There’s a reason why the wild story of Tony Kiritsis has been adapted into different forms of media over the years: it’s hard for us to keep our eyes and ears away from it.
Born in 1932, Anthony “Tony” Kiritsis was an Indianapolis native who shot to notoriety in 1977 after he kidnapped and held his mortgage broker Richard “Dick” Hall hostage with a gun that was connected to a wire and pointed at Hall’s neck. Kiritsis held Hall hostage for over 63 hours after the company that Hall worked for, Meridian Mortgage, denied Kiritsis’ request for an extension on late payments for a mortgage he had on commercial land that he planned to use to build a shopping center.
If that entire scenario sounds insane on paper, well, that’s because it really is. The ordeal became a veritable media circus, especially since during the 63-hour crisis, Kiritsis frequently made calls to local journalist and radio broadcaster Fred Heckman, who aired their conversations for the community to hear. The whole plight, which inadvertently shone a spotlight on the frustration blue-collar, middle-class America had toward the corporate financial class, has since been cemented in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, films, podcasts, and now, MGM+’s newest thrilling series American Hostage.
Starring Mad Men icon Jon Hamm as Heckman and Emmy-nominated Friends and My Name Is Earl star Giovanni Ribisi as Kiritsis, American Hostage dramatically delves deep into what drives someone to take such extreme measures when they feel they have been wronged by the system, and the choas that ensued with the people surrounding them. Gayety got to sit down for a chat with Ribisi, as well as his co-stars Kristogger Polaha (who plays Dick Hall) and Mireille Enos (who plays Heckman’s wife Barbara) to talk about what it was like to star in the show, getting to bring complex, nuanced humans to life on screen, and more.
“For me, he is complex,” Ribisi told Gayety when asked about playing a complicated, real-life person like Kiritsis, whose story exposed how many middle-class Americans felt (and still feel) unseen and unheard. “When you take several of the different facts from his life, from his history, and from the context of the situation, for me, I didn’t want to just throw the blanket description or category of ‘crazy man’ on him. That seems superficial. He says this over and over, that he had a plan that he spent months devising, and it was really smart. It was somebody who wasn’t just a blue-collar proletariat. He was somebody who was reaching for something. And through that, what’s fascinating is that I think he really achieved what he was out to do. He wanted to rattle a cage and do something radical that got the attention of the media and then exploit that to set the record straight or to disseminate his own truth.”
Watch Gayety’s full interview with Ribisi, Enos, and Polaha in the video above. American Hostage streams weekly on MGM+.
