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60 free Interstellar trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
46 free Interstellar trivia questions with answers. Interstellar is the rare blockbuster that people rewatch with a physics textbook open, and this quiz treats it that way. Forty-five questions cover the crew of the Endurance, the three Lazarus planets, the black hole Gargantua, TARS and CASE, the tesseract behind Murph's bookshelf, and the production story: Kip Thorne's equations, the 500 acres of corn planted in Alberta, the Temple Church organ, and the sound mix that made cinemas post warning notices. Easy questions cover things any viewer remembers (who plays Cooper, which planet the wormhole orbits). Harder ones get into who voiced TARS, where the ice planet was filmed, what the crew nicknamed the giant ship models, and what the film's budget really was. It suits a movie night, a sci-fi pub quiz round, or settling an argument about how many years the crew lost on Miller's planet. Every answer was checked against the film's Wikipedia article and its Wikiquote transcript, and each question carries its citation.
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Q 01Who directed Interstellar?
Christopher Nolan
He co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan, who had originally developed it for Steven Spielberg.
Q 02Which actor plays Cooper, the widowed pilot-turned-farmer who leads the Endurance mission?
Matthew McConaughey
He was fresh off his Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club when the film opened in November 2014.
Q 03Interstellar was released in which year?
2014
It premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on October 26 before opening in early November.
Q 04The wormhole the Endurance crew travels through was placed near which planet?
Saturn
The crew deduces it was created by mysterious beings they call "they," who turn out to be future humans.
Q 05What is the name of the supermassive black hole the three candidate planets orbit?
Gargantua
Rendering it accurately gave the film's physicist adviser new insights that led to three published scientific papers.
Q 06Which theoretical physicist and later Nobel laureate conceived the film and served as executive producer?
Kip Thorne
He wrote a companion book, The Science of Interstellar, explaining which parts of the film are established physics and which are educated guesses.
Q 07Who plays Dr. Amelia Brand, the biologist on the Endurance crew?
Anne Hathaway
Her character ends the film alone on Edmunds' planet, kneeling at his grave and taking off her helmet to breathe the air.
Q 08Which actress plays the adult Murph, Cooper's daughter, for most of the film?
Jessica Chastain
Mackenzie Foy plays her as a child and Ellen Burstyn plays her as an old woman on her deathbed.
Q 09Which veteran actor plays Professor John Brand, the NASA scientist behind the mission?
Michael Caine
He confesses on his deathbed that Plan A, saving the people already on Earth, was never possible.
Q 10Who provides the voice (and puppetry) of the robot TARS?
Bill Irwin
He physically operated the block-shaped robot on set, and Josh Stewart voiced its companion CASE.
Q 11Which actor makes an uncredited appearance as Dr. Mann, the stranded scientist on the ice planet?
Matt Damon
He was cast in late August 2013 and shot his scenes on a glacier in Iceland.
Q 12How does Dr. Mann die?
An airlock decompression while docking
His botched attempt to seize the Endurance sends the ship spinning, setting up Cooper's "It's necessary" docking maneuver.
Q 13According to Romilly, every hour spent on Miller's planet costs roughly how many years back on Earth?
Seven
The planet orbits so close to Gargantua that a brief visit costs the crew decades, and Cooper returns to a backlog of 23 years of family video messages.
Q 21The icy alien planet scenes were shot in which country?
Iceland
The Svínafellsjökull glacier stood in for Mann's planet, while the farm scenes were shot in Alberta.
Q 22The Cooper farm and cornfield scenes were filmed in which Canadian province?
Alberta
Towns used included Nanton, Longview, Lethbridge, Fort Macleod and Okotoks.
Q 23How long is Interstellar's running time?
169 minutes
That is nearly three hours, and Nolan shot more of it on IMAX cameras than any of his previous films.
Q 24Which director was originally attached to the project when it began development in 2006?
Q 14What natural hazard nearly kills the crew on Miller's water planet?
A colossal tsunami
What look like distant mountains turn out to be waves, a consequence of the planet's proximity to the black hole.
Q 15The ring-shaped mother ship Endurance is made up of how many capsules?
Twelve
The capsules were laid flat to mimic a clock face, and the ring rotates to generate artificial gravity.
Q 16What crop is Cooper growing on his farm when the film opens?
Corn
Production designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres of real corn in Alberta, and the production sold the crop for a profit afterward.
Q 17Which composer wrote the score, built around a church organ?
Hans Zimmer
Nolan gave him no script, only a one-page story about a father leaving his child for work, and Zimmer wrote the main theme from that.
Q 18The score's signature organ was recorded on a 1926 instrument in which London building?
Temple Church
The four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ became the primary instrument, giving the film its cathedral-like sound.
Q 19Interstellar won its only Academy Award in which category?
Best Visual Effects
It was nominated for five Oscars in total; the black hole imagery that won was created by DNEG.
Q 20Roughly how much did Interstellar gross worldwide in its initial theatrical run?
$681 million
A 2024 tenth-anniversary IMAX re-release added another $24 million.
Steven Spielberg
Jonathan Nolan was hired to write the script for Spielberg and later recommended his brother Christopher, who joined in 2012.
Q 25What is the higher-dimensional space where Cooper sees into Murph's bedroom in Interstellar called?
A tesseract
The set was physically built rather than rendered, with strands of light representing moments of time on the bookshelf.
Q 26Young Murph believes a 'ghost' is trying to communicate with her through what?
Her bookshelf
The falling books and later the dust patterns turn out to be Cooper himself, sending messages from inside the tesseract.
Q 27How does Cooper transmit the quantum data from inside the black hole to Murph?
By encoding it into a wristwatch's second hand
The watch was the one he gave her before leaving, and the adult Murph finds it still ticking out Morse code decades later.
Q 28Which poem does Professor Brand recite as the Endurance launches?
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Dylan Thomas's villanelle recurs throughout the film, and Michael Caine's reading of it became a trailer staple.
Q 29When Cooper adjusts TARS's humor setting to 75 percent, how does the robot respond?
It fakes a self-destruct countdown
Cooper then dials it down to 60 percent, and TARS's deadpan became one of the film's most quoted elements.
Q 30According to Cooper, what does Murphy's law actually mean?
Whatever can happen will happen
He tells his daughter this to reassure her about being named after the law, and the film treats it as a statement about possibility rather than pessimism.