Tom Cruise was “practically in tears” after being rejected by Terry Gilliam: “I couldn’t consider him”
Generally speaking, it’s a rule in Hollywood that if Tom Cruise wants to be in your movie, you put Tom Cruise in your movie. Of course, Terry Gilliam has never played by the rules, and he had no issues rejecting the superstar-in-waiting.
Since they briefly crossed paths, it would be fair to say their careers took off in different directions. Cruise had long been predicted for the top, and once Tony Scott’s Top Gun finally placed him there in 1986, he hasn’t looked back, with the daredevil still one of cinema’s biggest stars almost 40 years later.
Gilliam, meanwhile, has suffered plenty of ups and downs. He’s barely made a film that wasn’t plagued by at least one behind-the-scenes issue, whether it was budgetary concerns, a mutinous actor, or studio politics, and he hasn’t directed anything since he finally dragged The Man Who Killed Don Quixote across the finish line in 2018 to end a three-decade ordeal that almost broke him more than once.
In the early 1980s, though, the filmmaker was the bigger deal. Not only did he have the residual cache of his Monty Python days, but his first two features, Jabberwocky and Time Bandits, had established him as a dazzling, daring, and imaginative auteur with a penchant for eye-catching imagery and lashings of surrealism.
Cruise, meanwhile, was still working his way up the ladder. Top Gun was a ways off yet, but he’d already vowed to seek out Tinseltown’s most ambitious directors to soak up as much knowledge as possible. Gilliam was high on that list, but thanks in part to self-confidence and an unflappable belief in his destiny, one dealbreaker cost him the chance to audition for Brazil‘s protagonist, Sam Lowry.
“I remember there was one young actor I saw then, called Tom Cruise, in a rough cut of a film that hadn’t been released,” he recalled, per Ian Christie’s Gilliam on Gilliam. “But he wouldn’t let himself be videoed, because he’d become worried that the tapes would turn up years later when he’d become the big star he was expected to be and embarrass him.”
It was impressive foresight on Cruise’s part, considering audition tapes from his early days are virtually impossible to track down, but Gilliam didn’t care. “He was practically in tears on the phone, wanting to be involved,” he explained. “But I couldn’t consider him without a video test, even though I could see he had whatever it is that makes a star.”
Instead, the casting search settled on Jonathan Pryce, who’s about the opposite of Cruise in every imaginable way. Having missed out on the chance to collaborate with one visually-driven auteur in a far-fetched slice of genre fare because he didn’t want to tape himself, Gilliam pointed out that “the next thing he did was Legend with Ridley Scott,” which ticked several similar boxes.
Unfortunately, Cruise didn’t have the best time on Scott’s fantasy blockbuster, which made him swear off the genre forever. Brazil may not have been a hit after bombing at the box office, but it did notch two Academy Awards before eventually taking its place as a cult classic, with many people adamant that it’s the best film Gilliam has ever made.
It would take a brave soul to say the same thing about Legend and its place in Scott’s filmography, especially when he followed Cruise’s lead and disavowed fantasy for the rest of his professional life.
