Tom Cruise exists on a rarified level of the entertainment industry’s atmosphere. Carefully and methodically, he’s carved a path towards the top of the box office, spending the last decade pushing his body (and sometimes mortality) to the limit in order to hang off the side of the world’s tallest building and fly in the cockpit of a multimillion-dollar jet. But the king of cinematic spectacle has finally met his match in taking on the white elephant gift of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, a $125 million production (at minimum) that has been met with empty theaters and rotten reviews.
After years spent declining interviews and limiting his public exposure, Cruise took up the fight on the press tour for his unusual movie, appearing on podcasts, in social video skits, and on TV shows. Some appearances have gone more smoothly than others, but they all speak to one of the downsides of living in a space so high above everyone else: you no longer know what it means to be down to earth. Not only has this revealed the shakiness of Cruise’s star persona, it has created an ironic parallel to his latest character’s fondness for twisting the truth and living above the worries of everyday life.
Bursting out of the 1980s, Cruise soon tamped down the rascally energy that helped him break out in Risky Business in favor of a newly polished veneer, taking on high-octane roles in movies like Top Gun and Days Of Thunder alongside swoony lead characters in fare like Legend and Cocktail. By the ’90s, after a quick succession of increasingly large parts, Cruise became one of the most bankable actors in film history, embodying a new kind of movie star, one who could be both an action-movie hero like Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series and a hot bloodsucker in Interview With The Vampire. He carefully chose projects that gave him a mass appeal, but, as he got increasingly famous, and the more Cruise delved into Scientology, his personal life started making more headlines than his movies. He shied away from the press in the 2010s after his divorce from Katie Holmes, restricted questions about his religion, and retreated from talking about pretty much anything besides his work.
This move spoke to the other side of his star persona. Cruise has also taken risks on ambitious projects and filmmakers throughout his career, padding out his filmography beyond the standard crowdpleasing fare. Despite mostly sticking to what he knows (cars go fast, bombs go boom), Cruise occasionally stepped out to work with other great directors. Early in his career, he worked opposite Paul Newman in Martin Scorsese’s The Color Of Money. He followed those ambitions by working with Oliver Stone on Born On The Fourth Of July, Rob Reiner on A Few Good Men, Paul Thomas Anderson on Magnolia, Brian De Palma on the original Mission: Impossible movie, and even with Stanley Kubrick on the director’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. Even with this commitment to the serious side of cinema, over the course of Cruise’s career, he’s picked up four Oscar nominations, yet never walked away with the top prize. Taking a cue from The Revenant‘s Leonardo DiCaprio, Cruise may have seen working with Iñárritu as a chance to finally bring home the gold.
It’s been a long time since Cruise veered away from sequel autopilot for an ambitious original film. Before Digger, the combination of retreating from the press and only delivering the kinds of movies audiences are primed to check out because “Hey, we saw the first one,” largely played out in Cruise’s favor. It’s easy to shelve tabloid stories from over a decade ago when he and his team have been so careful about how the public perceives him. He’s pivoted towards becoming an ambassador for the movie industry, taking up the cause of going to see movies in theaters after exhibitors struggled reopening after the COVID pandemic.
As part of the recent Mission: Impossible exhibit at the Museum Of The Moving Image in New York City, Cruise taped an introduction extolling the history of action movies, connecting his stunts to silent movie daredevils like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, stepping into the role of a passionate film educator, like when he made his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Glen Powell watch a six-hour instructional video about filmmaking. But now, Digger may become the movie to break Cruise’s Guinness World Record for most consecutive $100-million-grossing films.
In trying his darnedest to get audiences to give Digger a chance, Cruise has tried in turn to make himself more relatable, reaching out to a younger audience who are terminally online. He’s made videos educating viewers about VistaVision (something mostly directors, not actors, have geeked out about online), and showed off his knowledge of his films just by recognizing their color palette. But in moments like dancing through the Spirit Tunnel on The Jennifer Hudson Show, his friendly façade cracks: he’s never seen how it’s been done before. Here’s a man who’s carefully blocked and choreographed in movies, but is clueless when asked to improvise on the spot. He makes a show of engaging those around him, then turns his back to the camera, as if forgetting it was there, and is forced to dance for his life in a way that would have gotten him eliminated on RuPaul’s Drag Race. He may have slid into movie theaters dancing to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” but now Cruise is more than a little out of step. The irony comes when seeing the film he’s trying to promote, which shows his character’s blustery downfall. Hidden away in their stately manors with their odd habits, both Cruise and Digger are frozen in time, weirdly standing out in every situation.
Maybe kings are only meant to last so long in Hollywood. Cruise alone wasn’t enough to salvage Digger from its director’s worst impulses, either with his performance or his sweaty promotional blitz. Yet, in what will be one of the last Warner Bros. films from the Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy era, Digger will make history, but not the kind that the filmmakers wanted. Cruise, for his part, seems like he’ll go back into autopilot. Before the Digger debacle came into focus, he had already announced his plans for a sequel to his racing movie Days Of Thunder. Once back in that comfort zone, Cruise may never take another risk as wild as Digger, retreating back to his fitness fortress, once again shielding his old-school movie stardom from the unscripted media cycle of the present and the uncertainty of making original movies.
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