The “stupid” sex scene Tom Cruise hated every moment of shooting: “It seemed so out of place”
Maybe it’s got something to do with evolving audience tastes or the way cinema has become more of a business than an art form, but modern Hollywood’s biggest stars, a pile at which Tom Cruise sits at the top, have become increasingly chaste and sexless figures.
That’s not to say the most successful actors in the business should be going at it hammer-and-tongs every time they grace the screen, but they’re all a bit wishy-washy. Have a wee gander at any list of the industry’s highest-paid performers, and one thing most of them have in common is that any notable depictions of onscreen intimacy or sexuality are either sorely lacking, or entirely absent.
Cruise is an obvious example, not that anybody really wants to see him shooting sex scenes in his 60s, but there’s also Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, Chris Hemsworth, and Will Smith, to name a few. All of them are conventionally attractive lads, most of whom have biceps for days, but doing anything even remotely saucy doesn’t seem to be in their wheelhouse, which is nothing if not curious.
After all, animal magnetism has been the order of the day since actors evolved into movie stars, with James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Alain Delon possessing it in spades. Realistically, is there so much as a single viewer out there who wants to see Tom Cruise shagging onscreen? Hopefully not, but you never know, and the good news is that since he’s more persona than person, he probably won’t.
However, that wasn’t the case back in his fresh-faced younger days, even if he didn’t want to do it. He even starred in a sex comedy, 1982’s Losin’ It, which was predicated entirely on a cabal of randy bastards trying to lose their virginities. He didn’t enjoy that experience, and he didn’t enjoy it when it was thrust upon him, for want of a better term, in 1984’s All the Right Moves, either.
Playing the star player on a high school football team, Cruise’s Stefan Djordjevic dreams big, hoping to earn the scholarship that will extricate him from the small town he’s desperate to leave behind. This being a sports flick, though, he gets kicked off the squad and has to fight his way back from the brink.
Along the way, he leans on Lea Thompson’s Lisa Lietzke for support, and since it was decreed so, that necessitated a love scene. “The thing I remember about that one, was the studio’s insisting that we put in a love scene, no matter whether it had anything to do with the story or not,” he told Roger Ebert. “It seemed so stupid and out of place.”
Thompson didn’t want to do it either, with the producers initially trying to convince the pair to shoot two love scenes. Standing their ground, she revealed that “Tom managed to talk them out of one,” but since he was still a relative newcomer and only had a handful of pictures to his name, he wasn’t anywhere near established or powerful enough to make them drop the other.
He never forgot about it, and since this is Tom Cruise we’re talking about, you can imagine that the determined and single-minded star made a point of ensuring that he wouldn’t let it happen to him twice.
