Interstellar Trivia
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58 free Interstellar trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
46 free Interstellar trivia questions with answers. Interstellar is the rare blockbuster that people rewatch with a physics textbook open, and this quiz treats it that way. Forty-five questions cover the crew of the Endurance, the three Lazarus planets, the black hole Gargantua, TARS and CASE, the tesseract behind Murph's bookshelf, and the production story: Kip Thorne's equations, the 500 acres of corn planted in Alberta, the Temple Church organ, and the sound mix that made cinemas post warning notices. Easy questions cover things any viewer remembers (who plays Cooper, which planet the wormhole orbits). Harder ones get into who voiced TARS, where the ice planet was filmed, what the crew nicknamed the giant ship models, and what the film's budget really was. It suits a movie night, a sci-fi pub quiz round, or settling an argument about how many years the crew lost on Miller's planet. Every answer was checked against the film's Wikipedia article and its Wikiquote transcript, and each question carries its citation.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Early in Interstellar, which machines leave the fields by themselves and gather at Cooper's farmhouse?
Combine harvesters
Combine harvesters: the unmanned machines peel off from the fields one by one and roll up to the house, and magnetism gets the blame.
Q 02Which actor plays Cooper, the father who leaves his children to lead the Endurance mission in Interstellar?
Matthew McConaughey
Matthew McConaughey caught Christopher Nolan's eye in an early cut of the small drama Mud, before his Oscar; the director wanted an everyman the audience could experience the story with.
Q 03In Interstellar, the wormhole the Endurance crew travels through sits near which planet?
Saturn
Saturn is a two-year voyage for the Endurance, and the wormhole beside it had appeared 48 years earlier; because wormholes do not form naturally, NASA concludes that someone placed it there.
Q 04In Interstellar, what name does the crew give the giant black hole beyond the wormhole?
Gargantua
Gargantua was rendered from real relativity equations, and the work yielded new insights into how black holes bend light, published in a physics journal.
Q 05Which theoretical physicist and later Nobel laureate helped conceive Interstellar and served as its executive producer?
Kip Thorne
Kip Thorne argued Nolan out of letting a character travel faster than light; the director says the physicist kept explaining it was impossible until he conceded.
Q 06Who plays Dr. Amelia Brand, the biologist on the Endurance crew in Interstellar?
Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway kept filming in frigid water after her suit sprang a leak, then asked what the symptoms of hypothermia were.
Q 07Which actress plays the adult Murph, Cooper's scientist daughter, in Interstellar?
Jessica Chastain
Jessica Chastain's Murph records a message on the birthday that makes her the age Cooper was when he left, telling him it would be a really good time to come back.
Q 08Which veteran actor plays Professor John Brand, the NASA scientist behind the mission in Interstellar?
Michael Caine
Michael Caine's Professor Brand confesses to Murph on his deathbed that he lied: Plan A, saving the people already on Earth, was never possible.
Q 09Who voices and puppeteers the robot TARS in Interstellar?
Bill Irwin
Bill Irwin, a stage comic, moved the block-shaped robot around the set himself on a specially built rig, so TARS was physically there with the actors; Josh Stewart voiced its companion CASE.
Q 10Which actor plays Dr. Mann, the scientist found stranded on an ice planet in Interstellar?
Matt Damon
Matt Damon's Dr. Mann turns out to have faked his planet's promising data so that someone would come and rescue him, and he then tries to kill Cooper.
Q 11How does Dr. Mann die in Interstellar?
An airlock decompression while docking
An airlock decompression while docking kills him: Mann opens the hatch on an imperfect seal, and the blast sends the Endurance spinning, forcing Cooper's 'It's necessary' docking.
Q 12In Interstellar, each hour on Miller's planet costs roughly how many years back on Earth?
Seven
Seven years per hour means the crew's short stop costs them 23 years, and Cooper comes back to a backlog of video messages from children who have grown up without him.
Q 13What natural hazard nearly kills the crew on Miller's water planet in Interstellar?
