49 Fun Facts About Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks is a distant cousin of which US president, whose mother shared his surname?

Abraham Lincoln's mother was Nancy Hanks, and the actor is a distant cousin of both through his father's family; in 2013 he presented the television film Killing Lincoln.

In which state was Tom Hanks born?

California: after his parents divorced when he was small, he was raised by his father, a cook whose work kept the family on the move until they settled in Oakland.

Which sitcom gave Hanks his TV breakthrough, playing a man dressed as a woman for cheap rent?

It ran on ABC from 1980 to 1982. Peter Scolari played the other half of the pair.

Which 1984 mermaid comedy became a surprise hit and made Hanks a film lead?

Splash has Daryl Hannah's mermaid pick the name Madison off a Manhattan street sign; Hanks's character objects that it isn't a name, and after the film it became one of America's favourite names for girls.

In which film does Hanks's washed-up baseball manager bark, 'There's no crying in baseball'?

A League of Their Own cast him as Jimmy Dugan, a faded slugger managing a women's team in the 1940s; the character is loosely based on Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx, who managed in the real league in 1952.

What is the name of the fortune-telling machine that grants the wish in Big?

Zoltar grants the wish after Josh, turned away from a carnival ride for being too short, asks to be big; only afterwards does he notice that the machine was unplugged all along.

Which two tunes are played on the giant walking piano in Big?

Heart and Soul and Chopsticks were danced by Hanks and Robert Loggia themselves: the two rehearsed at home on cardboard keyboards, and the studio hired doubles in case they could not get it right.

What milestone did Big achieve for its director, Penny Marshall?

First woman-directed film to top $100m at the US box office: Marshall, known until then as Laverne in the sitcom Laverne & Shirley, had directed only one feature before it.

For which film did Hanks win his first Academy Award for Best Actor?

Philadelphia brought Hanks the 1994 Oscar, and his acceptance speech, in which he thanked his gay high-school drama teacher, inspired the 1997 comedy In & Out.

Hanks became only the second performer in Oscar history to do what?

Win consecutive Best Actor Oscars: only Spencer Tracy had done it, in the 1930s, and when a publicist wrongly said he was giving the second to the priest he had played, the Academy struck an extra statuette for Father Flanagan.

Which actress starred opposite Hanks in both Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail?

Meg Ryan had already played opposite him in Joe Versus the Volcano; in Sleepless in Seattle the two romantic leads spend almost the whole film a continent apart and share only two scenes.

Who directed Forrest Gump?

Robert Zemeckis won the Best Director Oscar for it, after using digital effects to drop Hanks into archive footage alongside Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

Forrest Gump was adapted from a 1986 novel by which author?

Winston Groom's novel is far stranger than the film: his Forrest becomes an astronaut, crash-lands among cannibals with an orangutan named Sue, and tries professional wrestling and tournament chess.

Who played Lieutenant Dan, Forrest Gump's platoon leader and later shrimping partner?

Gary Sinise had his legs wrapped in blue fabric so they could be painted out frame by frame for the amputee scenes; he later named his Lt. Dan Band after the role and plays military bases with it.

In which city's Chippewa Square was the bus stop bench scene of Forrest Gump filmed?

Savannah visitors still look for the bench, but the square never had one there: it was a fibreglass prop, and one of the benches used now sits in the Savannah History Museum.

How was the famous cross-country running sequence in Forrest Gump paid for?

Hanks and the director paid for it themselves when the studio would not: they slipped away at weekends with a skeleton crew to film the run, and split the bill between them.

Which astronaut did Hanks play in Apollo 13?

Jim Lovell himself appears at the end as the captain of the recovery ship; offered an admiral's uniform for the cameo, he chose to wear his own, in the rank he actually retired with.

Which words did the real Apollo 13 crew radio, later reworded on screen?

Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here: those were Jack Swigert's words, repeated by the commander; the film moved the line into the present tense because 'we've had' made the danger sound already over.

How were the weightless scenes in Apollo 13 filmed?

Aboard a plane flying steep dives: NASA's KC-135 astronaut trainer, nicknamed the Vomit Comet, gives under half a minute of true weightlessness on each plunge, so the scenes were shot in short bursts on sets built inside it.

Which film beat Apollo 13 to the Best Picture Oscar at the 1996 ceremony?

Braveheart took Best Picture and the directing Oscar for Mel Gibson, even though Ron Howard had won the Directors Guild award for Apollo 13, which went home with the prizes for film editing and sound.

In Saving Private Ryan, who did Hanks work with as director?

Steven Spielberg put Hanks and the main cast through a week-long military boot camp before filming; the two then took the subject to television as the producers of Band of Brothers.

What job does Hanks's character do before being marooned in Cast Away?

FedEx systems analyst Chuck Noland works for a company that paid nothing to be in the film, yet it lent planes, trucks and uniforms, and its founder Fred Smith appears as himself to welcome Chuck home.

What is the name of the volleyball companion in Cast Away?

Wilson was dreamed up by screenwriter William Broyles Jr., who stranded himself on a remote beach as research and found himself keeping company with a ball that had washed ashore.

Why did filming of Cast Away shut down for a year partway through?

Hanks needed to lose weight: he filmed his character's paunchy early scenes first, then spent the break slimming down and growing his hair and beard while the director shot What Lies Beneath.

Cast Away's island scenes were filmed on Monuriki, an uninhabited island in which Pacific country?

Fiji's Monuriki is a tiny volcanic island whose owners gave their blessing in a formal ceremony before the crew arrived; since the film it has become a tourist attraction in its own right.

Which relative often voices Woody in Toy Story games and toys when Tom Hanks is unavailable?

