Film star Tom Hanks said he was “amazed and surprised” Donald Trump secured the keys to the White House last week – and wondered if the president-elect felt the same.

The Forrest Gump actor gave his opinion on the controversial politician’s election at a special screening of his new film Sully – Miracle On The Hudson at Waterloo Imax.

A vocal Trump critic prior to the election, Tom said: “Well I didn’t vote for that guy, I voted for someone else – can you believe that. I was amazed and surprised, perhaps as much as the president-elect.”

But Tom said he believed the American people would soon come to terms with a Trump presidency.

Citing Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and other ground-breaking moments in US history, he said: “My country has been torn apart on my watch, while I was there, and what we all did was we figured out what needed to be done. So we’ll be all right.”

Tom was joined on the red carpet by co-star Aaron Eckhart and the real-life Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, who famously landed a passenger jet with 155 people on board on New York’s Hudson River after a goose-strike caused engine failure three minutes into the flight.

The film explores the incident itself and the controversial hearings that followed.

Tom said the dramatisation of these hearings brought an added pressure in making the film because “you don’t want to turn someone into a villain when they’re just doing their job”.

He added: “Nor do you want to take someone who did something magnificent and make it seem outside the realms of normal human behaviour – they’re not supermen.”

But it appears he has nothing to worry about, with the real-life Sully describing the film as “true to the emotion of the story” and calling the aviation sequences “very, very accurate”.

He described seeing the film for the first time as an “emotional experience for all four of us in our family”.