what life as a corporate lawyer can be like. You never see your family, you work 3,000 hours a year. I don’t I really didn’t want to do that.”
In order to prioritize his family life, Charlie Korsmo decided to put his skills at the service of the new generation, and to teach law at university. A job that he still practices today at the age of 45.
If he never really returned to television or film sets, he still played one last small role in 2019 in the drama Chained for Life by Aaron Schimberg, centered on the meeting between a flirtatious actress and a actor disfigured on the set of an independent horror film.
(Re)discover the trailer for “Dick Tracy”…