Tom Cruise has spent much of the last decade jumping out of airplanes, hanging off helicopters and finding new ways to make audiences wonder whether he has any sense of self-preservation. Digger is something very different.
After three Mission: Impossible movies and Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise is stepping away from the kind of massive action spectacle audiences have come to expect from him. This time, he is playing an outrageous character in a very dark comedy from filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu. And for Cruise, that was a big part of the appeal.
Tom Cruise gets to do something completely different in Digger
Cruise plays one of the wealthiest men in the world, but this is not exactly a story about enjoying all that money. After causing a cataclysmic disaster, his character sets out to save the world in an attempt to redeem himself. That premise alone puts Cruise in some pretty unusual territory.
He has certainly done comedy before, and he has played characters with plenty of humor built into them. But Digger offered him something he says he had never really encountered before. An outrageous character unlike anything he had read, seen or had the chance to bring to the screen.
After spending so many years playing Ethan Hunt, there is also something fun about seeing Cruise take a hard turn in another direction.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu was a filmmaker Cruise already admired
The director was another major reason Cruise wanted to be part of the movie. Alejandro G. Iñárritu has built a career around films that rarely feel conventional, and Cruise had been following his work from the beginning.
Cruise said he saw Iñárritu’s first movie before it was even released and had wanted to work with him for years. So when the opportunity finally arrived, it was not something he was going to let slip away.
Click on the video below to hear Tom Cruise talk about why he had always wanted to work with Alejandro G. Iñárritu and what made his outrageous Digger character unlike anything he had played before.
Digger gives Cruise a new kind of challenge
That may be the most interesting thing about Digger. Cruise does not exactly need to prove that he can carry an action movie. He has been doing that for decades.
What makes this one intriguing is seeing what happens when an actor so closely associated with precision, intensity and giant action sequences hands himself over to a filmmaker like Iñárritu and a character Cruise himself describes as outrageous.
There is also something refreshing about an actor at this stage of his career still sounding genuinely surprised that he got to play a particular role. Cruise said he could hardly believe the character had actually made it onto the screen.
Considering some of the things we have watched Tom Cruise do over the years, that might be saying something.
Digger opens in theaters this Friday.
