“It wasn’t arrogance”: the 1980 audition that convinced Tom Cruise he’d be a movie star
Confidence is one of the most important parts of being an actor, because if you don’t believe in yourself, who else is going to believe in you? It’s not something that Tom Cruise has ever lacked, and he had it in spades well before he’d made a name for himself.
Obviously, he was right, although even he might not have been able to predict that he’d spent 40 uninterrupted years perched at the summit of the Hollywood A-list, the kind of longevity that very few actors have ever managed to achieve, and there are no signs he’ll be coming down anytime soon.
When Clint Eastwood says yours is the career they’ll be talking about and studying a century from now, looking at how his has panned out, that says an awful lot. Cruise is the biggest star in the business, and he has been for a long time, but he always had the sneaking suspicion he’d get there eventually.
25 months after making his screen debut in Endless Love, Risky Business, his fifth feature, was released in August 1983, and heralded that an unstoppable rising star was coming. Three years after that, Tony Scott’s Top Gun arrived in cinemas, with his eighth big-screen outing confirming his leading man credentials.
However, despite having less than 24 hours of on-set experience to his name at the time, the fresh-faced Cruise had a good feeling about his 1980 audition for Taps. “I hadn’t done anything up to that point,” he explained. “Well, my mom was in amateur theatre, and I’d done a couple of musicals. But, basically, my experience was a one-day shoot on Endless Love.”
Director Harold Becker and producer Stanley Jaffe were both present as prospective cast members were put through their paces, but Cruise nailed it. “I said one line. That was it,” he recalled. “I don’t know why, but as I walked out, I thought I’d get it. It wasn’t arrogance. I had a quarter in my pocket, and that was it. I’m telling you: I didn’t have bus fare to get back to where my mom was living in Jersey.”
So skint that he had to walk home, the Taps team had already made their decision by the time he got back. “I walked up the driveway, and saw my mother on the phone through the window,” he added. “It was a distance, but I remember her face. She looked at me, and I looked at her, and I thought, ‘I got it.'”
He was right: he had gotten it, and Cruise would play his first decent-sized role in a movie as David Shawn, alongside recent Academy Award winner Timothy Hutton and a couple of familiar names, including Sean Penn and Giancarlo Esposito. He was only 18 at the time, but he knew he’d nailed his one-line audition, and that ironclad confidence only continued to grow stronger.
Not many people would have looked at him in Taps and thought, ‘Within five years, he’ll be the biggest star in Hollywood, and he’ll still be the biggest star in Hollywood four decades after that’. Maybe everyone except Tom Cruise, who always knew he’d get there.
