Did a Tom Cruise binge-watch launch the career of JJ Abrams?
It’s become patently clear that few people love cinema quite as much as Tom Cruise, but the actor hasn’t put on the blinders and given up watching TV in favour of restricting his output solely to celluloid.
In fact, one of the most commercially successful directorial careers of the 21st century owes everything to Cruise becoming so obsessed with a series that he made a point of hand-picking the show’s creator from the small screen to hand them their first taste of helming a motion picture.
By the mid-2000s, JJ Abrams was already a known commodity, but not as a filmmaker. He’d notched several screenwriting credits on films like Harrison Ford’s Regarding Henry and Michael Bay’s Armageddon, but it was on television where he began to carve out a niche for himself as the creator of high-concept cult favourites.
Felicity got his foot in that particular door before Alias elevated his profile to the next level. Bradley Cooper may have hated being a part of it, but the Jennifer Garner-led espionage adventure had plenty of high-profile supporters, considering its eclectic list of guest stars, which included Quentin Tarantino, David Cronenberg, Ricky Gervais, Ethan Hawke, Roger Moore, and Christian Slater.
Abrams’ entire history as a director at the time extended as far as two Felicity episodes and the first and last instalments in Alias‘ first season, but Cruise nonetheless decided he was the perfect candidate to make the leap to blockbusters and take over Mission: Impossible III after David Fincher’s departure.
As he revealed on an episode of Dinner for Five, he was shooting the pilot episode of Lost when Cruise called him to fanboy over the series. “I watched every episode of Alias,” the A-lister told him. “44 episodes. The first two seasons. I was like, ‘Really?’ We hung out. It was like we had started dating, and before I knew it, we’d become buddies.”
Abrams thought they were merely friends who admired each other’s work, but Cruise had an ulterior motive in mind. “Before I knew it, I got this phone call, and my agent is like, ‘Are you aware of the conversation?'” he continued. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘About you directing Mission: Impossible III‘. And I was like, ‘What?’ And that’s how it happened.”
His feature-length directorial debut may have been the lowest-grossing entry in the franchise, but it quickly led Abrams onto bigger and better things. He took the reins on the first two chapters in the rebooted Star Trek, homaged Steven Spielberg and the glory days of Amblin with Super 8 before being tasked to follow in George Lucas’ footsteps and breathe new life into Star Wars with The Force Awakens.
Abrams is now the ninth highest-grossing director in cinema history, and he owes it all to Cruise devouring the first two seasons of Alias.
