Goodfellas Trivia
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48 free Goodfellas trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Goodfellas trivia questions with answers. Goodfellas is the mob movie that other mob movies get measured against, and this quiz treats it that way. Fifty questions run from the opening narration to the closing shot, taking in the cast, the improvised scenes, the soundtrack choices, the awards, and the real Lucchese crew whose lives Nicholas Pileggi turned into Wiseguy. It starts gently (who plays Henry, what Billy Batts says about the shine box) and works up to production trivia only obsessives know: how many frames were cut for an R rating, why the Copa shot goes through the kitchen, and how much the real Henry Hill was paid before cameras rolled. If you host movie trivia nights, the whole set is free to lift. Every answer was checked against the film's own credits, Wikipedia and Wikiquote entries, and the pages on the real people involved, and each question carries its source. No fan-forum guesses, no recycled listicle errors.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Goodfellas is adapted from which 1985 nonfiction book by Nicholas Pileggi?
Wiseguy
Wiseguy reached Scorsese while he was making The Color of Money; he cold-called Pileggi to say he had waited his whole life for this book, and Pileggi said he had waited for that call.
Q 02Which actor plays Henry Hill, the narrator of Goodfellas?
Ray Liotta
Ray Liotta was not the studio's choice: Warner Bros. kept asking for a bigger name, but his turn in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild had already won over Scorsese.
Q 03Which cast member won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Goodfellas?
Joe Pesci
Joe Pesci's Oscar was the film's only win of the night: it lost Best Picture, and its director, its screenplay and its editor all went home empty-handed.
Q 04Robert De Niro plays which character in Goodfellas?
Jimmy Conway
Jimmy Conway was De Niro's own idea: reading the book, he rang Scorsese and proposed himself, which gave the studio the star it wanted and Scorsese the money to shoot.
Q 05In Goodfellas, Henry's opening narration begins "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a" what?
gangster
A gangster: the line lands on a freeze-frame of Henry slamming a car trunk on a dying man, and he adds that the life beat being President of the United States.
Q 06In Goodfellas' prison dinner scene, what does Paulie use to slice garlic so thin it melts in the pan?
A razor blade
A razor blade is Paulie's 'wonderful system' behind bars: Henry says the garlic came out so thin that it would liquefy in the pan with just a little oil.
Q 07Who plays Karen Hill, Henry's wife, in Goodfellas?
Lorraine Bracco
Lorraine Bracco chose not to meet the real Karen, wanting the creation to come from her, and drew instead on her own girlhood in a Jewish neighborhood.
Q 08Who plays Paulie Cicero, the crew's capo, in Goodfellas?
Paul Sorvino
Paul Sorvino says half of the scene in which Paulie orders Henry back to his wife was made up on the day, including his own line, 'We're not animali.'
Q 09In Goodfellas, the crew's 1978 robbery raids the JFK Airport vault of which airline?
Lufthansa
Lufthansa lost about $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewels, then the biggest cash robbery in American history, and none of it has ever been recovered.
Q 10In Goodfellas, Henry and Tommy's first major score, in 1967, robs the cargo terminal of which airline?
Air France
Air France lost $420,000 without a shot fired: the real robbers had a copy of the strong-room key, and simply walked in with the largest empty suitcase they could find.
Q 11Which song plays over the long tracking shot as Henry leads Karen into the Copacabana in Goodfellas?
Then He Kissed Me
Then He Kissed Me, the Crystals' hit, carries the couple in by the back way, through the kitchen, to a table that is flown in and set down for them right at the front.
Q 12What does Henry keep spotting on his tail through his last day as a free man in Goodfellas?
A helicopter
A helicopter shadows him all day as he delivers guns, moves cocaine and keeps the Sunday sauce stirred, and that night he is arrested in his own driveway.
Q 13What does Paulie hand Henry before turning his back on him in Goodfellas?
Some cash
Q 21In his final narration in Goodfellas, Henry says he gets to live the rest of his life like a what?
