If you thought Tom Cruise wouldn’t bring his signature Mission: Impossible intensity to his first non-franchise film in over a decade, you were dead wrong. He’s like that 24/7—not just when he has to motorcycle off the wing of an airplane, or whatever he does in those movies.
For his upcoming role in Alejandro Iñárritu’s Digger, Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a powerful oil tycoon who believes he’s Earth’s savior. The role required a face full of prosthetics that apparently took the hair and makeup team six hours to get right at first. But that wasn’t good enough for Cruise. The mission, should his subordinates choose to accept it, was to complete the intense makeup routine in under one hour.
On Friday’s episode of the New Heights podcast, Cruise said he started coming to set with a coach and a stopwatch to motivate the prosthetics team to work faster…because employees famously love when their bosses time them with stopwatches to boost efficiency.
“The first time we did the makeup, it took six hours,” he said. “One day they came in, I had a guy there with a stopwatch, and I’m like, ‘By the time we’re done, we’re going to get it under an hour.’ They were like, ‘No, we’re not doing that. It’s never happened.” But has Tom ever taken no for an answer? Only when Gal Gadot asks to get on his coconut cake holiday gift list.
Cruise recalled telling his crew, “‘First of all, if you say no, you can’t do it, you will never get there. So can we agree that we’ll maybe make it a little less?’ So with each piece that was going on, it was timed, and then we’d drill and practice.” Sounds awful. I hope he paid their overtime, because if not I would’ve slapped that stopwatch right out of his hand.
In a rare interview with GQ this week, Cruise doubled down on his “intense” reputation: “I expect a lot, and I’m up-front about it. I’m like, ‘Trust me, the rumors are true.’ I’ll be here before you,” he said.
“Even when I was a kid, they were like, ‘Oh, come on, Tom. You’re so intense.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know what to say. I am intense.’ I got a very good sense of humor about it, but it was like: When I’m interested in something, I want to learn it. I want to understand it. And you want to blast through the confusion and kind of build up that ability.”He would have been a great tech CEO…or cult leader!
