The brutal R-rated superhero role Tom Cruise lobbied for: “Would have been unbelievable”
These days, the number of prominent actors in Hollywood who haven’t played a superhero, or at least appeared in a superhero movie, can be counted on less than one hand. There’s Leonardo DiCaprio, who famously warned Timothée Chalamet off putting on spandex, and Tom Hanks, who has admitted he’s not a huge fan of the genre. The other big holdout is, of course, Tom Cruise – but if he’d had his way, he may have joined the cape and cowl brigade nearly two decades ago.
To dig through this tale of Cruise lobbying for a truly brutal superhero role, we must cast our minds back to the mid-2000s. In 2006, superheroes were riding high at the box office again, thanks to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, Bryan Singer’s X-Men films, and Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. This prompted Marvel Comics to establish its own movie studio and hire Elf’s Jon Favreau to make its first big-budget blockbuster: Iron Man.
At the time, Iron Man was very much a C-list character in comics, but because Marvel had already licensed its big guns out to different studios, weapons designer Tony Stark was seen as the best bet for the company’s opening cinematic salvo. The fledgling studio initially felt it needed a big name star to play Stark to guarantee butts on seats, so before it even hired Favreau to helm the film, producers sounded out Cruise to see if he was interested.
To Marvel’s chagrin, though, Cruise didn’t see the vision for Iron Man, and couldn’t be persuaded to come on board. In 2005, he told IGN that Marvel made its pitch, but admitted, “When I do something, I want to do it right. If I commit to something, it has to be done in a way that I know it’s gonna be something special. And as it was lining up, it just didn’t feel to me like it was gonna work.“
Three years later, Robert Downey Jr proved that Iron Man could very much work on the big screen, and Cruise backed up the casting decision in 2018 when he gushed, “I can’t imagine anyone else in that role, and I think it’s perfect for him.” After this brief flirtation with Marvel’s armoured adventurer, though, most fans believed that was the last time Cruise truly considered a role in a superhero movie – until 2024, that is.
During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Man of Steel and Rebel Moon director Zack Snyder dropped the bombshell that he had approached Cruise about playing a character in his 2009 Watchmen adaptation. That comic, written by Alan Moore and drawn by David Gibbons, is widely considered the greatest superhero story of all time, and it is fiendishly clever in its deconstruction of the myths and tropes of superhero worlds.
It was long believed to be unfilmable, but Snyder found a way in 2009, and while it wasn’t an enormous box office smash, it has developed a cult following over the years. Well, unless your name is Alan Moore; he hates it, along with every other adaptation of his work.
Snyder, then best known for directing 300 and Dawn of the Dead, took a meeting with Cruise to pitch him on the character of Ozymandias, also known as philanthropist and former superhero Adrian Veidt. Ozymandias is handsome, charming, and beloved by the public, but in the big twist, he is revealed to be the villain of the piece. Cruise was intrigued by the part, and Snyder confirmed, “I did talk to him about it for a while,” but then the megastar threw a curveball. He didn’t want to play Ozymandias. Instead, he was much more intrigued by Rorschach.
In Watchmen, Rorschach is a violent vigilante wearing a white mask that covers his entire face, and features inkblots that morph and change shape constantly. The character is viewed as a psychopath even by the other heroes, and in the film, he delivers a growly noir-style voiceover, beats a child predator to death with a meat cleaver, and complains about being covered in “human bean juice” after a particularly fierce altercation.
While it might sound unlikely that Cruise would want to play such an intense character who spends much of the film hidden behind a mask, it’s also undeniably exciting to think about what he could have done with it. As Snyder said, it “would have been unbelievable.”
Whatever the case, though, it was all academic at that point because the director had already cast Rorschach with Little Children star Jackie Earle Haley, and was convinced he was the man for the job. “Tom wanted to play Rorschach, which obviously he could have done, but we had Jackie already, and Jackie’s unbelievable,” Snyder confessed. “I certainly would have considered Tom in retrospect, if I hadn’t had Jackie.” So, Cruise wound up losing the part to Haley, and we bet that’s the only scenario in which that sentence will ever be uttered again. Weird, huh?
