If you’ve seen Forrest Gump running through Montana, Vermont, and North Carolina, you’ve probably seen Jim Hanks — not Tom. Jim, Tom’s younger brother and a fellow actor, served as the body double for most of the film’s famous running sequences in the 1994 classic. As Jim himself put it: “Pretty much all that running stuff, if you can’t see his face, it’s me.” But what makes that fact land differently is this: the two brothers barely knew each other as kids.
Two brothers, two separate childhoods
When Amos and Janet Hanks divorced, the family split in ways that went beyond custody arrangements. Tom, the older of the two, stayed with their father. Jim went to live with their mother in Red Bluff, California. Different households, different towns, different daily realities — and no shared childhood to speak of. The kind of brother bond most people assume just happens naturally never quite formed for them the way it might have.
Tom, born in 1956, was already navigating an unstable home environment with their father by the time Jim — born June 15, 1961 — was old enough to have memories worth keeping. Jim’s upbringing with their mother was quieter, more removed from the older siblings. For years, they existed in parallel rather than together. The reconnection came later, in adulthood, the way it sometimes does when family ties outlast the distance that created them. Much like the complicated family dynamics behind other Hollywood dynasties, theirs is a reminder that shared last names don’t always mean shared lives.
Running back to each other — through Forrest Gump
By the time Forrest Gump was in production, Tom and Jim had found their way back to each other as adults and discovered something useful: they looked — and sounded — remarkably alike. That resemblance wasn’t just a fun family fact. It became a practical solution for director Robert Zemeckis and his crew.
Jim traveled to multiple states to film the running sequences while Tom stayed focused on the film’s emotionally demanding scenes. At one point in Vermont, Jim reportedly had to yell at cows to get them to look toward the camera. The physical work was unglamorous and largely anonymous — most audiences spent 30 years believing they were watching Tom the entire time. The collaboration didn’t stop there: Jim has also voiced Woody for Toy Story merchandise, video games, and spin-offs whenever Tom wasn’t available, a role that required matching not just the voice but the entire tone of a character his brother made iconic.
There’s something worth sitting with in that image — a man who grew up in a different house, on a different path, running across the country in his brother’s place, making sure the movie worked. It’s not a metaphor anyone scripted. It just happened to be true.