His brother Jim sounds so much like him that, on Tom's own recommendation, he voices Woody in most Toy Story video games, spin-offs and talking toys.

In Toy Story 4, Woody ends the film by staying with which old friend?

Bo Peep, given away years earlier, turns up as a free-roaming lost toy, and Woody chooses to stay on the road with her; Tim Allen said the last scene was so emotional he could not get through it.

In The Polar Express, what was unusual about Hanks's contribution?

He played multiple motion-capture roles, among them the conductor, the hobo, Santa Claus and the boy's father, and even acted out the young hero's movements while a child actor supplied the voice.

Which real airline captain did Hanks play in a 2016 Clint Eastwood film?

Chesley Sullenberger put US Airways Flight 1549 down on the Hudson in 2009 and all 155 aboard survived; the film's hostile crash investigators were a dramatic invention that stirred a dispute of its own.

Captain Phillips was based on which real event?

The Maersk Alabama hijacking of April 2009 ended on its fifth day, when Navy SEAL snipers shot the three pirates holding Captain Phillips in a lifeboat; first-time actor Barkhad Abdi played their leader.

The Green Mile, in which Hanks plays a death-row prison guard, is based on a novel by which author?

Stephen King published it in 1996 as a serial, six slim paperbacks a month apart; its director, Frank Darabont, had already filmed King's other prison story, The Shawshank Redemption.

In Catch Me If You Can, Hanks's FBI agent spends years chasing a teenage con man played by whom?

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr., who claimed to have passed as a pilot, a doctor and a prosecutor before he turned 19; later investigations found most of those tales were invented.

Which 1994 crime film lost the Best Picture Oscar to Forrest Gump?

Pulp Fiction took only the screenplay Oscar; The Shawshank Redemption, shut out the same night, had flopped in cinemas, then became 1995's most-rented video.

Which line does Forrest speak on the bench as Forrest Gump opens?

Life was like a box of chocolates is how he quotes his mama, in the past tense; she gives her own version later, on her deathbed: 'Life is a box of chocolates, Forrest.'

Which film did Hanks make with the Coen brothers in 2004?

The Ladykillers reset a 1955 Ealing comedy on the Mississippi, with Hanks as a courtly Southern professor whose gang tunnels from an old lady's cellar towards a riverboat casino's vault.

In which Ron Howard thriller did Hanks first play the symbologist Robert Langdon?

The Da Vinci Code reached cinemas first, in 2006, although Angels & Demons was the earlier novel; the film of that book followed in 2009 as a sequel.

Apollo 13 was adapted from which 1994 book?

Lost Moon was written by the mission's commander with journalist Jeffrey Kluger, and its film rights were being shopped around before a word of it was written; the paperback was retitled Apollo 13.

In The Terminal, Hanks plays a traveller stranded for months inside which American airport?

JFK, New York, traps Viktor Navorski when a coup at home voids his passport; no real airport would host the shoot, so a working terminal was built in a hangar, and the story echoes a man who lived in a Paris terminal from 1988 to 2006.

The giant floor-piano scene in Big was filmed in which New York toy store?

FAO Schwarz already had the walk-on piano on display when the film's co-writer spotted it there; the scene then made the instrument the store's signature attraction, copied in its later branches.

Hanks is a devoted collector of which vintage machines, which he has gathered since his youth?

Typewriters are his passion: he uses one almost daily, appears among the enthusiasts in a 2016 documentary about the machines, and has given some away as gifts.

Hanks won a Cleveland critics' award in 1978 playing Proteus in which Shakespeare play?

The Two Gentlemen of Verona gave him one of his rare villains; his summer internship with Ohio's Great Lakes festival stretched to three years and led him to drop out of college for the stage.

Hanks made his film debut in which low-budget 1980 slasher?

He Knows You're Alone gave him a small part as a student named Elliot, who is said to have been spared a scripted death because the filmmakers liked him; the same year a talent scout picked him for a sitcom.

Which 1996 film about a 1960s pop group marked Hanks's debut as a director?

That Thing You Do! follows a one-hit band signed to the fictional Play-Tone label, with Hanks as the label man who manages them; he liked the name enough to give it to the production company he co-founded two years later.

Hanks made his Broadway debut in 2013 in which Nora Ephron play?

Lucky Guy was Nora Ephron's last work, staged the year after her death; Hanks, the star of her films Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, earned a Tony nomination as tabloid columnist Mike McAlary.

In which 2013 film did Hanks play Walt Disney himself?

Saving Mr. Banks follows Walt's 20-year pursuit of the Mary Poppins rights, begun as a promise to his daughters, and his battle of wills with the book's author P. L. Travers, played by Emma Thompson.

Which Halloween character did Hanks first play in a 2016 Saturday Night Live sketch?

David S. Pumpkins, a grinning man in a pumpkin-print suit flanked by two dancing skeletons, keeps popping up on a haunted elevator ride to ask 'Any questions?'; an animated special followed in 2017.

For which 2020 war film did Hanks also write the screenplay?

Greyhound, which Hanks adapted from C. S. Forester's novel The Good Shepherd, was made for cinemas and dated for June 2020; when the pandemic shut them, it went straight to Apple TV+ instead.

A 1982 guest spot on which sitcom helped Hanks land his breakout mermaid comedy?

Happy Days cast him as an old classmate with a grudge against Fonzie; the spot put him in front of the film's makers, who first read him for the wisecracking brother, the part that went to John Candy.

Whom did Hanks play in Baz Luhrmann's 2022 film Elvis?

Colonel Tom Parker, Presley's manager, was the part Hanks was filming in Australia in March 2020 when he and his wife tested positive for Covid-19; the shoot stopped for six months.