The Idris Elba role Tom Cruise was supposed to play: “He wanted to do it”
It’s probably been at least 30 years since Tom Cruise has ever had to audition for anything, and it’s a standard part of the acting business he’ll never have to deal with again. If he wants to star in a movie, then he’s going to star in it, and that’s how it works.
That might sound like an oversimplification, but it’s not. When Joseph Kosinski first pitched the A-list megastar with his idea for a Top Gun sequel, Cruise casually whipped out his phone, called up the head of studio Paramount and told him that he was making a sequel to Top Gun, which is exactly what he did.
Cruise competing with other actors for parts hasn’t been a factor in his career since the early 1990s at the very earliest, but his loss was Idris Elba’s gain on one occasion. They’re both hugely popular and undeniably charismatic performers with charisma to spare and a propensity for playing straight-laced and stoic heroes, but that’s where the similarities end.
It’s impossible to imagine Elba doing a better job of running away from aliens in War of the Worlds or thwarting a dystopian conspiracy in Minority Report, and it’s equally silly to try and envision Cruise sporting the signature coat of John Luther while solving crimes and apprehending murders.
Similarly, in theory, the prospect of Cruise promising to cancel the apocalypse in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim sounds ludicrous. It’s the cheesiest line in a movie that’s capable of killing the lactose intolerant, but it’s delivered with such authority and gravitas that it’s entirely believable that Elba would be able to rally the troops with such a stupid soundbite, especially when he’s playing a character called Stacker Pentecost.
And yet, the part was Cruise’s for the taking, and he wanted to do it. Del Toro has been trying to work with the Mission: Impossible figurehead for a long time, most notably in At the Mountains of Madness, but it’s never come to pass. Still, he did reveal to Collider that Pacific Rim came pretty close.
“So, the part that Idris Elba plays, Tom Cruise was gonna do it, and I even have a karaoke scene,” the filmmaker confirmed. “The deal couldn’t be made. He wanted to do it. We were developing stuff, and he couldn’t do it. I thought, ‘You know what? Let’s go with Idris Elba, then. He’s a god’. Obviously, I had to rewrite it for that, but I thought it was gonna be an interesting analogue to that. It would have been a lot of fun.”
Cruise bellowing out expositional orders as giant monsters battled giant robots in the background is so dumb that it definitely would have worked within the ridiculous context of Pacific Rim, but Elba ended up getting one of his career’s most memorable quotes out of the deal.
