The co-star who thought Tom Cruise was overrated: “I cannot say I felt the appeal”
You don’t spend 40 unbroken years as one of cinema’s biggest stars without doing something right, but regardless of his impressive and borderline unprecedented A-list residency, one question continues to linger: is Tom Cruise a good actor?
The simplest answer is that, yes, he is, but it’s more complicated than that. Cruise has shown repeatedly over the years that he’s got top-drawer dramatic performances in his locker, but as he evolved into his current, and presumably final, form as an entity made of nothing but teeth and star power, those examples have grown increasingly few and far between.
Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Digger will be a real litmus test, in what marks the tiny stuntman’s closest thing to a serious, straightforward turn since 2008’s Valkyrie, which wasn’t entirely well-received. Since then, he’s been using his charisma, charm, and death-defying feats to carry his career, but he’s also in his 60s now.
He was incredible in Michael Mann’s Heat, he would have been guaranteed an Oscar for Born on the Fourth of July if it wasn’t for that pesky Daniel Day-Lewis, and his work in Magnolia holds up better than Michael Caine’s in The Cider House Rules, so he probably should have won that one, too. Even though he gave them back, he’s still a three-time Golden Globe winner.
Lions for Lambs could have ushered in a new era for Cruise if the political drama wasn’t a soggy snoozefest that shat the bed at the box office, but when he was on the cusp of establishing himself as the next big thing, one of his co-stars completely and utterly failed to see what all the hype was about.
“Before we met on the set of Legend, I had seen Risky Business, with Tom cast perfectly as the cute, innocent young rebel,” Tim Curry wrote in his memoir. “And when we finally appeared in a film together, he was very nice and easy to be around, but he’s also quite unique, and not a person I fully understood.
‘Quite unique’ is one way of describing the industry’s premier popcorn-munching, movie-obsessed Scientologist, not that he won Curry over. “We never had any issues,” he clarified. “But I cannot say I felt the appeal.” Mid-1980s Cruise wasn’t quite Tom Cruise: Movie Star, but he wasn’t too far away, either.
It was his last release before Top Gun pushed him over the top, and it was an experience so miserable that he never wanted to repeat it. Spare a thought for poor Curry, though, who had to spend hours in the makeup chair every day, which didn’t hamper him in giving one of the hammiest performances you’ll ever see in anything, ever.
“Unlike many others in the ’80s, I wasn’t desperately star-struck around him,” the Rocky Horror legend added. “In fact, I was kind of dreading it. I couldn’t really identify why. Maybe he sensed my reticence and was consequently a little awkward.” Curry didn’t think Cruise lived up to the fuss that followed him everywhere he went, but ever the professional, he did the job as best he could, awkwardness aside.
