When Tom Cruise almost played a squirrel in a Welsh short film: “We very nearly got him”
Ever since he decided Oprah Winfrey’s couch was the best place to let the world know he was a pretty weird guy, Tom Cruise has recalibrated his career to favour reward over risk, with the superstar playing it almost too safe in returning to his signature wheelhouse of death-defying stunts.
While Alejandro González Iñárritu’s mysterious upcoming movie stands every chance of giving Cruise the platform to do career-best work, or at the very least his best since Magnolia, and potentially earn another Academy Award nomination for acting, it’s the first time he’s taken anything resembling a risk in years.
For the last 15 years, his filmography has been defined largely by two things: risking his life with his next daredevil feat, and Christopher McQuarrie. The cock-rocking musical Rock of Ages is the only outlier because it didn’t feature at least one action scene or a perilous practical set piece, and even a comedic semi-biographical film like American Made featured him piloting a plane and abandoning the controls.
It’s hard to say that playing it safe hasn’t worked when Cruise remains Hollywood’s definitive A-lister and can almost always be relied on to put butts in seats, but now that he’s in his 60s, time is surely running out on his days as an action star, which hopefully brings him full circle and leads him back to his auteur era, when he used his star power to work with the best directors in the business.
If there’s one thing that could be called the complete opposite of a standard Tom Cruise vehicle, it’s Race to the Start Line. Why? He would have voiced a stop-motion squirrel in a short film made by a group of Welsh teenagers about a boy making a mad dash to a mountain bike race and encountering all sorts of mishaps and hijinks along the way, that’s why.
Any aspiring filmmaker should aim as high as possible, but a band of ambitious kids reaching out to someone of Cruise’s magnitude was the Hail Mary to end all Hail Marys. However, if it wasn’t for a scheduling conflict, the people involved were confident he would have agreed to do it.
While some teens saying ‘we asked Tom Cruise to be in our movie’ is the sort of playground bravado nobody would believe, Steve Swindown of TAPE, the organisation involved with the Supporting Shorts project behind Race to the Start Line, confirmed that it was 100% true.
“The Tom Cruise thing was a genuine idea. And we very nearly got him as well,” he told the BBC. “It was a scheduling change that stopped it from happening in the end. But if we hadn’t asked, we wouldn’t be here. The confidence in the room with the young people when their question to Tom Cruise was heard and taken seriously, and they got a response, the next day, changed people’s self-belief.”
Had it happened, it would have been the most unexpected role of his career by far, and it’s a shame audiences didn’t get the chance to hear Cruise as an anthropomorphised squirrel thanks to those pesky scheduling conflicts.