A colossal tsunami
Q 21Interstellar's farmhouse was built with mountains on the horizon in which Canadian province?
Alberta
Alberta: Nolan wanted mountains behind the farm, so the crew built the house from scratch outside Calgary and brought in huge fans to blow its dust storms.
Q 22Cinemas using which format got Interstellar two days early?
Film prints
Film prints: cinemas that could still run 35mm or 70mm got it two days early, a win for Nolan's campaign to keep film alive after most had switched to digital.
Q 23Which director was originally attached to Interstellar when it began development in 2006?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg was set to direct from Jonathan Nolan's script, and when Spielberg left, the job passed to the writer's brother Christopher.
A colossal tsunami: what look like distant mountains are waves, and the one that hits kills a crew member and floods the engines, stranding the crew while time races by on Earth.
Q 14Why does Interstellar's ring-shaped Endurance spin?
Artificial gravity
Artificial gravity: once the crew is aboard, the ring spins up to one G, and the motion leaves one of the scientists needing motion-sickness pills.
Q 15What crop is Cooper growing on his farm when Interstellar opens?
Corn
Corn: designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres of it for the film to wreck in a dust storm, and Nolan says so much survived that the production made money on the crop.
Q 16Which composer wrote the score for Interstellar?
Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer was given no script, only a one-page letter about a father leaving his child for an important job, and one day to write music for it. Nolan said that piece gave him the heart of the movie.
Q 17Which instrument dominates the score of Interstellar?
A pipe organ
A pipe organ: the composer chose the 1926 instrument in London's Temple Church, saying its pipes look like spaceship afterburners and that you can hear the giant machine breathe.
Q 18Interstellar won its only Academy Award in which category?
Best Visual Effects
Best Visual Effects was its one win from five nominations: to draw the black hole, the effects team wrote new rendering software from a physicist's equations.
Q 19Which Disney film beat Interstellar to number one on their shared US opening weekend?
Big Hero 6
Big Hero 6 won the weekend with $56.2 million to Interstellar's $47.5 million, even though Interstellar had led on the day they both opened wide.
Q 20Interstellar's scenes on Dr. Mann's frozen planet were shot on a glacier in which country?
Iceland
Iceland: recent volcanic eruptions had streaked the chosen glacier with grey ash, giving Mann's frozen planet a marbled look the designers could not have planned.
Q 24What is the higher-dimensional space where Cooper sees into Murph's bedroom in Interstellar called?
A tesseract
A tesseract: Cooper works out that the beings who built it are not aliens at all but humans from the far future, reaching back to save their own ancestors.
Q 25In Interstellar, young Murph believes a 'ghost' is trying to reach her through what?
Her bookshelf
Her bookshelf: books keep dropping from it, and the ghost pushing them out turns out to be her own father, reaching back to her from years in the future.
Q 26In Interstellar, how does Cooper send the black hole's quantum data to Murph?
Ticks of a watch's second hand
Ticks of a watch's second hand: Cooper taps the data out in Morse code on the watch he gave Murph before he left, and years later she notices the hand twitching.
Q 27Which poem does Interstellar's Professor Brand recite?
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: Dylan Thomas's poem urges a fight against death, yet the professor reciting it already knows the people left on Earth cannot be saved.
Q 28In Interstellar's final scenes, how does the rebuilt TARS respond to a 75 percent humor setting?
It fakes a self-destruct countdown
It fakes a self-destruct countdown, so Cooper hastily drops the setting to 60 percent, and TARS answers that with 'Knock, knock.'
Q 29According to Cooper in Interstellar, what does Murphy's law actually mean?
Whatever can happen will happen
Whatever can happen will happen: Cooper says it to comfort young Murph, who has asked why her parents named her after something bad.
Q 30Which two words complete Cooper's Interstellar line "Mankind was born on Earth, it was never meant to…"?
die here
'Die here': Cooper says it to his father-in-law Donald, arguing that the world is a treasure but has been telling them to leave for a while.