Tom Hanks was called up for jury service. The actor was called up to deliberate over a domestic violence case and he was determined to do his duty rather than use his celebrity status to get out of it. He said: "I don't know how it works in the UK but here you are sitting around and then one day you get a summons in the mail to appear for duty. "And you end up making some phone calls and you get some things explained to you and you can ask to be excused ... but you cannot lie and you have to have very specific reasons why you need to be excused. And if you don't have them ... then what you really need to is show up. "And it just so happens that other than cancelling some really important interviews for the worldwide media, I had no reason not to show up for jury duty - so down I went." Although he doesn't think he was necessarily a distraction during the case, the defence requested a mistrial after one of the prosecutor's team approached the star during a lunch break. The 'Forrest Gump' actor explained: "Somebody was eating lunch and said to me, 'Hello, thanks for coming down, most people try to get out of jury duty'.
