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Tom Cruise has played some iconic movie roles from Maverick in the Top Gun movies to Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible franchise but you simply cannot talk about Tom Cruise’s best roles without mentioning his performance in Tropic Thunder as Les Grossman.
A great deal has been said about the part over the years, but it’s still a phenomenal story regarding just how it all came together. Appearing on the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend Podcast, Tropic Thunder star and director Ben Stiller talks about the two requests that Cruise had for his character. Specifically how his arms looked, and how he’d move his legs. Stiller explained…
He wanted to have big, thick forearms that were hairy (he wanted to be Jewish, OK) and he wanted to dance. …It’s a strange set of circumstances the way this happened. We had done this little short for the MTV Movie Awards where I played a stuntman. And we had met a couple of times over the years before that. But then we had a great time doing that together and had stayed in touch since then.
The bit of Ben Stiller playing Tom Cruise’s stunt double is an iconic sketch from the MTV Movie Awards. It’s made especially hilarious by the fact that Tom Cruise does all his own stunts, so any stunt double wouldn’t have much to do. Although there are rumors he actually had a stunt double on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. If you have never seen it or don’t remember it, it’s worth revisiting.
Stiller has spoken about Cruise’s requests before. Apparently, Stiller was largely against the whole dancing idea initially. Cruise had been taking dancing lessons and just wanted to use them in a movie at some point. Eventually during a makeup test, Cruise just started dancing, showing Still what the scene would be like, which sold him on the idea.
It’s hard to imagine Tropic Thunder without a dancing Tom Cruise, but it turns out we could have had exactly that. Stiller says that when he initially started talking to Tom Cruise about being in the movie, it was to play the role that Stiller himself would eventually take. And maybe Cruise would have taken if Stiller had ever actually asked. He continued…
I had had this idea for the movie for a long time and I had been working on it with Justin Theroux… and we finally had the script and I had talked to Tom about it. Originally I wanted Tom to play my part. But I was too nervous to ask him to do it, because he’s Tom Cruise, he has other stuff to do. But we were friendly, would hang out, and he’s so nice. … but I didn’t want to bother him really with this.
But what’s even more fascinating is that apparently Tom Cruise didn’t simply create Les Grossman’s look or the way he moves. He actually created Les Grossman himself, as the character wasn’t actually in Tropic Thunder until Cruise suggested a character like that should appear. Stiller said…
Eventually, I sent him the script and he was like, ‘This is great, I’d love to be a part of this.’ I was like, ‘Well maybe you could play, there’s like an agent role.’ He was like, ‘Well no, I’ve played an agent before [Jerry Maguire]. And he said – it was his idea this character – he said, ‘You don’t have a studio exec in the movie.’ This was like 2.5 months before we started shooting and Justin and I were like, ‘Well Tom would like to be in the movie and he had this idea of playing a studio exec. And so we went back and came up with Les Grossman. And it changed the plot of the whole movie but made it so much better.
So apparently we can thank Tom Cruise not only for being in Tropic Thunder but for making it a better film by his suggestions.