Tom Hanks had "no ambition" when he was a teenager

In an interview with The Guardian, Tom explained: "I had no ambitions to do anything, except maybe to kiss Marie, in my school class, you know, or to make Dorothy laugh."

The actor did admit he was enthralled by space, and was awakened to the cinematic landscape when he watched Stanley Kubrick's classic movie '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

He said: "I can tell you the day. It was a Sunday, it was kind of rainy and it was cold. It was the day the Oakland Raiders beat the Kansas City Chiefs, November of 1968.

"It blew my head off. It presented this romantic notion of a human being in this place void of life. I had paid attention to the space programme prior to that, but I was not hooked by the artistry or the romance of it until I saw that movie."

Tom explained his fascination with space and the movie gave him an appreciation for Hollywood and the art of filmmaking, and would set him on a path towards a career in the industry, even if he didn't realise at the time.

He said: "I knew enough that you needed science to be in space and I wasn't any sort of scholar. But what I did have, I guess, was an incredibly active imagination without realising that the stuff in my head was essentially storyboards for movies later on."

Tom insisted he is still captivated by space many years later, and regularly looks up into the night's sky to hunt for planets.

He said: "I look at the planets much more than I look at the stars. I have a couple of telescopes. "And when we have people over to eat on a clear night I'll say, would anybody like to see Saturn? Not one of them looks through that telescope without saying, 'Oh my God!'"