How Tom Cruise starring in Ben Stiller’s home movie led to an iconic role: “It blew my mind”
In Hollywood, being cast in a movie is rarely as simple as “They sent me the script. I liked it. I signed up.” Instead, most actors’ paths to any role are usually long, winding, convoluted and, from time to time, downright bizarre. Take the strange sequence of events that led to Tom Cruise being cast in one of his most entertaining roles – a path that involved Ben Stiller, a casual acquaintance from nearly a decade earlier, and a home movie created for an audience of one.
This tale began in 2000 when Stiller was enjoying his honeymoon with his new wife, Christine Taylor, who he met in 1999 and starred opposite in Zoolander. He received a phone call that prompted him to contemplate an awkward decision, though. MTV Movie Awards producer Joel Gallen wanted Stiller to resurrect the hilarious Cruise impression he did on The Ben Stiller Show in the 1990s because Cruise couldn’t attend the ceremony. Instead of having Cruise there in person, the idea was for Stiller to play ‘Tom Crooze,’ Cruise’s lookalike stunt double, in a skit that would air at the awards.
Unfortunately, shooting the skit would require Stiller to cut his honeymoon short. No one knows how this decision went over, but he made the call, leading to him catching a 15-hour flight with his new bride a day early to be at the shoot on time. Stiller remembered that making his Cruise impression directly on the man himself was a surreal task, but luckily, Cruise found it hilarious. “He was sitting at the monitor and he started cracking up watching, and I knew it was OK,” Stiller smiled. “The part where we’re both laughing is kinda real because we’re both laughing at the absurdity of the moment.”
Fast-forward seven years, and Stiller was working on the script for his upcoming meta-comedy Trophic Thunder, which would poke fun at everything about Hollywood in zany style. He had kept in touch with Cruise over the intervening period, and they’d “been talking about trying to figure something to do but hadn’t figured it out.” Then, an idea struck Stiller like a bolt from the blue – he and Cruise should team up…on a home movie, he wanted to make for Taylor’s birthday.
“It starred my brother-in-law, Brian Taylor,” Stiller chuckled on the New Heights podcast in 2025. “Brian is the worst actor ever”. The joke of the home video was to put Brian alongside real, honest-to-goodness actors delivering famous lines of dialogue, which would theoretically give his sister the giggles. The pièce de résistance would be Brian butchering Jack Nicholson’s famous “You can’t handle the truth!” scene from A Few Good Men – and who better to deliver that line to than Cruise, the man on the receiving end of it in the movie?
Stiller recalled, “I said, ‘Tom, we’re doing this home movie for Christine. Would you maybe come and do a scene in it where my brother-in-law’s gonna recite the Jack Nicholson speech to you?'” To his shock and delight, Cruise said “Yes” – and then showed up to deliver the goods in classic uber-professional Tom Cruise fashion. “It blew my mind,” Stiller admitted. “He was so good.”
Amazingly, it was only after having so much fun with Cruise making the silly birthday video that Stiller thought, “Hey, maybe I should ask him about Tropic Thunder.” Once again, to his surprise, Cruise was totally down to make an out-and-out comedy that skewered Hollywood, and he knew exactly who he should play in it.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You make fun of the actors, you make fun of everybody and the agents and all that, but you don’t make fun of the studio heads,'” Stiller revealed. “‘You should have a studio head.'” So, Cruise created Les Grossman, the bald, hairy-forearmed, volanically furious studio executive with a penchant for hip-hop dancing. “It was his idea, that character,” Stiller insisted. “That character did not exist before he suggested it. And then, it became such an important part of the story.”
