‘What balls!’: ‘Apollo 13’ star Kathleen Quinlan on firing off notes to Ron Howard, secret dinner with Tom Hanks, and why her Oscar-nominated role was more than just ‘the wife’

First things first: yes, the ring thing really happened.

Early on in Apollo 13 — Ron Howard’s 1995 dramatization of the famous 1970 NASA space odyssey that very nearly became a space tragedy — there’s a scene that plays more like fiction than fact. On the morning of the launch that rockets Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) into the wild blue yonder, the celebrated astronaut’s wife, Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan), steps into a motel shower… and watches in horror as her wedding ring is washed down the drain mid-rinse.

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It’s the culmination of a series of premonitions she’s had warning her that Jim’s mission isn’t going to go smoothly. And, sure enough, a few days into Apollo 13’s moon-bound trajectory Lovell radios Houston to alert them to a very serious problem aboard the unluckily numbered spacecraft.

“All that was real,” Quinlan confirms to Gold Derby ahead of Apollo 13’s 30th anniversary on June 30. (NASA marked the 55th anniversary of the actual mission in April.) “She dropped the ring down the drain and realized it was not a good omen. She felt that something ominous was coming — and it did.” (For the record, Jim Lovell later revealed that the movie did take one creative liberty: in real life, Marilyn recovered her wedding band from the shower drain trap.)

Quinlan — who earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance — learned about the veracity of the ring incident direct from the source. Prior to production, she spent some time with the Lovells at their lakeside home in Texas. The trip included peeks through photo albums, plenty of stories and a private Cessna flight to the NASA museum in Houston piloted by Jim himself.

“Marilyn didn’t like flying,” Quinlan recalls. “She sat in the back of the plane with a thermos and served us coffee.”

Meeting Marilyn — who died in 2023 — alleviated one of the chief concerns that Quinlan had when she accepted the role. “I was worried a little bit about playing ‘the wife,’” the actress admits candidly, acknowledging the limited roles for women in so many Hollywood studio productions in the ‘90s. “You were either the wife or the girlfriend and that’s pretty much what you did. I felt the danger of being ‘the wife.’”

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Her time with the Lovells, though, provided her with a fresh perspective on the part. “Once I met Marilyn, I understood the gravity of what astronauts’ wives did,” she says. “They had to stay home and take care of the kids by themselves all while acting like everything is fine. I remember thinking, ‘There’s something to this.’”

With that thought top of mind, Quinlan returned to Los Angeles and typed up a series of notes intended to correct some of the inaccuracies she now saw in Marilyn’s portrayal in the script based on her trip to Texas. She then faxed those notes directly to Howard.

“What balls!” Quinlan says with a hearty laugh while thinking back on her younger self's chutzpah. “But Ron was very gracious about it and even took some of my notes.”

While those typed notes have long since been lost to history, Quinlan does remember that one of her chief recommendations was centering Marilyn as a crucial part of the extended NASA team. “NASA always told the wives that they would be the ones sending their husbands off to space,” she explains. “What they said was very important — they needed to keep the astronauts’ psychology strong. They were the crew’s ground mission control so to speak.”

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In the end, Howard recognized the dramatic value of Quinlan’s approach. “He said that my work grounded the other actors’ work,” she says. “That was very flattering.”

(L to R) Emily Ann Lloyd, Quinlan, Miko Hughes and Mary Kate Schellhardt in Apollo 13Universal/courtesy Everett Collection

Released in the midst of a crowded summer movie season, Apollo 13 enjoyed a five-week run at the top of the box-office charts and raked in cash well into the fall. It finished the year as the second highest-grossing film of 2025, right behind Batman Forever — proof that scientists could go toe-to-toe with superheroes at the multiplex.

Apollo 13 was a hit on the awards circuit as well, earning nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Besides Quinlan, Ed Harris also scored a Best Supporting Actor nod for his breakout performance as flight director Gene Kranz.

“I got to be in a great film that’s become a classic,” Quinlan says of her part in the movie’s three-decade legacy. “That’s a great thing to have in my kit.”

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To celebrate 30 years of Apollo 13, Quinlan dug into her kit to share memories from the movie’s production, from a pre-filming dinner date with Hanks to why we don't see Jim and Marilyn reunite at the final scene.

Dinner with Tom

Quinlan was already a Hollywood veteran by the time Apollo 13 came her way, having gotten her start in the early ‘70s with roles in movies like American Graffiti and Airport ’77 as well as regular guest spots on such vintage shows as Police Woman and Ironside. In all that time, though, she had never crossed paths with Hanks in a casting session until she showed up to read for Marilyn — a meeting she squeezed in before undergoing surgery on her left shoulder.

“I did my reading with Tom and Ron, and then went to surgery,” she says, laughing. “When I woke up, my then-husband Bruce Abbott told me, ‘You got it!’ And I said, ‘Got what?’”

