Everything You Need to Know About Tom Hanks: Career Facts & Film Trivia
Tom Hanks is like everyone’s favorite actor, even if you don’t really name him as one of your favorites. He doesn’t have the hip iconicness as someone like James Dean or chameleon-esque range as someone like Gary Oldman, but you would be hard-pressed to find any individual who doesn’t like Tom Hanks. In fact, Esquire once called him America’s Dad. He’s pretty much the most likeable actor in the history of American cinema, and the most agreeable choice on family movie nights.
Here are a whole bunch of facts about Tom Hanks and his life, work, films, family, and career, as well as other fun oddball facts. Read on, and if you’re in the mood to check out one or three of his films, feel free to click on any of the flicks in the wall of images far below.
Tom Hanks Early Life & Family: Parents, Wife, Brothers & Children
1. He was born Thomas Jeffrey Hanks in Concord, California on July 9, 1956. That makes him a Cancer! Perhaps you two are soul mates and are destined to be friends.
2. Tom Hanks’s mother’s name was Janet Marylyn Frager. She was a hospital worker whose last name is of Portuguese descent.
3. Amos Mefford Hanks was Tom’s father, and he worked as a cook. Tragically, when Amos was eight or nine years old, he witnessed Tom’s grandfather killed in a fight. This was obviously awful and traumatic, and Tom has discussed the impact the incident has had on both his and Amos’s life.
4. When Tom was around four years old, Amos and Janet divorced in 1960. Tom has said that he lived in 10 different houses by the time he was 10 years old.
5. Tom’s younger brother Jim Hanks is also an actor. In fact, they’re so similar in voice and physical build that Jim was Tom’s body double in Forrest Gump, and serves as a voice substitute for Sheriff Woody in Toy Story spinoffs and video games.
6. His other brother Larry Hanks is an entomologist who currently teaches bugs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He’s such a big deal in the bug world that he won the National Recognition Award in Urban Entomology from the Entomological Society of America in 2000.
7. Abraham Lincoln is Tom’s third cousin four times removed. Nancy Hanks was Abraham’s mother.
8. According to IMDB, he is also distantly related to George Clooney, Walt Disney, and Mr. Rogers. The Hanks family tree is loaded.
9. His daughter Elizabeth Hanks has a cameo in Forrest Gump. She’s one of the little girls on the school bus who tells young Forrest that he can’t sit with them.
10. Tom’s oldest son Colin Hanks is a successful actor in his own right. He’s appeared in films like Orange County, Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), and Oliver Stone’s W., as well as television shows like The Good Guys, Fargo, and Dexter.
11. Chet Hanks is Tom’s other son and Colin’s half-brother. Chet has appeared in Greyhound with his father, as well as Empire and Shameless. Chet Hanks is definitely the black sheep of the Hanks family, and you can google for yourself to see why.
Tom Hanks: Work & Career
12. Tom studied theater at Chabot College in California before transferring to California State University, Sacramento. An internship at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland turned into a three-year position and he ended up dropping out of college. The move ended up working out okay for him.
13. A lot of versatile actors are trained in Shakespeare, and Tom is no exception. When he was at the Great Lakes Theater Festival, he won the Cleveland Critics Circle Award for his performance as Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
14. His appearance on a 1982 episode of Happy Days (“A Case of Revenge”) led to a relationship with Ron Howard, who went on to direct him in five movies.
15. Tom Hanks also appeared in three episodes of Family Ties, playing the role of Elyse’s alcoholic brother Ned.
16. Tom Hank’s career has had several breakthroughs and level ups, but his first was a starring role in Bosom Buddies, a sitcom about the misadventures of two men dressing in drag in order to live in a cheap apartment for women. The show ran for two seasons starting in 1980 and not only did it launch his career, he met his future wife Rita Wilson when she appeared in the show’s 26th episode, “All You Need is Love.”
Click on the fisherpeople to buy the show!
Tom Hanks: Writer, Director & Producer
17. Thomas Jeffrey Hanks has written and directed two films: That Thing You Do! and Larry Crowne. The former is absolutely fantastic with a killer soundtrack written by genius pop maestro Adam Schlesinger and is absolutely recommended. The latter is legit pretty close to being an objectively terrible movie and should be viewed at one’s own risk.
18. The established actor also has a few more writing credits. He wrote the screenplay for Greyhound as well as the 2012 short series Electric City. He also wrote an episode of Band of Brothers, as well as a few episodes of From the Earth to the Moon.
19. Tom Hanks also appeared in and directed a 1992 episode of Tales from the Crypt, “None But the Lonely Heart” that starred Frances Sternhagen, Treat Williams, Henry Gibson, and Sugar Ray Leonard.
20. Movies where Tom Hanks is credited as a producer or executive producer — but does not appear in — include Mamma Mia!, Evan Almighty, Where the Wild Things Are, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as well as the HBO miniseries John Adams.
