When Tom Cruise taught Kanye West improv for a TV show he refused to appear in: “We had to hire a lookalike”
For many people, and with no shortage of entirely valid reasons, Tom Cruise and Kanye West are the nightmare blunt rotation to end all nightmare blunt rotations.
In one corner, fighting out of Scientology headquarters, there’s the A-list movie star who was described as having such “an intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes” that he became one of Christian Bale’s biggest inspirations when he was crafting American Psycho‘s sociopathic killer, Patrick Bateman.
In the other corner, fighting out of whatever rock he should be banished under after torpedoing a massively successful music career by intentionally courting controversy and inciting offence whenever the opportunity presented itself, there’s Adolf Hitler’s most famous modern-day supporter.
Imagining the two of them in the same place at the same time is enough to send a shiver down the spine, but, as it turned out, Cruise taught West the basics of improvisational acting. Why? Because he wanted to bring his own surrealist comedy series to HBO. Did it work? No, because A Little Inappropriate never made it past the pilot stage. Was the Mission: Impossible star in it? Again, no. He was asked, though, he just didn’t want anything to do with it.
Inspired by Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is jarring in itself, the plot finds West discovering that a Make-A-Wish child is no longer terminally ill, and the reasons why it was never ordered to series continue becoming clear. In one sequence, he’s asked who his idol is, which then flashes back to West watching the trailer for Brian De Palma’s first Ethan Hunt adventure, before a silhouette of the leading man appears.
The plan was to have Cruise play himself, and West probably thought he could get him since they were relatively friendly with each other. However, much like John Wayne before him, he doesn’t do TV, which left actor and comedian Wyatt Cenac as the fly on the wall for a tremendously bizarre conversation.
“Kanye had been trying to get Tom Cruise to be in the pilot,” he told Vulture. “And he had asked him because they were friendly. And we’re shooting a scene, and at one point, Kanye’s like, ‘Shut the fuck up, it’s Tom Cruise’, and because he couldn’t get out of the car, he had to take the phone call smashed between people, and you can hear Tom Cruise laughing as Kanye goes, ‘Yeah, man, I’ve been working on improv stuff, you know, all your suggestions were great.'”
“That went on for like 15 minutes,” Cenac added. “Tom Cruise never did the show, and we had to hire a Tom Cruise lookalike that was like five feet taller than the real Cruise.” West hadn’t become embroiled in his many, many, many controversies by then, and the actor was still in damage limitation mode after the couch-jumping nonsense and getting very publicly dumped by Paramount.
If there’s anything weirder than Kanye West making a Curb Your Enthusiasm-inspired TV show for HBO, it would have been Kanye West making a Curb Your Enthusiasm-inspired TV show for HBO with Tom Cruise in it.
