Johnny Depp’s unlikely pick for Tom Cruise’s greatest performance: “The best I’ve ever seen”
As two handsome and charming actors who were born just 13 months apart and made it big around the same time, it was almost inevitable that Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise would find themselves in the running for the same part several times over, even if they took markedly different approaches to their career.
Whereas Depp worked with Wes Craven and Oliver Stone early on, it was 21 Jump Street that made him a household name, and he hated it. When he was finally able to break free from his contract, he made a point of avoiding the Hollywood game in favour of taking on challenging, idiosyncratic parts.
Cruise, meanwhile, had his sights set at the very top from the beginning. Once Top Gun shot him onto the top of the A-list in 1986, he refused to come down. One chased performance while the other embraced persona, but their names were regularly discussed in the same studio circles behind closed doors.
The most famous is the title role in Edward Scissorhands, with the film’s backers pushing for Cruise to take the part. He ended up asking too many questions about the mechanics of using the bathroom and questioning things that Tim Burton didn’t feel worth questioning, which eventually saw the director get his way and hire Depp like he’d wanted to from the start.
Conversely, Cruise ended up playing Lestat in Interview with the Vampire after Depp had turned it down, and they once came close to sharing the same franchise when they were drafted into the Dark Universe, which ended up going down in an embarrassing ball of flames as one of blockbuster cinema’s most unintentionally hilarious and overambitious failures.
Cruise has given Academy Award-nominated performances in Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia, and he won Golden Globes for all three of those roles. He’s also done excellent work playing against type in Michael Mann’s Collateral and going toe-to-toe with Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, with his range and talents as an actor often being outstripped by sheer star power.
However, none of them exists in Depp’s eyes as the single greatest performance he’s ever given, with the Pirates of the Caribbean headliner instead of the opinion that burying himself under prosthetics and bellowing down a phone line takes the cake. That’s right; he’s a firm believer that Tropic Thunder was the high point of Cruise’s on-screen exploits.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Depp admitted, “That’s the best I’ve ever seen Cruise,” and it was a glorified cameo at best. Having worked with plenty of studio moguls in his time, the Mission: Impossible frontman didn’t have to look too far to find his inspiration, even if those in the know were fully aware of who he was basing the megalomaniacal Grossman on.
Whether Grossman really was an amalgamation of Scott Rudin, Harvey Weinstein, and Sumner Redstone remains entirely up for debate because Cruise has neither confirmed nor denied how he developed the bald cap, beard, and enlarged forearms that defined the dance-happy executive, but Depp doesn’t care when he thinks it’s a career-best turn either way.
