Kristoffer Polaha as Dick Hall and Giovanni Ribisi as Tony Kiritsis in American Hostage, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.Steve Ackerman/MGM+
On Feb. 8, 1977, an Indianapolis resident named Tony Kiritsis, about to be bankrupted by his mortgage company’s predatory practices, wrapped a wire attached to a shotgun around the neck of his mortgage broker, Richard Hall, then held him hostage in his apartment for three days. Throughout, he reached out to a trusted local radio newsman, Fred Heckman, who conveyed his message to the world, turning Kiritsis into a folk hero in real time.
His story posed a question we’re still wrestling with today, as the gap between rich and poor expands exponentially, bankers concoct subprime mortgage schemes, and vigilantes such as Luigi Mangione become quasi-celebrities: When do people who’ve been trampled by the system have a right to take extreme measures to make their voices heard? When the essential unfairness of life becomes unbearable, what do “right” and “wrong” even mean?
No wonder Kiritsis’s story keeps popping up. It’s been made into a 2018 documentary, Dead Man’s Line; a 2022 scripted podcast, American Hostage; and a 2025 drama directed by Gus Van Sant, Dead Man’s Wire. Now it’s receiving its fullest exploration yet, as an eight-part Crave series also called American Hostage, shot in Winnipeg and starring Giovanni Ribisi as Kiritsis, Jon Hamm as Heckman and Canada’s Mark McKinney as Indianapolis’s police chief. (The first two episodes arrived Sept. 20.)
“It’s not an accident that episode one starts with Fred getting a job offer, for a bigger, better deal,” Hamm said in a joint interview with Ribisi earlier this month, when the series premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. “A big part of American success is, ‘What’s next? How can we make more money, sell more things to more people?’ This show reminds us how much we haven’t learned, how much we’ve given away to that goal.”
As the standoff wears on, and law enforcement and attorneys jostle for power, we watch the relationships deepen between Kiritsis and Hall, and Kiritsis and Fred Heckman.Steve Ackerman/MGM+
A host of Kiritsis’s lines in episode one drive home the theme: “They set you up to take everything you got.” “I’m not a lunatic, I’m a man who’s been robbed by a rigged system.” “The man at the end of my gun is the villain.” And, “Rich people don’t need guns to destroy folks. They just need poor people.”
But as another character says, “There’s a lot of tentacles to this story, it’s not just a hostage situation.” As the standoff wears on, and law enforcement and attorneys jostle for power, we watch the relationships deepen between Kiritsis and Hall, and Kiritsis and Heckman. All three have difficult fathers – Kiritsis’s beat him sadistically; Heckman’s is a con man; and Hall’s is coldly imperious – so there are timely explorations of masculinity and the cycle of abuse. As well, as Heckman see-saws between his responsibilities as a newsman versus his empathy as a human, we glimpse the dawn of TV sensationalism and the loss of any consensus on accepted facts.
“An important part of Tony’s focus, almost an obsession, was the truth,” Ribisi says. “In his phone calls to Fred, he says many times, ‘I’ve never told a lie in my life.’ All he wants is a forum to tell the truth. But just try to Google a fact now – the next link will be something that contradicts it. We don’t know which way is up, and that’s by design by the purveyors. Algorithms rile us up, and then it’s, ‘Buy these shoes.’”
In the series, we watch as Heckman, played by Jon Hamm, see-saws between his responsibilities as a newsman versus his empathy as a human.Steve Ackerman/MGM+
Adam Arkin, who directed four of the episodes (Nina Lopez-Corrado directed the other four), was 21 in 1977, and remembers “the indelible news photos of Kiritsis marching Hall through the downtown Indianapolis streets,” he says in a separate interview. “I remember being fascinated by the combination of how extreme Tony seemed, but also how articulate he was about his situation.”
Those grainy, caught-on-the-fly images influenced the series’ style: how it looks, and also how it was filmed. “We had a truncated schedule, six days per episode, and we had eight to 11 pages of dialogue a day, so we had to shoot it like a documentary,” Arkin says. “We embedded the camera crew in with the cast, and empowered them to find the story moments as we went” – especially in the radio newsroom scenes, where every actor might be on camera at any moment, whether they had lines or not.
The series’ beating heart is the interplay between Heckman – reined in on the surface, politically savvy, aware of his status in Indianapolis society, but racked with doubt underneath – and Kiritsis, a powder keg but deeply vulnerable. The actors had a similar dynamic, Arkin says: “Jon is task-oriented, focused, He shows up to work and doesn’t waste energy. Giovanni is a live wire, an improvisor. He’ll try things in radically different ways from one take to the next.” Kristoffer Polaha – who plays Richard Hall – “said working with Gio must be like working with Thelonious Monk: You’d hear him play a standard five times and hear five different versions, but the effect is always surprising, moving and powerful.”
“I could really chew the hell out of this thing – Giovanni, stop it!” Ribisi says, laughing. “But I couldn’t have been in better hands than Jon’s. You need your yin and yang, your Jerry and Dino. This makes me sound like a pretentious actor, but when Fellini was doing 8 1/2, he carved into the side of the dolly in Italian, ‘This is a comedy.’ I thought about that quite a bit.”
Because of a truncated schedule, the series was shot like a documentary, says Adam Arkin, who directed half the series.Steve Ackerman/MGM+
Watching the Kiritsis/Heckman relationship evolve over phone calls – on land lines, with cords – could have been static; instead, it becomes increasingly intimate, thanks to an innovation the production designer cooked up with the directors: They built Heckman’s radio station and Kiritsis’s apartment on the same soundstage. That enabled them to shoot both sides of the phone calls live, with two cameras on each actor.
“It became a dream for us, because we could capture every spontaneous moment of the exchanges, every overlap and response, and we didn’t have to worry about how to edit them together,” Arkin says. On the first day, everyone crossed their fingers it would work. When it did, “it felt like being part of the moon launch. You can feel the immediacy.”
As a quick internet search reveals, the actual crisis was resolved when everyone – cops, Kiritsis’s lawyers, the media – agreed to feed Kiritsis a lie. That makes his story not just timely, but urgent, Arkin says: “Now more than ever, it’s worth remembering that the thousands of news stories we’re bombarded with every day involve human lives. We’re not stick figures in somebody else’s idea of a political thesis. We’re human beings with dreams, desires, aspirations, fears. I hope this series will inspire people to dig a little deeper than the headlines in the passing feeds we’re all subjected to.”