The whitewashed 1998 role Tom Cruise wisely turned down: “I think it’s not a good idea”
On paper, acting is about becoming people you’re not, but you can only stretch that so far before it becomes ill-judged, misguided, or offensive, and Tom Cruise was smart enough to realise that.
Apart from playing an immortal bloodsucker in Interview with the Vampire and a German military officer who lived his real-life dream by plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler in Valkyrie, Cruise has spent his career playing what he is: American guys who more often than not get caught up in extraordinary situations.
While it would be ludicrous to expect anyone to ask the biggest movie star in the world if he wanted to play a Black character, he was offered the chance to play an iconic hero of Latin American descent. Wisely, he baulked at the idea, even though it had come directly from one of Hollywood’s most powerful names.
In 1992, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment viewed a blockbuster action flick based on Johnston McCulley’s Zorro as having the potential to thrill audiences. It did eventually, with the 1998 film a rousing good time that made a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office and still holds up pretty well today.
However, as much as it probably would have increased its earning power, casting Cruise in the title role sounds as stupid today as it did back then. Mikael Salomon was the first person to sit in the director’s chair, and he vividly recalled the awkward conversations with Spielberg about the leading man.
“He wanted to offer it to Tom Cruise,” the filmmaker revealed. “And my friend and countryman, Billie August, had done The House of the Spirits with non-Latinos, and he got in so much hot water because of that, and they picketed the movie in South America. And I said to Steven, ‘You know, that’s probably not a good idea, just for that reason.'” Still, the legendary director did it anyway.
“Apparently, he offered it to Tom,” Salomon continued. “Because one day, I was doing a commercial, and my assistant said, ‘Mikael, there’s Tom Cruise on the phone for you’. ‘Tom Cruise? OK’. I had worked with him on Far and Away; I was the DP on Far and Away. So he called me up and said, ‘Thanks for the offer, but I think it’s not a great idea for me to do this movie, because, as you know…’ I said, ‘Tom, you’re a very smart guy. Absolutely, you’re absolutely right.'”
Salomon eventually dropped out to be replaced by Robert Rodriguez, who signed his Desperado star, Antonio Banderas, to make a much more fitting Zorro. He was gone soon, too, with Martin Campbell keeping the actor aboard, with The Mask of Zorro giving the actor his first global hit as a top-line star.
Cruise in the part would never have worked, and that’s why he turned it down, but that doesn’t explain why nobody had the same issues with two Welsh performers, Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones, playing characters called Don Diego de la Vega and Elena Montero, or Englishman Stuart Wilson playing Rafael Montero. Either way, it would have been madness to cast someone born in Syracuse as Zorro.
