Tom Hanks Trivia
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49 free Tom Hanks trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Tom Hanks trivia questions with answers. Tom Hanks has been a leading man since 1984, which gives a quiz plenty to work with. These 49 questions run from the sitcom where he wore a dress to the fourth-highest career box-office total in American film, taking in the mermaid comedy that made him a star and the two Best Actor Oscars he won back to back. There are film-by-film rounds on Big, Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Cast Away and Toy Story: the fortune-telling machine, the piano duet, the volleyball, the real words spoken on the way to the Moon, and how the cross-country running sequence got paid for when the budget ran out. Every answer was checked against a primary reference before publication, so the box-office figures and award details are accurate rather than approximate. Difficulty runs from questions any moviegoer will get to a handful aimed at people who read the end credits.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tom Hanks is a distant cousin of which US president, whose mother shared his surname?
Abraham Lincoln
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.
Q 02In which state was Tom Hanks born?
California
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.
Q 03Which sitcom gave Hanks his TV breakthrough, playing a man dressed as a woman for cheap rent?
Bosom Buddies
It ran on ABC from 1980 to 1982. Peter Scolari played the other half of the pair.
Q 04Which 1984 mermaid comedy became a surprise hit and made Hanks a film lead?
Splash
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.
Q 05In which film does Hanks's washed-up baseball manager bark, 'There's no crying in baseball'?
A League of Their Own
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.
Q 06What is the name of the fortune-telling machine that grants the wish in Big?
Zoltar
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.
Q 07Which two tunes are played on the giant walking piano in Big?
Heart and Soul and Chopsticks
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.
Q 08What milestone did Big achieve for its director, Penny Marshall?
First woman-directed film to top $100m
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.
Q 09For which film did Hanks win his first Academy Award for Best Actor?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 10Hanks became only the second performer in Oscar history to do what?
Win consecutive Best Actor Oscars
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.
Q 11Which actress starred opposite Hanks in both Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail?
Meg Ryan
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.
Q 12Who directed Forrest Gump?
Robert Zemeckis
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.
Q 13Forrest Gump was adapted from a 1986 novel by which author?
Winston Groom
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.
Q 21In Saving Private Ryan, who did Hanks work with as director?
Steven Spielberg
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.
Q 22What job does Hanks's character do before being marooned in Cast Away?
FedEx systems analyst
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.
Q 23What is the name of the volleyball companion in Cast Away?
Wilson
Q 14Who played Lieutenant Dan, Forrest Gump's platoon leader and later shrimping partner?
Gary Sinise
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.
Q 15In which city's Chippewa Square was the bus stop bench scene of Forrest Gump filmed?
Savannah
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.
Q 16How was the famous cross-country running sequence in Forrest Gump paid for?
Hanks and the director paid for it
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.
Q 17Which astronaut did Hanks play in Apollo 13?
Jim Lovell
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.
Q 18Which words did the real Apollo 13 crew radio, later reworded on screen?
Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here
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.
Q 19How were the weightless scenes in Apollo 13 filmed?
Aboard a plane flying steep dives
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.
Q 20Which film beat Apollo 13 to the Best Picture Oscar at the 1996 ceremony?
Braveheart
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.
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.
Q 24Why did filming of Cast Away shut down for a year partway through?
Hanks needed to lose weight
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.
Q 25Cast Away's island scenes were filmed on Monuriki, an uninhabited island in which Pacific country?
Fiji
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.
Q 26Which relative often voices Woody in Toy Story games and toys when Tom Hanks is unavailable?
His brother Jim
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.
Q 27In Toy Story 4, Woody ends the film by staying with which old friend?
Bo Peep
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.
Q 28In The Polar Express, what was unusual about Hanks's contribution?
He played multiple motion-capture roles
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.
Q 29Which real airline captain did Hanks play in a 2016 Clint Eastwood film?
Chesley Sullenberger
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.
Q 30Captain Phillips was based on which real event?
The Maersk Alabama hijacking
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.