The $500m role Tom Cruise turned down: “It just didn’t feel like it was gonna work”
Making it in Tinseltown is really tough to do. And the majority of actors fall by the wayside. Tom Cruise makes achieving Hollywood stardom look easy.
After walking away from a life in the priesthood, he moved to New York, where he quickly set about dazzling casting agents and landing roles in some of the highest-grossing movies of the 1980s, including Top Gun, The Color of Money, Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July. With all that success, the role offers came flooding in.
By the 1990s, Tom Cruise was already one of the world’s highest-paid actors, earning an average of $15million a picture. Considering The Vampire Chronicles, the first Mission: Impossible, and Jerry Maguire were all released just two years apart, Cruise was probably sitting on dizzying sums of money. Financial security allows actors a certain freedom of choice when it comes to picking roles, and that partly explains why Cruise didn’t feel the need to get involved with another of Hollywood’s most successful franchises: Marvel.
It’s hard to imagine anyone but Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man’s Tony Stark. When the producers saw his first screen test, they knew they’d found their leading man. But in the early 2000s, the studio was far more interested in casting Cruise. In a 2005 interview, the actor confessed that he turned down the role because of a lack of faith in the picture.
“They came to me at a certain point and, when I do something, I wanna do it right,” he began. “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. I need to be able to make decisions and make the film as great as it can be, and it just didn’t go down that road that way.” (quotes via The Indian Express).
After several rewrites and an ill-fated attempt to hire Quentin Tarantino as director, which is certainly a combination that would have got the pulse racing, Marvel Studios began the Iron Man project from scratch, announcing that the film would be the studio’s first independent feature. Then, in 2006, Jon Favreau was hired to direct. He originally approached Sam Rockwell for the lead role, but quickly changed his mind after watching a screen test by Robert Downey Jr.
“I don’t want to call it an out-of-body experience,” Downey Jr. said of the audition, “but it was one of those rushes that I’m sure, like, somebody would feel if they were about to play a big sporting arena. It was just like, ‘am I gonna pass out, or am I gonna nail this?” Of course, he nailed it. By the end of the screen test, Favreau and the casting team knew they’d found the right man for the job.
How much has Robert Downey Jr made from Marvel?
While Tom Cruise is certainly not sort of a few quid, the actor missed out on a serious payday when he turned down the role. Though we can’t be sure that with Cruise as Stark the franchise would have taken off as it did, estimates put RDJ’s Marvel haul as somewhere between $435million and $600m, in what might well be one of the most lucrative roles in Hollywood history.
Of course, Cruise has his own money-making machine. The Mission: Impossible franchise has produced something close to $600m from the box office and commercial rights. Meaning that he likely isn’t losing sleep over missing out on the chance to be Tony Stark.
