Tom Cruise reflects on learning from Jack Nicholson: “He’s very generous, an actor’s actor”
At an event in London on May 11th, Tom Cruise reflected on working with Hollywood icon Jack Nicholson on A Few Good Men in 1992.
The opportunity to star alongside Nicholson in the thriller was a huge learning curve for Cruise, who revelled in the experience of seeing how one of the all-time greats works on set. Now, while speaking to Edith Bowman at the British Film Institute on May 11th, the Mission Impossible star labelled it “extraordinary” and revealed a peek behind the curtain.
During the filming process, A Few Good Men had already become the talk of Hollywood with Cruise remembering: “I remember the Nicholson scene when we were in in the courtroom, suddenly I’m looking around and the rafters were filled. We were making movies in LA at that point, and the rafters were filled and people were coming in just to see the scene and the town knew.”
He added: “We were shooting it, and they would come just to see the scene. To see us go at it. People, people were kind of surrounding and filling the rafters around just to, just to watch Nicholson and I go at it. It was magnificent to watch him and see what a, what a wordsmith he is, you know, like a great crooner.”
Cruise then spoke specifically about the attributes he admired most in Nicholson, adding (via The Independent), “To see him carve up the dialogue and make it his own, find his own stillness. He’s very generous, an actor’s actor. He is off camera the whole time just feeding, feeding me and very supportive. He’d be like, ‘That was a good take Tommy, nice work Tommy.’ He’s just really lovely and he just loved it.”
Additionally, Cruise highlighted Paul Newman alongside Nicholson as another Hollywood legend that he was grateful to work with. Cruise and Newman appeared together in 1986’s The Color of Money. On Nicholson and Newman, he said, “All of them understood the lens”.
He compared this skill to “understanding the stage as an actor”, and noted how it’s “not taught in film school to understand what the lens is”.
Cruise added: “Nicholson, he understood it so well, the stillness and what he knew the power of that character. He was looking for a centre and you could feel his voice start to relax and his face start to relax and you could feel the energy that he was going and he was just throwing lasers as the film went on.”
Cruise’s new movie, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, is set for release in cinemas internationally on May 21st, 2025.
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