Giovanni Ribisi & Kristoffer Polaha on the 63 Hours That Changed Tony and Dick in American Hostage

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In American Hostage, Tony Kiritsis and Dick Hall spend 63 hours bound together under extraordinary circumstances. Tony, played by Giovanni Ribisi, holds Dick hostage with a shotgun wired to his neck, while Kristoffer Polaha’s Dick has to navigate a situation in which almost any wrong move could have deadly consequences.

For Ribisi and Polaha, understanding the two men began well before the hostage crisis itself. Ribisi says “it always starts with a character’s history,” and saw an important connection between Tony and Dick in the fathers who shaped them.

Tony grew up in an extremely violent household, with Ribisi pointing to the physical abuse he experienced from his father, along with his time in the Korean War, as part of the history he carried into adulthood. Dick came from a very different environment, but Polaha similarly found a man whose life had been heavily influenced by his father.

The youngest of three boys, Dick worked in the family business under a successful and imposing patriarch. Polaha describes him as perhaps having an “artist soul” and being the one in the family who did not quite fit the mold. Still, he remained the good son, returning home, joining the family business and building the life expected of him.

When Tony puts the shotgun around Dick’s neck, Polaha saw something almost symbolic in the way those two histories collided.

“It’s almost as if these two men swapped places.”

Once Tony takes Dick hostage, that psychological dynamic becomes inseparable from a very physical one. The shotgun around Dick’s neck meant Ribisi and Polaha had to move together, with each step dependent on the other.

The production initially developed a safety rig for the weapon, but Polaha says he quickly developed enough trust in Ribisi that they were able to work more freely with it. Their movements eventually became “a bit of a ballet,” with the two actors moving in lockstep and camera operator Matt joining the choreography.

That trust was particularly important given the conditions surrounding the shoot. Filming in Winnipeg brought temperatures around 30 degrees below zero, sometimes while the actors were dressed for 1977 Indianapolis. The production was also moving through as many as eight to eleven pages a day, often jumping between different points in the ordeal.

For Polaha, the physical restraints became one way of staying connected to Dick as the production moved out of sequence. He opted for metal handcuffs that pinched his wrists and a weighted chain, allowing those sensations to inform his performance.

“All I had to do was stay present,” he says. “I just had to listen and feel the bite of the cuffs.”

Working opposite Ribisi gave him something equally immediate to respond to. Polaha remembers watching Ribisi continually change the pacing and emphasis of Tony’s dialogue across takes, comparing it to Thelonious Monk playing the same song differently each time.

He also points to Ribisi’s preparation, including arriving at the table read already off-book despite the amount of dialogue Tony carries. On a production moving at such an intense pace, Polaha believes that preparation helped make the work possible.

“He’s probably the most disciplined actor I’ve ever worked with,” Polaha says. “His professionalism and his preparedness really carried the day.”

That discipline also supported a performance that had to make sense of a man whose behavior could easily be dismissed from the outside. Ribisi was interested in getting beyond that immediate judgment and understanding how deliberate Tony believed his actions to be.

“For a headline mindset, you might just say, ‘This person is crazy.’ But when you get on into the nuances, he was very smart. He had a whole plan.”

Tony’s actions remain violent and dangerous, something Ribisi is careful not to excuse. His focus was on understanding the internal logic behind them. Tony believes he has been wronged and becomes consumed by the need to get his version of events in front of an audience. He respects radio host Fred Heckman and sees the radio station as a way to finally make people listen.

“A big focus for him was the truth,” Ribisi says. “He says, ‘I’ve never told a lie in my life.’”

That belief is central to how Tony understands himself, even as his methods put another person’s life at risk. Ribisi explicitly distances understanding Tony from defending him, saying he does not advocate or justify what Tony did. The distinction allowed him to approach Tony as someone with a clear objective without sanitizing the consequences of pursuing it.

Polaha also considered the limits of what Tony intended to do. The shotgun was unquestionably real and loaded, something Ribisi underscores by pointing out that Tony later fired it out the window. But Polaha does not believe Tony went into the situation intending to kill Dick.

“I don’t think Tony ever wanted to kill Dick,” Polaha says. “I think he simply wanted to be heard.”

For Dick, surviving those intentions still meant living for 63 hours with the possibility that everything could go wrong. Polaha did not want that lack of physical control to make the character feel passive.

“I didn’t want to play him as some sad sack, some weakling who just took it,” he says.

His approach was rooted partly in Dick’s Christian faith. Polaha, who is also Christian, thought about the practice of trying to see another person beyond what they have done, even when that person has given you every reason not to.

“I think Dick started to see Tony as a man. He started to see Tony as a son of God. He started to see Tony as somebody that he could love.”

That shift does not erase the fact that Dick is Tony’s hostage. It gives another dimension to the way Dick responds to him. Polaha points to accounts of the real ordeal describing police hearing the two men laughing and talking “like brothers” at certain points during those 63 hours.

The relationship never became something simple enough to call friendship. Tony and Dick never spoke or saw each other after the ordeal, and Polaha notes that hearing Tony’s voice later could still trigger a physical trauma response in Dick. He also did not talk about what happened with his children for decades.

That lasting trauma was part of why Polaha wanted to find strength in Dick without turning him into a conventional hero. His version of that strength came through in the way Dick tried to endure an impossible situation while holding onto his own sense of humanity.

“How can I do this in a way that we can both walk out of this?”

For Polaha, that question became central to playing Dick. But bringing the changing dynamic between Dick and Tony to the screen also required a great deal of trust between the two actors, particularly when so much of their work involved being physically connected and reacting to each other in the moment.

Ribisi describes working with Polaha as “a privilege,” while Polaha remembers both actors staying on set between setups rather than retreating between takes. Even with the production moving quickly through different points in the 63-hour ordeal, they remained engaged with the material and with each other.

“We were just there,” Polaha says. “We stayed in it.”

That consistency helped ground a shoot that demanded a lot from both actors, from the practical restraints and extreme weather to the amount of material they were filming each day. For Polaha, much of it ultimately came back to the same thing he had relied on while playing Dick throughout the production, staying present with what was happening in front of him.

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