The one icon Tom Cruise was nervous to meet: “You want to be accepted”
Someone who rappels around the outside of skyscrapers, straps themselves to moving planes, and rides motorcycles from cliffsides before parachuting to safety wouldn’t come across as being the nervous type, but Tom Cruise wasn’t always Hollywood’s foremost daredevil.
That being said, he’s always carried himself with a natural confidence and sense of determination, so imagining him trembling in the presence of a silver screen icon is still difficult to picture. And yet, that was the exact position he found himself in before he was an A-list megastar; with Cruise so desperate to meet an idol he even went to an audition more in the hopes of encountering them than anything else.
Cruise didn’t become a world-famous celebrity until after the release of Tony Scott’s action blockbuster Top Gun in 1986, but it was already apparent through his performances – Risky Business in particular – that he was destined to reach the very top of the industry.
In the period after he slid through a living room in his pants but before he took to the skies as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell for the first time, Cruise admitted that he wasn’t overly concerned at the prospect of bombing his audition when he was thrilled enough to come face-to-face with one of his heroes in Paul Newman.
“I auditioned for Harry & Son, mostly because I wanted to meet Paul,” he admitted, per The Independent. “I was nervous. Starting out as a young actor, you want people to like you, you want people to like your work, you want to be accepted.”
At the time, Cruise recalled that “Taps had come out, and I think Risky Business,” with Newman sitting in his office with Joanne Woodward, who was knitting. “He said, ‘Hey killer. How’s it going?'” Cruise reflected, fondly remembering how the legendary star was “very excited to see an actor coming in very relaxed.”
Obviously, Cruise didn’t end up getting the part in Harry & Son as the younger half of the titular duo, with Robby Benson ultimately winning out. Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait too long to be reunited with Newman once again and without being overlooked for a role, when they shared the screen three years later in Martin Scorsese’s 1987 legacy sequel The Color of Money.
The end result was critical, commercial, and awards season glory, with Newman finally winning the big one and claiming his Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ at the seventh attempt. Things worked out a lot better for Cruise the second time he entered the star’s orbit, then, with an unsuccessful audition for a drama that flopped at the box office being handily outstripped by a pivotal part in a picture that led its leading man – and his inspiration – directly to their crowning achievement.
