Tom Cruise names the trickiest thing he ever worked on: “I don’t know if it’s going to work”
It feels like a long time since Tom Cruise has gone out of his way to stretch himself as an actor, in a performative sense at least, because the A-list mainstay can at least always be relied on to put his life on the line in whatever dangerous stunt he’s cooking up for his next action blockbuster.
The last decade and a half of his career has seen him basically play variations of himself in Mission: Impossible movies, Top Gun sequels, Jack Reacher films, and standalone stories like Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, and the ill-fated reboot of The Mummy, but it wasn’t always that way.
His brief stint as a studio mogul may have contributed to his decision to back away from more challenging performances in favour of more obvious hits, after the Robert Redford-directed legal drama Lions for Lambs and World War II tale Valkyrie didn’t perform in line with expectations following Cruise assuming control of United Artists.
He’s got three Academy Award nominations and a trio of Golden Globe wins for his on-camera prowess, though, so nobody could ever claim that he’s a movie star with no chops. And yet, he tended to prove it on a much more regular basis in the 1990s and 2000s, with Michael Mann’s Collateral the last genuinely jaw-dropping turn he’s given.
Working with Cameron Crowe was hugely beneficial to both parties when they first teamed on sports flick Jerry Maguire, which made a killing at the box office, earned them both Oscar nods for their acting and writing respectively, and made the shortlist for ‘Best Picture’. When they reunited, the circumstances were much different.
Remaking Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes just four years after its release was a bold call, and the jury remains out on whether existential psychological thriller Vanilla Sky was worth it. The film does have its merits, but it tended to split opinion down the middle as the appraisals ranged from praising it as abstract filmmaking on an epic scale to decrying it as self-indulgent claptrap.
For Cruise, he viewed the character of David Aames as a difficult one to embody, to the point he didn’t think he’d encounter such a complex role again. “You see the tone that Cameron is going for,” he said to Vanity Fair. “You feel the emotion, the tension, the humour.” Did that instil him with the confidence that he was capable of pulling it off? Not exactly.
“You go, ‘Well, I don’t know if it’s going to work,'” he admitted. “It’s definitely the trickiest thing I’ve ever worked on, and probably ever will work on.” There can’t be many people who’d single Vanilla Sky out as the best movie Cruise has lent his name to, but for the leading man, it was an experience that stayed with him long after cameras stopped rolling.
