The only two demands Tom Cruise had for ‘Tropic Thunder’: “It changed the whole plot of the movie”
Tom Cruise is one of Hollywood’s longest-standing movie stars, and when he signs on to a project, it’s pretty much guaranteed that he’ll get what he wants. In general, this means doing his own stunts, but when he’s working in a movie that doesn’t require any death-defying action sequences, he still brings a few demands.
The fact that he appeared in Ben Stiller’s cringeworthy 2008 showbiz satire Tropic Thunder at all is a minor miracle. He is a blockbuster guy. He might have ventured into critically acclaimed dramas in the late ‘90s with movies like Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia, but he hasn’t made anything approaching an action-free cerebral Oscar contender since Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs in 2007, and even that was about war.
Before Tropic Thunder, he was similarly allergic to comedy. Having gotten his breakthrough in 1983’s Risky Business, he barely dipped a toe into comedic waters afterward, unless you count movies like Jerry Maguire and his cameo appearance in an Austin Powers sequel. But when his old pal Ben Stiller sent him the script for his next movie, he wanted to be a part of it.
Stiller originally offered Cruise the role of a talent agent, but the Top Gun star reminded him that he’d been there, done that in Jerry Maguire. It was Cruise himself who pointed out that the script was missing a studio executive, so Stiller and co-writers Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen dutifully wrote the role of Les Grossman, a balding, irreverent bloviator who is producing the Vietnam War movie within the story. “It changed the whole plot of the movie but made it so much better,” Stiller said in an interview with Conan O’Brien in the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast.
When Cruise altered the script so radically, Stiller must have suspected that the star would have a few more rewrites and requests up his sleeve. He might have insisted on doing a completely unnecessary skydive. He might have insisted on scaling a cliff face to get to his boardroom. Instead, he wanted two very small things. “He wanted to have big, thick forearms that were hairy,” Stiller recalled, and “he wanted to dance.”
Sure enough, Les Grossman wears button-down shirts that are always rolled up to the elbows to put the hairy forearms on display, and he does indeed dance. It isn’t just a little hip gyration after he finishes screaming at Matthew McConaughey’s character. Set to Ludacris’ ‘Get Back,’ the routine takes place over the end credits and lasts for over two minutes. In a movie jam-packed with comedic talent, it steals the show.
“He has an amazing instinct about movies,” Stiller said. “He’s so smart… he’s a student of movies, and he’s just… he had this feeling like, ‘You need this element to the story.’”
Even though Cruise isn’t known primarily for comedy, Stiller wasn’t kidding when he said the star had a good instinct. In 1998, he singlehandedly saved Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels from the scrap heap long before Guy Ritchie was a known quantity.