Once the post-surgery haze passed, Quinlan threw herself into preparing for the shoot. Having enjoyed a small window into Jim and Marilyn's relationship, she wanted to ensure that she and Hanks had the same level of intimacy and familiarity as the real-life Lovells — especially as the actors would only be occupying the same frame for a limited amount of screentime.

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“Tom was very friendly, but he was also Tom Hanks and that was intimidating in and of itself,” she says of her costar, who was coming off back-to-back Best Actor wins for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. Determined to conquer any sense of intimidation before showing up on set, Quinlan had her agent call Hanks’ office to arrange a private dinner date — a request that she’s only made of two actors during her career.

“Both of them were surprised, too, which I found a little strange,” she says. (The other actor? Chris Cooper, who played her husband in the 2007 spy thriller Breach.)

Joined by Abbott, Quinlan met Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, at a secluded restaurant in the SoCal mountains that she doesn’t name but confirms is still open. (“You’d have to know about it,” she teases.) The out-of-the-way location afforded the duo the atmosphere and the time to really get to know each other. “I felt like I could relax around him,” Quinlan says about their actorly connection coming away from the table.

Hanks didn’t forget the dinner either… but for slightly different reasons. Quinlan remembers getting a call from his office days later with a follow-up request. “They said, ‘Tom would like to know the name of that place you took him so he can take his son there!”

Staying grounded

Apollo 13 went into production during that in-between period when old-school movie magic like wire work seemed dated, but the new wave of computer-generated tricks were still booting up. So in order to realistically depict weightlessness in space, Howard famously put Hanks and his costars — the late Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon — aboard the so-called “Vomit Comet,” a training aircraft that NASA employed to get its own astronauts accustomed to being human flotation devices.

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The name wasn’t an exaggeration: nausea was a regular co-pilot for anyone who rode in the Boeing-made vessel. That’s one of the reasons why Quinlan says she never asked Howard for her own chance to experience weightlessness.

“I wanted to at first, but then I heard that James Cameron and another big director had called to ask if he could ride in the Vomit Comet, and got turned down,” she says. “I thought, ‘If Ron is turning them down, I’m not even asking.”

Besides her sightings of Hanks, Paxton, and Bacon after they exited the aircraft told her all she needed to know. “I watched all those boys come out, and they were just green,” she remembers with a big grin. “I just said, ‘Nah, I’ll pass.’”

Quinlan and Tracy Reiner are looking at a basketball, not a rocket, in the Apollo 13 launch sceneUniversal/courtesy Everett Collection

Playing pretend

When it came to the film’s recreation of Apollo 13’s launch, Howard obviously didn’t have the budget to send a real rocket into the final frontier. Instead, the skillfully-edited sequence — Mike Hill and Daniel Hanley shared a Best Film Editing nomination — relies largely on models and limited CGI.

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But that’s not Quinlan saw when she’s seen reacting to the rocket taking flight. Instead, she was staring at something much more… low-fi. “They rigged a basketball to the end of a C-stand,” she says when asked where Howard directed her gaze for her part of the launch sequence.

After Jim leaves Earth’s atmosphere, Marilyn’s only connection to him is through news footage and private NASA radio. Quinlan says that much of that material was played live on set so she had something to react to in the moment. “Having those playbacks really helped,” she emphasizes, recalling an earlier instance in her career when those kinds of assists wasn’t made available.

“I’ll never forget being in The Twilight Zone movie when greenscreen had just been invented,” Quinlan says. “I was shown this little round thing on the end of a popsicle stick and was told to react to it! It took me awhile to learn how to react to things that aren’t really there. I’ve learned that you just have to believe in it for that moment.”

There’s no missing Jim and Marilyn reunion

It's notable that the last scene Hanks and Quinlan share together in the film also conspires to keep them apart. To avoid any infections, the departing astronauts have to say goodbye to their families from across a strip of highway. "I really liked that because the audience gets to feel their separation," Quinlan says of the staging. "I thought that was a very good choice by Ron."

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Even after Jim returns to Earth at the end of the movie, Howard chooses to avoid depicting the couple's joyful reunion. Instead, the final sequence stays with the astronauts as they're recovered from their capsule while Hanks narrates what happened to the principal figures in the years after. Quinlan confirms that she didn't shoot any additional material and believes seeing the Lovells together again isn't necessary to those final moments anyway.

"I think what's there is resolution enough," she says matter-of-factly. "Showing him landing and her seeing that he landed on the news allows everybody gets to feel that moment along with Marilyn."

While critics largely loved Apollo 13, the only review that mattered to Quinlan was Marilyn's — and it turned out to be a rave. "It's always scary when you play a real person what their reaction is going to be," she notes. "Marilyn saw the movie at the premiere in Houston, and I had seen it already so I waited outside. When it was over, she come up to me and said: 'Kathleen — you did a great job.' That was such a relief."

Meanwhile, Jim Lovell — who recently celebrated his 97th birthday — had his own gift for Quinlan. "At one point, I asked him, 'How did you keep going in the face of everything going wrong?'" she recalls. "He said, 'I never felt like I didn't have an ace to play.' I've carried that with me forever."

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