The back-to-back movies that would make or break Tom Cruise: “Can I do this? Do I have the talent?”
The thought of Tom Cruise being plunged into an existential crisis and worrying about whether or not he had the chops to make it as a top-line Hollywood talent sounds ridiculous, since he’s Tom Cruise.
After all, who else can say they’ve spent 40 years as one of the biggest stars in the business? He can, and he’s managed to do it without slipping down the pecking order, apart from that awkward period in the mid-2000s where it felt as though he was being squeezed out of the A-list.
He sort of brought that on himself, what with Cruise going bananas on Oprah Winfrey’s couch, effectively calling psychiatry a wad of bullshit on television, and getting dumped by his home studio, Paramount, with the company’s then-boss going on record saying that he believed women found the star repellent.
The Mission: Impossible figurehead bounced back, though, as he’s wont to do, and all he had to do to rehabilitate his image was to keep his mouth shut and refuse to talk about anything other than his love of the business. You can’t say it hasn’t worked, and it’s fair to call him about as bulletproof as it gets.
However, in the immediate aftermath of Tony Scott’s Top Gun strapping a rocket to his back and making him a household name, Cruise didn’t want to be known as an action guy, which is ironic, when virtually everything he’s made for the last 20 years has been an action flick in some form or another.
He knew he had to challenge himself to reach the next level and convince both audiences and the Tinseltown hierarchy that he could hold his own as a performer. To do that, he played two different but equally challenging roles in consecutive pictures, and his concerns proved to be unfounded.
“When I made that film, people said, ‘This is going to ruin your career. Why are you doing this after you did Top Gun? Why not just do Top Gun 2?'” Cruise recalled of the time he signed up for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. Before that, he had to get Barry Levinson’s Rain Man out of the way, too.
“There was a time when I thought, ‘This is when I know if I’m… Can I go to that next level?'” he wondered. “Because I did Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July back-to-back, and I thought, ‘Can I do this? Do I have the talent?'”
Based on the fact Rain Man was the highest-grossing release of 1988 and won four Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, and Born on the Fourth of July claimed two Oscars, including ‘Best Director’, and earned Cruise his first nod for ‘Best Actor’, which he probably deserved to win, it would be an understatement to say that he got his answer.
