When Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington almost made a David Cronenberg movie
There are certain actors who you can’t imagine working with specific directors. Imagine Margot Robbie in a Gaspar Noé movie. Or Dwayne Johnson in a Jane Campion film. It just wouldn’t work.
It’s bizarre to think that there was a time when Hollywood icons Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington were set to star in a David Cronenberg movie. Sometimes, the unexpected really does work, like Adam Sandler appearing in a Paul Thomas Anderson film, but can you really imagine someone as sanitised as Cruise – the epitome of Hollywood blockbuster shininess – appearing in a depraved Cronenberg flick?
Cronenberg practically pioneered the body horror genre with movies like Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood in the late 1970s, emphasising the often abject and gross reality of corporeality. Your body can betray you and do things out of your control, and in Cronenberg’s world, this is taken to the absolute extreme.
It’s hard to imagine what modern horror would look like without the influence of Cronenberg, who pulled gory movies out from shlocky, B-movie territory (think Herschell Gordon Lewis’ splatter cinema) and allowed it to be considered more artfully. Would Coralie Fargeat’s recent sensation The Substance have been able to earn such significant praise and Oscars acclaim if not for Cronenberg’s pioneering approach to the genre? His bold dissections of our physical body’s relationship with our deepest fears and desires have long towed the line between transgression and the mainstream, causing endless controversy as a result.
When Crash was released in 1996, for example, the critical acclaim it received didn’t stop many newspapers like The Daily Mail from printing stories in outrage, calling it a “depraved sex film”. Sure, the film was about people who get aroused from car crashes that place them on the brink of death, but Cronenberg’s film is deeply philosophical if you look beyond people shagging on the motorway.
Of course, Cruise has appeared in a few films that have revealed a different side to him besides the Mission: Impossible star he is best known as. You could call Eyes Wide Shut a depraved sex film, too, and he’s really good in that. Still, you just can’t picture him in a Cronenberg film – the same goes for Washington, who has appeared in endless Hollywood action movies – they simply exist in different spheres.
However, in 2011, Cronenberg was set to adapt The Matarese Circle, written by Rovert Ludlum (who also wrote the Bourne trilogy). The horror director isn’t a complete stranger to non-horror movies, having made the action film Fast Company, the romantic drama M Butterfly, and the thriller A History of Violence, in the past, so maybe a Cruise and Washington vehicle could’ve worked surprisingly well for Cronenberg.
Talking to Showbiz 411, Cronenberg revealed, “I was working on The Matarese Circle, the novel by Robert Ludlum, which was going to star Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise, before MGM went belly up. So I don’t think that’s going to happen now. Tom still likes the idea though.”
The director acknowledges that he isn’t a blockbuster filmmaker, which might’ve been part of the reason why the movie was never going to work. “I never managed to do that [big studio productions]. I’ve flirted with that for many years, but it’s never worked out. I’ve talked to directors who have had a lot of fun with that, and some have had hellish experiences. The things that interest me seem not to be the things big studios are not interested in. Could be as simple as that.”
Perhaps one day we’ll see Cruise and Washington in a Cronenberg movie, but for now it seems best if the Canadian filmmaker sticks to what he knows best – weird and off-putting body horror.