Schnook
Schnook is his word for life in witness protection: 'I'm an average nobody,' he says, having ordered spaghetti with marinara sauce and been served egg noodles and ketchup.
Q 22Who earned an Oscar nomination for editing Goodfellas?
Thelma Schoonmaker
Thelma Schoonmaker, who has cut every Scorsese film since Raging Bull, built Henry's frantic final day with him to rattle the audience, and at previews it did.
Q 23Which film beat Goodfellas to Best Picture at the 63rd Academy Awards?
Dances with Wolves
Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner's first film as a director, also beat Scorsese to Best Director, a prize he would not win until The Departed sixteen years later.
Some cash, $3,200 in all, ends their years together; Paulie had warned him off drugs, and Henry calls the sum not even enough to pay for the coffin.
Q 14Which future Sopranos star plays Spider, the card-game bartender Tommy shoots in Goodfellas?
Michael Imperioli
Michael Imperioli doubts he would have been cast in The Sopranos without this small part, and he went on to write five of that show's episodes himself.
Q 15Who plays Billy Batts, the made man Tommy beats in Henry's club in Goodfellas?
Frank Vincent
Frank Vincent spent the early 1970s in a comedy double act with the very actor who stomps him here, and in Scorsese's Casino the beating goes the other way.
Q 16In Goodfellas, Billy Batts taunts Tommy by telling him to go home and get his what?
Shine box
Shine box is a dig at Tommy's boyhood trade; the real jibe was to ask whether he still shined shoes, and two weeks later the man who made it was dead.
Q 17Which future Pulp Fiction star plays Stacks Edwards, who fails to get rid of the getaway van in Goodfellas?
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson's Stacks pays with his life, as the real Parnell Edwards did: he left the van by a fire hydrant at his girlfriend's place, and police found it two days later.
Q 18Martin Scorsese's own mother, Catherine, appears in Goodfellas as which character?
Tommy's mother
Tommy's mother feeds the three men a late-night meal with a body in their trunk; the director's father is in the film too, as the prisoner told to go easy on the onions.
Q 19Which song plays over the montage of murdered crew members being found after the airport robbery in Goodfellas?
Layla
Layla, or rather its piano coda: Scorsese planned the sequence around it and had it playing on set so that the staging could be timed to the music.
Q 20Whose version of "My Way" plays over the end credits of Goodfellas?
Sid Vicious
Sid Vicious, not Sinatra: the film's co-writer says the whiny, ironic punk cover suits a man who did it his way and watched his dreams end in disaster.
Q 24What was the Best Supporting Actor winner's entire acceptance speech for Goodfellas?
"It's my privilege. Thank you."
It remains one of the shortest speeches in Oscar history; he was off the stage in seconds.
Q 25At the 1990 Venice Film Festival, Goodfellas earned Scorsese which prize?
The Silver Lion
The Silver Lion is Venice's award for best director; the festival's top prize that year went instead to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.
Q 26As a boy in Goodfellas, Henry gets his start with the mob working where, just across the street from home?
A cabstand
A cabstand was the local mobsters' hangout, and Henry's after-school job there soon replaced school itself: a letter home says he has not been to class in months.
Q 27After Henry beats up her neighbor in Goodfellas, what does he hand Karen to hide?
A pistol
A pistol, still in his hand from the beating; Karen hides it in the milk box and admits that where her friends would have run, it turned her on.
Q 28Which performer spoiled a take of the Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas by forgetting his own line?
Henny Youngman
Henny Youngman blanked on 'Take my wife...', a joke he had told thousands of times, just as the long unbroken walk reached him, so it all had to be done again.
Q 29What does Morrie sell in his own TV commercial in Goodfellas?
Wigs
Wigs 'tested against hurricane winds', he promises; the real Morrie did own a wig shop in Queens, and it was his tip that set up the crew's big airport robbery.
Q 30The "funny how?" scene in Goodfellas grew out of a real incident from Joe Pesci's days in which job?
Waiter
Waiter: a young Pesci told a mobster he was funny, meaning it kindly, and it went down badly; he told the story at rehearsal and the scene was improvised from it.