Tom Hanks didn't think anyone 'would care about this nut' in the iconic bench scenes in Forrest Gump

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28 Jun 2022, 09:49

If Tom Hanks had had his way, the infamous park bench scenes in Forrest Gump may have never happened. Can you believe it's been almost 30 years since his multiple Oscar-winning performance back in 1994 which became the highest-grossing movie of the year.

The Hollywood mega-star has revealed he wasn't too keen on the bench scenes and was concerned 'no one would care'.

In an interview with CinemaBlend for his new movie Elvis in which he plays Colonel Tom Parker, he admitted his reservations about the now-iconic bench scenes.

"I will tell you, in Forrest Gump, all the stuff that we shot on the park bench in Savannah, Georgia, we were just shooting fodder for a possible narrative piece of it.

"And I said to Bob [Zemeckis], 'Is anyone going to care about this nut sitting on a [bench]? What is this? No one knows what’s in this [box] I mean,'" Hanks added.

"We ended up shooting, it was probably like, you know, 13 pages of dialogue that we had to shoot in a day and a half," Hanks admitted. 

"It was written on cue cards, [and] I didn’t need the cue cards after a while because you get into it," Hanks said.

"But Bob says, 'I don’t know, it’s a minefield, Tom, it’s a minefield. You never know what people are gonna take away from it!' And it ends up being, you know, that thing."

'That thing' racked up 13 Oscar nominations with six wins for Best Picture, Best Actor (Hanks), Best Director (Robert Zemeckis), Best Adapted Screenplay (Eric Roth), Best Film Editing and Best Visual Effects, and made $678.2 million (£552m) worldwide on a $55 (£44m) million budget.

Not bad for a 'thing'.