Tom Hanks photobombs another wedding party
Tom Hanks has taken photos with yet another bride-to-be. This time, the meet-and-snap happened in Pittsburgh, where the Oscar winner is filming a new movie. Credit: Getty Images/Alberto E. Rodriguez
Film star Tom Hanks surprised a delighted wedding party Saturday in Pittsburgh, spontaneously posing for photos with a bride and her bridesmaids.
"He's like, 'Hey, I'm Tom Hanks. I would love to get a photo with you,' " Grace Weiers Gwaltney told NBC affiliate KCRA of the encounter outside the Fairmont Pittsburgh hotel, where she and her bridal party were preparing to enter cars to take them to her wedding at Calvary United Methodist Church. "And I immediately just froze and I was just looking around like I didn't know what to do."
In shots captured by wedding photographer Rachel Rowland, a smiling Hanks poses with Weiers and her seven red-gowned bridesmaids and two maids of honor. "So we were all walking from the hotel to the limo," Rowland told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "and out of nowhere, he pops up and just says, 'My name is Tom Hanks! Can I take a photo with the bride?' We all started screaming and were pretty much in shock."
She added of the two-time Academy Award winner, who is in Pittsburgh shooting "A Man Called Otto," "He was just as wonderful and charming as you'd assume. His wife, [singer-actor] Rita [Wilson], was there and got in some photos, too."
"Like, you see him and then he starts speaking," Gwaltney, who works in project management, told KCRA. "And he's, like, 'You look so beautiful, I'm so happy for you.' He was talking in my ear — I was thinking of 'Toy Story'! " she added, laughing. "I'm sure a lot of other Pittsburgh brides would love for him to photobomb their shots."
She told the groom, software engineer Luke Gwaltney, at the church before the ceremony. "We were holding hands and going back to back so we wouldn't see each other [as part of a common wedding tradition] and I was, like, 'I just met Tom Hanks!' Like, I had to sneak that in!”
Hanks has not commented on social media. In September 2016, when he came upon a couple named Elisabeth and Ryan while jogging on the Central Park bridle path, he took a selfie with them that he posted on Twitter, wishing them "Congrats and blessings! Hanx." Northport-based wedding videographers First Day Films posted a more than minutelong video of the encounter showing Hanks with the happy couple and also posing with two young children.
This past October, he similarly posed with Diciembre and Tashia Farries at their beach wedding near the Santa Monica Pier in California. And in 1993, while shooting "Forrest Gump" in Beaufort, South Carolina, he posed with bride Mary Dunning Chapman.
