Moonlight Movie Trivia
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50 free Moonlight Movie trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Moonlight trivia quiz covers Barry Jenkins's 2016 Best Picture winner, told in three chapters. It follows Chiron from the crackhouse where Juan finds him, through the beach with Kevin and the chair over Terrel's head, to the diner in Miami and Barbara Lewis on the jukebox. It asks about the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue that started it, the three actors who never met while playing the same character, Naomie Harris shooting all her scenes in three days, the twenty-five-day shoot in Liberty City, the three film-stock looks, Nicholas Britell's chopped-and-screwed score and the $1.5 million budget. A final round covers the 89th Academy Awards, from Mahershala Ali becoming the first Muslim to win an acting Oscar to Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway and the backup envelope that briefly handed Best Picture to La La Land. Note: this page is about the 2016 film, not the Harry Styles song or the astronomical phenomenon. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Moonlight, what does Juan teach Little to do in the ocean off Miami?
Swim
Swim. Holding the boy afloat in the Atlantic, Juan tells him he is in the middle of the world, and the crew took the camera into the waves so viewers ride the lesson with them.
Q 02Moonlight is based on a never-staged play with which title?
In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue
In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Tarell Alvin McCraney wrote it in 2003 and it sat unproduced for about a decade, until a Miami arts collective passed the script to Barry Jenkins.
Q 03Who plays Little, the youngest version of Chiron, in Moonlight?
Alex Hibbert
Alex Hibbert. He had never made a film: the director found him during an open casting call that toured schools and community centres around Miami.
Q 04In which Miami neighbourhood does Chiron grow up in Moonlight?
Liberty City
Liberty City. The director and the playwright were both raised there, a few blocks apart and at the same schools, yet the two never met until they were adults.
Q 05Who plays Juan, the drug dealer who becomes a father figure to Chiron in Moonlight?
Mahershala Ali
Mahershala Ali. Juan appears only in the first of the film's three chapters, yet that short stretch of screen time won Ali the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Q 06In Moonlight, what is the heritage of Juan, the dealer who takes Little under his wing?
Afro-Cuban
Afro-Cuban. On the beach Juan tells Little he came from Cuba, and that Black people live in every corner of the world because they were 'the first ones on this planet'.
Q 07Who plays Paula, Chiron's mother, in Moonlight?
Naomie Harris
Naomie Harris. She had always said she would never play a crack addict, and gave in only when the director told her the character was his own mother's story.
Q 08Who plays Teresa, Juan's girlfriend, in Moonlight?
Janelle Monáe
Janelle Monáe. The singer had never acted on camera in a film, and her second, Hidden Figures, opened two months later, so both of her first two were up for Best Picture on the same night.
Q 09At Juan's dinner table in Moonlight, what does Little ask him to explain?
A homophobic slur
A homophobic slur. Juan says it is a word used to make gay people feel bad, then has to admit to the boy that he sells drugs and that his mother uses them.
Q 10In Moonlight, what has happened to Juan by the time Chiron is a teenager?
He has died
He has died. It happens off screen and comes up only in passing, when Chiron's mother remarks that she has not seen Teresa since the funeral.
Q 11What nickname does Kevin give the teenage Chiron in Moonlight?
Black
Black. When Chiron asks on the beach why Kevin keeps calling him that, Kevin just says it is his nickname for him, and Chiron grows up to use it as his own street name.
Q 12In Moonlight, what does the bully Terrel manipulate Kevin into doing?
Punching Chiron in a hazing ritual
Punching Chiron in a hazing ritual. Kevin tells him to stay down so it will end, but Chiron keeps getting back to his feet and meeting his eye.
Q 13How does Chiron take revenge on Terrel in Moonlight?
Smashes a chair over his head in class
Q 21Why did Barry Jenkins keep Moonlight's three Chiron actors apart during filming?
To avoid them imitating one another
To avoid them imitating one another. Each shot his chapter in a separate two-week block, and the three did not meet until the finished film was playing at festivals.
Q 22Whose faces are merged into a single portrait on Moonlight's theatrical poster?
