The iconic ‘Magnolia’ scene Tom Cruise rewrote and left Paul Thomas Anderson in awe: “Let me show you my instincts”
There’s a lot to be gained from the moment you first meet a character. The first gambit an actor has to be uniquely positioned for an audience to truly connect with the role. Whether it is powerful or subtle, it has to lead those sitting down in their comfy chairs into the story about to unfurl, and nobody knows this better than Tom Cruise.
Apart from the fact he has starred in dozens of hugely successful Hollywood movies, Cruise is a devotee of not just film but cinema – the spectacle of sitting down in a theatre and joining the rest of your audience in a communal moment of art appreciation. It has made him one of the most sincere acting giants Tinseltown has ever produced.
Perhaps in tribute to this supreme appreciation or the wild success he has enjoyed, Cruise has often found himself in conference with the filmmakers behind his movies on how to adjust or improve them. Most people now know that the stunts he performs on the Mission: Impossible series are hugely from his own fantasies, and that his appearance in Tropic Thunder was all of his own propulsion. But the tweaks Cruise comes up with can be interested in dialogue, too.
In 1999’s Magnolia, Cruise took on one of his more advantageous roles. Working with the newly crowned indie king, Paul Thomas Anderson, Cruise pitched himself as Frank Mackey a womanising hustler who convinces lonely men that he has the key to meeting and bedding women. It’s one of Cruise’s defining moments on screen and feels far removed from the bruising action hero we know him to be.
Much of the film relies on Cruise’s opening scene as Mackey, as he pushes his motivational speaking to the forefront and convinces a group of men, holed up in a conference room, that he has the key to seducing women and delivers what is now known as the “respect the cock” speech. It’s a humour-tinged moment of cringe-inducing performance that sets up the entire picture, but it almost didn’t work out that way.
The image of Cruise, in a leather vest and a potent sense of aftershave, is undeniably burned into the audience’s brain from the very start, and it was Cruise who made sure things went down the way they did. “The whole monologue wasn’t there at the beginning. That wasn’t there — there was a couple sentences, and I remember I was worried,” Cruise recalled as part of a conversation at the British Film Institute in London.
The reality of being Tom Cruise is that you have the pleasure of being able to pick and choose the roles you want, unburdened by the necessity to work, and that your previous success has afforded you the chance to have a perfectly lit screening room at your home. “I said, ‘Look, just come over to my place, let’s do the wardrobe fitting.’ And I remember he wanted me in IZOD shirts and khakis. I was like, ‘I don’t think that’s this guy. Let me show you my instincts on this,'” Cruise said.
“I said, ‘Just sit down right here in my screening room.’ I lit it, and I had the whole music, and I basically wrote the opening monologue, my version,” Cruise continued. “I was like, ‘Let me just show you what I’m gonna do,’ and he was literally right here sitting, and I had a stage, and I had lit, and I had the big speakers, and as I was doing it, I could just see his face, he’s like, ‘What the fuck?!'”
The scene plays out with gusto on the screen, Cruise is backlit as he enters the stage and bounds up and down the boards with the energy of a one-eyed man in front of a blind audience. Cruise’s Mackey is repugnant in every measure, and one assumes this was the actor’s intention. It convinced Anderson to pursue the idea and bring Mackey’s unlikability to the forefront of the movie.
The moment we meet a character is incredibly important, and, knowing this, Cruise made the instant we meet Magnolia‘s Mackey one of the most joyous of his career.
