All of Tom Hanks’ roles in The Polar Express

The Polar Express is a modern Christmas classic with one of the world’s most beloved actors at the helm – but can you name every character played by Tom Hanks?

Released back in 2004, Robert Zemeckis’s festive adventure was the first entirely motion-capture picture. Its achievements with animation notwithstanding, one of its most notable choices was casting Hanks in not one, not two, but several different roles.

If you were to ask your everyday moviegoer, most would probably be able to name at least four; if they don’t get Conductor, then they’ve not seen the movie or they’re really not a fan. The voice of Eddie, the homeless man on top of the train, is pretty unmistakable, and his adventures on the top of the carriages in the middle of a blizzard are a big takeaway.

But what about the rest of them? Well, I suggest we all hold on – because we have the answer.

How many roles does Tom Hanks play in The Polar Express?

In The Polar Express, Hanks voices seven people: Hero Boy, Hero Boy’s father, the Conductor, the ghost on top of the train, the Scrooge puppet, the narrator, and Santa Claus himself.

At one point, he nearly played every single role in the movie. Unfortunately, this quickly became tiresome and Zemeckis opted for a wider cast.

In an earlier interview with IGN, Hanks opened up about taking on all the characters. “When Bob explained it enough to me so that I could understand the process we were doing would make it possible for grown-ups to play the kids, that Nona could play the girl and I could play the boy and Eddie Deezen and Peter Scolari could come along with it, that opened up a lot of opportunities for one aspect of it,” he said.

“Bob at one point said, ‘I think you should play every role in this movie because then we could do it. You could play every role!’ Forgive me, Bob. But I said, ‘Well, wait a minute. There’s girls in this movie. I’m going to play every elf?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’ll be great.’

“There’s only so much that I can internally grasp as an actor and on the day of tests that we did I played five or six or seven roles in the course of that day, and I said, ‘Bob, I’m exhausted here.’ So in my mind, I had a track on the five characters that I played.

“I could understand the differences between them all and I understood how they related to the boy and I understood what the boy’s perceptions of them were. And it was just a circumstance where it was doable.”

Hilariously, over the course of the movie’s production, Hanks kept fooling around by making Eddie swear. “I tell you this, this is a big motherf**king train. This is the greatest f**king train I ever rode. Jesus, this hot chocolate tastes like horsesh*t,” he joked.

You can check out our list of the top 25 Christmas movies of all time here. You may also have seen a poster for a Polar Express sequel, which we’ve debunked here.