The three actors who play Chiron
The three actors who play Chiron. Each third of the face belongs to a different actor and is tinted its own colour, echoing the way the film splits one life into three chapters.
Q 23By Barry Jenkins's own account, roughly what did Moonlight cost to make?
Smashes a chair over his head in class. A day earlier Chiron had refused to tell the principal who beat him; now he is the one led out of school in handcuffs as Kevin looks on.
Q 14In Moonlight's third chapter, where is the adult Chiron living and dealing drugs?
Atlanta
Atlanta. He tells Kevin he started over there and 'built myself hard', and his mother has moved to Georgia as well, into a drug rehab centre where he visits her.
Q 15In Moonlight, what does Kevin do for a living as an adult?
Cook at a diner
Cook at a diner. Kevin says he was put on the kitchen line while serving time and took to it, and when Chiron walks in he makes him the chef's special.
Q 16Which song does Kevin play for Chiron on the jukebox in Moonlight?
Hello Stranger by Barbara Lewis
Hello Stranger by Barbara Lewis. Kevin explains that a customer put it on one night and it brought Chiron to mind, which is why he picked up the phone after a decade.
Q 17What does Chiron confess to Kevin at the end of Moonlight?
That nobody else has touched him
That nobody else has touched him. He tells Kevin he is the only man who ever has, and the film closes on his memory of himself as Little, standing on a beach in the moonlight.
Q 18Who plays the adult Chiron in Moonlight's third chapter?
Trevante Rhodes
Trevante Rhodes. A former college sprinter, he came in to read for Kevin, and partway through the audition the director stopped him and asked him to try Chiron instead.
Q 19Who plays the adult Kevin in Moonlight?
André Holland
André Holland. A friend of the playwright who had acted in several of his stage plays, he shot his whole part, the final scene included, in just five days.
Q 20Who plays the teenage Kevin in Moonlight?
Jharrel Jerome
Jharrel Jerome. It was the first job he ever booked, landed during his first year at college, and the beach scene went on to win Best Kiss at the MTV Movie & TV Awards.
$1.5 million
$1.5 million. That is the director's own figure, though some listings put it nearer $4 million; either way the film went on to take about $65 million at cinemas worldwide.
Q 24Which company financed and released Moonlight, the first film it produced itself?
A24
A24. Until then the company had only distributed other people's films, such as Spring Breakers and Ex Machina; this time it put up the whole budget and kept the worldwide rights.
Q 25The actor cast as Juan in Moonlight was then best known for which television role?
Remy Danton in House of Cards
Remy Danton in House of Cards. He was still playing the lobbyist while Moonlight was being shot, and Luke Cage, his other series of the time, had not yet reached screens.
Q 26Which capital, recommended to Barry Jenkins as Europe's most boring city in summer, is where he wrote Moonlight?
Brussels
Brussels. He had asked friends for a place with no distractions, and once the draft was done he moved on to Berlin on the same trip and adapted a James Baldwin novel he had no rights to.
Q 27In the play behind Moonlight, how were the three stages of Chiron's life presented?
All at once, side by side
All at once, side by side. The script followed a single day for the boy, the teenager and the man together, and only partway through did it become clear that they were one person.
Q 28Each of Moonlight's three chapters was colour-graded to imitate what?
Different film stocks
Different film stocks. Shot on a digital camera, the chapters were graded to mimic Fuji, then Agfa, then Kodak film, and the long-retired Agfa look is what tints the middle chapter greenish-blue.
Q 29Which hip-hop remix technique did composer Nicholas Britell apply to Moonlight's orchestral score?
Chopped and screwed
Chopped and screwed. He recorded the strings and piano first, then slowed and bent the recordings, so that in the schoolyard fight Chiron's theme rumbles about three octaves below where it began.
Q 30Which festival, where Barry Jenkins had worked for years, gave Moonlight its world premiere in 2016?
Telluride
Telluride. Jenkins was a longtime member of the Colorado festival's staff, and three years before the premiere he met the film's future producers there after hosting a Q&A.