Tom Hanks Will Play His Distant Relative Abraham Lincoln in Upcoming Movie Jack SmartMon, February 23, 2026 at 10:34 PM UTC 0 Tom Hanks; Abraham Lincoln CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty; Bettmann/Getty Tom Hanks will play Abraham Lincoln in a screen adaptation of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo Duke Johnson will direct the biopic, with Hanks also serving as producer The Oscarwinning actor is distantly related to Lincoln Tom Hanks will play a former U.S. president — and distant relation — in an upcoming biopic.
Tom Hanks Will Play His Distant Relative Abraham Lincoln in Upcoming Movie
Jack SmartMon, February 23, 2026 at 10:34 PM UTC
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Tom Hanks; Abraham Lincoln
CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty; Bettmann/Getty
Tom Hanks will play Abraham Lincoln in a screen adaptation of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo
Duke Johnson will direct the biopic, with Hanks also serving as producer
The Oscar-winning actor is distantly related to Lincoln
Tom Hanks will play a former U.S. president — and distant relation — in an upcoming biopic.
Lincoln in the Bardo, based on George Saunders' bestselling 2017 novel of the same name, will star Hanks, 69, as Abraham Lincoln. Per Deadline, it will be a hybrid movie combining live-action filmmaking and stop-motion animation.
The Forrest Gump Oscar winner is a distant cousin of the 16th president's mother, whose name was Nancy Hanks, according to Ancestry.com.
Tom Hanks in June 2025
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
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In addition to starring, Hanks will produce Lincoln in the Bardo through his Playtone label with partner Gary Goetzman. The film will be directed and produced by Oscar-nominated Anomalisa filmmaker Duke Johnson.
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Deadline reports that the film will "explore one of the most intimate moments of Lincoln's life, centering on his relationship with his recently deceased 11-year-old son. The movie will explore themes of love, empathy and human capacity in the face of grief as the story unfolds through an ensemble of characters, both living and dead, historical and invented."
Hanks is no stranger to playing real people on the big screen. Among his dozens of credits are Walt Disney in 2013's Saving Mr. Banks, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger in 2016's Sully and Fred Rodgers in 2019's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. He served as narrator on the 2011 television program Killing Lincoln, a docudrama about John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Lincoln.
In a 2021 op-ed for The New York Times, Hanks wrote that he considers himself "a lay historian who talks way too much at dinner parties, leading with questions like, 'Do you know that the Erie Canal is the reason Manhattan became the economic center of America?' Some of the work I do is making historically based entertainment."
Among Hanks' other upcoming screen projects are reprising his voice role as Woody in Toy Story 5 (in theaters June 19) and a sequel to his 2020 WWII naval drama Greyhound.
on People
Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: Entertainment
Published: 2026-02-23T23:00:17Z on Source: PRIME TIME
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