Facts About Tom Hanks Movies
21. The 1997 Frank Oz film In & Out starring Kevin Kline was inspired by Tom’s Oscar acceptance speech for Philadelphia, in which he thanked a gay teacher of his.
22. Tom Hanks is willing to suffer for his art. He has gained and lost weight a few times for roles throughout his career. Tom ate a lot of ice cream to put on 30 pounds for A League of Their Own, only to take it back off for Philadelphia. Then he also lost more than 50 pounds for Cast Away, perhaps the greatest two-and-a-half-hour FedEx commercial ever made. Unfortunately, the turmoil this put on his body eventually led to him being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 2013.
23. Ever the everyman, Tom let himself get pudgy for the beginning scenes of Cast Away. Filming then stopped for a year while he lost weight and grew his hair out.
24. For some reason, peeing shows up in no less than six of his films: A League of Their Own, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Forrest Gump, The Money Pit, and Apollo 13. See the video for yourself if you don’t believe us.
25. Tom wrote and directed That Thing You Do!, so it’s probably no surprise that the film also features his wife Rita, his son Colin, and his daughter Elizabeth.
26. A bunch of big-name actors were considered for the starring role in Big. Harrison Ford, Jeff Bridges, and Steve Guttenberg turned it down, and Robin Williams, John Goodman, Judge Reinhold, Albert Brooks, Michael Keaton, Gary Busey, and Bill Murray was also all in play at different points. It almost went to Robert De Niro, but he commanded a big salary. Since he wasn’t quite the elite star he would become, Tom Hanks was willing to work much cheaper than the established De Niro, and ended up with the movie that changed the trajectory of his career with his first Oscar nomination.
27. The producers of Philadelphia did not look to Tom Hanks for their first choice. Tim Robbins, Michael Keaton, Andy Garcia, William Baldwin, and Daniel Day-Lewis were all offered the part.
28. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg have collaborated no less than five times. The famed filmmaker first directed Tom in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, and in four more movies: Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), Bridge of Spies (2015), and most recently in The Post (2017).
Is Tom Hanks Left-Handed?
29. Our statistics tell us a lot of you landed here just from googling the above query, so this question may very well be the reason you have visited our fine website. If so, welcome to Content Bash! We are very happy to tell you that Tom Hanks is NOT left-handed. Not even a little bit!
In fact, Jim Lovell — the astronaut dude depicted by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 — is left-handed, but not only is Tom Hanks not left-handed, Tom Hanks refused to play the part as a lefty! That seems very un-Tom Hanks-like!
Anyway, thank you for coming. If you’re leaving, have a wonderful day! If you’re staying, read on for more cool trivia about Tom Hanks.
More Interesting & Weird Tom Hanks Facts
30. He once had an asteroid named after him, called 12818 tomhanks. It’s even listed on the NASA website.
31. Early in 2020, Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson unfortunately contracted COVID-19. This was a particularly significant event because of how it highlighted the potential seriousness of the disease. Fortunately, they both rebounded, and Hanks hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live to be aired after the show went on hiatus during the pandemic. The monologue and sketches were performed remotely from all the actors’ homes, and helped redefine how television can be made under extenuating circumstances.
32. Tom Hanks absolutely fucking loves typewriters, and talks about them at length in the wonderful and engaging documentary California Typewriter, as well in an NPR interview. If you let him, he’ll go on and on about them, and it’s endlessly charming in his endearing Tom Hanks kind of way. He supposedly owns more than 250 typewriters, and he even once wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about them.
33. In addition to his prolific work as an actor, director, writer, and producer, Tom Hanks has also written a book! Presumably all by himself. Uncommon Type is a collection of short stories that Tom wrote under the inspiration of his typewriter collection.
Click on the typewriter to buy the book!
34. Tom appears in Carly Rae Jepsen’s very charming video for “I Really Like You,” where he lip-syncs the song.
35. Tom Hanks has said that The Man with One Red Shoe, an earlier film of his that came out in 1985, is “not a very good movie.” We’ve never seen it so you should clink on the link and buy the movie and watch it and see for yourself if it’s true or not and then report back to us.
36. Thanks to his role in Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks was inducted into the US Army’s Ranger Hall of Fame as an honorary member in 2006. What an honor!
37. Hanks turned down Tim Robbins’s role in The Shawshank Redemption, but made up for it by appearing in The Green Mile — both Frank Darabont directions of Stephen King stories.
Here is the End of Our Post About Tom Hanks
Read more movie content at Content Bash!
Check out our articles on facts about movies like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and The Pope of Greenwich Village and Cool Hand Luke and Gangs of New York and Searching for Bobby Fischer.
Cover Image Credit: Dick Thomas Johnson via Wikimedia
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