The one role Tom Cruise refused to play again: “It was as simple as that”
For the first three and a half decades of his career, Tom Cruise made a deliberate and conscious effort to avoid sequels at all costs, although there was one obvious and notable exception to the rule.
The star would happily report for duty as super-spy Ethan Hunt in the latest instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, but that was where he drew the line. Studios, producers, and filmmakers would regularly inundate him with approaches to try and get him to reprise another role because there was money to be made, and he’d always shoot them down without hesitation.
Even now, there are only three characters Cruise has ever played more than once, and he’s never going to play one of them ever again. Regular collaborator Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher was followed by the sequel Never Go Back, but after the literary series was rebooted for the small screen, it’s safe to assume that Alan Ritchson will be the only guy playing the title character for the foreseeable future.
Cruise had spent 30 years resisting the urge to regain his need for speed in a follow-up to Tony Scott’s Top Gun, and when he finally got back into his flight suit for Joseph Koskinski’s Maverick, the end result was the highest-grossing release of his entire career and one of the best and most immersive blockbusters of the 21st century.
That’s the entirety of Cruise’s role reprisals thus far, and it’s beginning to look like that long-mooted sequel to Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow will never happen. The same goes for the Tropic Thunder spinoff focusing on Les Grossman, the actor has been bizarrely obsessed with for such a long time, while James Mangold’s Knight and Day and the wretched reboot of The Mummy didn’t perform well enough to warrant the multi-film sagas they were clearly eying.
One prospective cinematic successor that was definitely on the table at one stage was another bout of bloodsucking as Lestat in a sequel to Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, which survived the on-set friction between Cruise and Brad Pitt to deliver a gothic horror fable that recouped its budget almost four times over at the global box office and earned two Academy Award nominations.
Jordan began work on adapting Anne Rice’s book The Vampire Lestat for the screen, which obviously would have necessitated Cruise’s involvement, seeing as he played the title character. If he didn’t want to be involved, then the entire thing would immediately go up in a puff of smoke, which is pretty much exactly what happened.
“I was asked to write a script of The Vampire Lestat, which I did,” Jordan told Variety. “And quite simply, Tom didn’t want to reprise the role. It was as simple as that. And it would’ve been quite a different animal. If Mr Cruise had said he would do it, I’m sure they would’ve done it. But at the time, he wasn’t doing sequels.”
Cruise hadn’t even made his Mission: Impossible debut at the time, so sequels were uncharted territory. Jordan wanted to make it and Warner Bros were keen to try and capitalise on the success of the original, but it was impossible for the film to happen when the leading man rejected the opportunity to come back for a second bite at vampirism.
