How Tom Cruise helped launch John Boyega’s career: “You’ve got to watch this kid”
Even though he’s the biggest movie star in the world, and has been for the last four decades, Tom Cruise has been known to lend the little guy a hand and wield his influence to give others a leg-up in the industry.
When Guy Ritchie was trying to secure a distribution deal for his debut feature, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and the best he was offered was a straight-to-video run in the United States, Matthew Vaughn decided to draft in the Top Gun frontman to help secure the British gangster flick a better deal.
Because he was such a big fan of Ritchie’s first film, which he called “the best movie I’ve seen in years” in front of a gathered throng of studio executives, everybody suddenly and not-so-mysteriously changed their tune, giving Lock, Stock the platform to become a minor hit in America when it hit the big screen.
When he first saw Joe Carnahan’s low-budget crime story, Narc, he was “calling friends and telling them about the movie,” which culminated in Cruise making history of a personal nature by attaching himself as a producer, the first time he’d ever done so for a filmmaker he didn’t have a pre-existing relationship with.
Although he’s known for going to the cinema as much as possible and snaffling popcorn like an obsessive weirdo, Cruise does watch TV, too. In fact, he was so enamoured by Jennifer Garner’s spy series, Alias, that he personally reached out to its creator, JJ Abrams, and recruited him to helm his first movie, Mission: Impossible III.
That inadvertently created a ripple effect, which ended up with John Boyega being cast in Star Wars. While Abrams only directed one Mission: Impossible adventure, he and his Bad Robot company remained on board as executive producers up until Fallout, and a conversation in the editing suite saw Cruise topple the first domino toward his debut in a galaxy far, far away.
“I’m thankful to Tom Cruise, who loved Attack the Block,” Boyega revealed at Emerald City Comic Con. “He was editing Mission: Impossible at the time with JJ Abrams. Tom told JJ, ‘You’ve got to watch this kid in Attack the Block.’ JJ watched it, and one thing led to another, and four or five years later, I was in the movie.”
Obviously, he still had to audition for the part of Finn, but he was already on Abrams’ radar before then, thanks to Cruise insisting his friend and collaborator check out Joe Cornish’s cult favourite street-level sci-fi. It was clear from Attack the Block that Boyega was destined for big things, and they don’t come much bigger than Star Wars, especially the first new instalment in the iconic franchise for almost two decades.
It was the actor’s first major Hollywood production, and he played the second lead behind Daisy Ridley’s Rey, which isn’t bad going. Not only that, but he beat out a cavalcade of future stars like Michael B Jordan and Tom Holland for the part, with Cruise watching Attack the Block the catalyst for Boyega to make the jump to America and play one of the biggest parts in one of the highest-grossing releases of all time.
