The one movie Tom Cruise never wants to make again: “There are other actors”
During his four-decade stint at the top of the Hollywood ladder, Tom Cruise has tried his hand at almost every genre imaginable, although there’s one form of cinema he’s actively avoided.
While action-packed blockbusters have become his bread-and-butter, as well as the chance to indulge his love of death-defying stunts, the A-lister has also tried his hand at drama, comedy, sci-fi, romance, musicals, and thrillers of the legal, political, criminal, and psychological variety.
It’s that ability to move between different mediums at will that saw him work with a cavalcade of the biggest and best directors the industry has ever had to offer, but when he collaborated with one particular great early on in his career, he found himself swearing off ever repeating the experience.
With his star firmly on the rise after breaking out in The Outsiders, Risky Business, and All the Right Moves, it was Top Gun that turned Cruise into a mainstream superstar in 1986. The year before, though, he made his one and only appearance in a fantasy movie when he headlined Ridley Scott’s Legend.
The most memorable thing about the film by far is Tim Curry’s deliciously hammy performance caked under makeup and prosthetics as the devilish Darkness, with Legend as a whole a rather unremarkable romantic adventure epic that finds Cruise’s Jack trying to save Mia Sara’s Princess Lili in a world populated by mysticism and magical creatures.
Tepidly received by audiences and unable to recoup its production budget at the box office, Cruise knew fine well that his performance wasn’t one for the history books. In fact, he even described his contributions as being “another colour in a Ridley Scott painting” to Rolling Stone, which is accurate considering Legend is a visual feast but a narrative chore.
His assessment in the aftermath was that “I’ll never want to do another picture like that again,” and he’s remained true to his word for going on 40 years. Funnily enough, Scott has done exactly the same and steered as far away from full-blown fantasy as possible as he built his own reputation as one of the modern era’s most distinguished filmmakers.
The actor explained how the movie would completely change his way of thinking about the industry and how he would approach making movies in the future: “I said, ‘After two months, if I don’t want to do it, the script’s gonna be in good enough shape, and you’ll have more of a sense of what you want to do. And there are other actors.’ I think they were kind of taken aback at first, [but] after coming off Legend, I just wanted to make sure that everything was gonna go the way we talked about it.”
The production was a troubled one, with a fire breaking out and burning down an entire set with just ten days of shooting left to go before post-production interference saw the director’s original 125-minute cut hacked to pieces in the editing room, with the United Kingdom’s 95-minute version at least running slightly longer than the 89-minute film screened in the United States.
Clearly, it wasn’t a memorable experience for either Scott or Cruise, with the two figureheads of Legend never again dipping their toes into fantastical waters after their first attempt.
But more importantly, it shaped how Cruise would take on the rest of his career. Famously hailed as the man who “saved Hollywood’s ass” by Steven Spielberg, Cruise has instead dedicated his time in the industry to making pictures he truly believes in. Does that mean that, more often than not, he is starring in a picture which sees him either running, shooting, flying, or a combination of all three? Yes. But is he happier for it? You’d bloody well hope so.
