This Unexpected Cameo Is Tom Cruise’s Best Performance Ever

Tom Cruise’s cameo in Tropic Thunder demonstrates how thoroughly he can disappear into a role.

To say that Tom Cruise is one of the biggest Hollywood celebrities ever to exist would either be hyperbole or an understatement, depending on the era and measurement. His career thus far has spanned three decades and is about to exit Earth’s orbit - literally . He is known for pushing the boundaries of what his body and skills can portray on film, such as the incredible stunts he regularly performs for his mega-franchise Mission Impossible, or the meticulous training he puts himself through to perfect a character . His global celebrity has restricted him to only a few chances to let his hair down and have fun for a change, but when he does the result is unforgettable. In fact, arguably his best performance ever given was just such an occasion when he played Les Grossman in 2008’s brilliant Tropic Thunder.

Undoubtedly known as a serious actor and an action star, Tom Cruise rarely puts himself in comedies of the magnitude that is Tropic Thunder . The outrageous and hilarious spoof brought out the best of Cruise’s comedic talent and teased audiences to a future movie that sadly never materialized. Tropic Thunder starred Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and several other Hollywood celebrities like Matthew McConaughey, Nick Nolte, Bill Hader, and Dany McBride. Though controversial in many regards, it became a global success and one of the funniest comedies of the early 21st Century. This already perfect comedy is elevated by sneaking in Tom Cruise behind a fat suit and a bald cap!

RELATED: These Movies Are Perfect Parodies Of 80s And 90s Action

“Mm, That’s Good Satire”

Tropic Thunder operates on many layers of comedy, satire, parody, and unintentional real-life irony. First, as a comedy, it is a movie about making a fake movie that turns “real life” dangerous. Second, in satire, it skewers the bloated Hollywood organism . Third, the characters parody a range of Hollywood types like the cocaine-addled comedian, the overzealous Oscar hound, and the chiseled action star diva. Figures behind the camera are also parodied like the first-time director type, the brown noser executive assistant, and the high adrenaline power-mad Studio Executive. All these types so common to Hollywood are turned into caricatures on screen for the industry and audiences’ amusement.

A fair example of how Tropic Thunder 's once-praised satire has not exactly aged well is Robert Downey Jr.’s character. This is where it gets ironic as well. 2008 is the same year Downey starred in the first Iron Man . He was regaining his celebrity after recovering from years of addiction abuse. He was already a marquee actor from his Oscar nomination sixteen years earlier for Chaplin (1992). Most likely just for kicks, he decided to star alongside Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder as the Australian method actor and five-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus.

Lazarus is such a serious actor that to portray the black soldier Lincoln Osiris he undergoes a skin alteration to change his own skin color black. He deepens his voice as well to play Osiris, but it is a naïve, misunderstood, offensive, yet almost innocent to the point of gross stupidity, performance. Lazarus is so “focused” and “committed” to the role that he blindly dives headfirst into blackface. Despite the fact that the movie is supposedly making fun of the idea of blackface, at the same time, it is still doing it. This is the sort of "satire" that has (thankfully) fallen out of favor with audiences.

Lazarus is so dedicated to winning another Oscar that he creates an unrestrained, horrible, racist stereotype of a character – the exact opposite of what would get him nominated for another Academy Award. The unintended irony to all of this is that in real life, Robert Downey Jr. then gets an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for playing Kirk Lazarus playing Lincoln Osiris in Tropic Thunder .

Tom Cruise as Les Grossman

Tropic Thunder is already an unrivaled comedy by those chops alone , but to feature a cameo from Tom Cruise in a role so debauched as Les Grossman is just unbelievably awesome. Cruise has played in comedies before, such as his brief appearance playing Austin Powers in 2002’s Goldmember but never with the same commitment and depth as Tropic Thunder. Never before or since, sadly.

Originally, Cruise was supposed to play Ben Stiller’s agent Rick Peck ( ultimately played by Matthew McConaughey ). Instead, Cruise offered up a new character of his own invention. Wearing a fat suit, a bald cap, enlarged plastic hands, and a whole lot of chest and arm hair, Cruise became Les Grossman, the Studio Executive providing the money behind the movie who is also a raging foul-mouthed ogre. The personality of Grossman and the villainous role he would play in the film was all initiated by Cruise and developed alongside Ben Stiller. This proves that on top of everything else Cruise can do on camera , he can also be an original source of enormous comedy.

Les Grossman could be considered Tom Cruise’s best performance because he essentially erases himself in the character. If one was not told that Les Grossman was played by Tom Cruise, one would have a very hard time recognizing the actor. The mannerisms, the dance moves, the look are all out of the ordinary for a superstar like him, which is why the performance is such a magnificent sight to behold. Grossman is such a unique character it highlights the talent of Tom Cruise to a new degree. The fact that he never played a role like this again is a heavy loss for the greater movie-going public.

Tropic Thunder is a brilliant high watermark for comedy. To quietly contain Tom Cruise’s best performance ranks it even higher on the scales as one of the best movies ever made. Hopefully, after Tom Cruise finishes with the Mission Impossible franchise he launches the Les Grossman Cinematic Executive Universe .

MORE: Starship Troopers: Was The Buenos Aires Asteroid Attack A False Flag?

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Revealed: More Details on Tom Cruise's Cameo in 'Tropic Thunder'

The star appears as a studio boss, leading the New York Times to compare him to Sumner Redstone

There’s a surprise coming in Ben Stiller’s next movie, Tropic Thunder : Tom Cruise , as he’s never been seen before.

Rather than play his typical, boyishly charming good guy, Cruise delivers an apparently memorable cameo in which he’s craggy, fat, bald, vulgar, hairy-chested – and playing an ungrateful studio boss, reports The New York Times , which also says that Cruise’s opening line in the movie comedy is enough to guarantee it an R-rating when it opens Aug. 15.

The Times points out that Tropic Thunder is a Paramount Picture: Paradoxically, in August 2006 Cruise was famously fired from Paramount by its parent-company chief Sumner Redstone, despite the star’s having made such big hits for the studio as 1984’s Top Gun and the Mission: Impossible series.

Redstone, of course, is neither fat nor bald, but he is a studio boss. Besides, only last week the Wall Street Journal reported that he had a very public lunch with Cruise at the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge – a venue chosen by Cruise so Hollywood could see that the two were talking again, peacefully.

Though neither would tell the Journal what they talked about, Redstone said the two “agreed the past is the past and we would put it behind us and renew our relationship.”

Controversial Characters

Now comes Stiller’s movie, about out-of-control actors making a Vietnam movie and ending up in a real war. Besides Cruise and Stiller, it also stars Robert Downey Jr. (in controversial blackface), Jack Black, Nick Nolte and Matthew McConaughey , who replaced Owen Wilson after Wilson withdrew due to personal reasons , though it’s been reported that Wilson will also appear in a cameo role.

Cruise will not be listed in the credits or marketing materials for the movie. His photo in the fat suit also will not be made public, though there was an Internet leak of it last fall, prompting Cruise’s spokespeople to say, Britain’s Channel 4 News reported on Wednesday: “Mr. Cruise’s appearance was supposed to be a surprise for his fans worldwide. [Paparazzi] have ruined what should have been a fun discovery for moviegoers.” (The photo agency involved has reportedly removed the pictures from circulation.)

Preview Reaction

Reaction to Cruise’s scene when Stiller previewed Tropic Thunder on the Paramount lot to an audience of industry insiders on Tuesday was described as rapturous. (Likewise, for Downey’s turn.) Reps for Cruise, Stiller and Paramount all declined the Times ‘s request for comment.

But as Stiller reportedly told the crowd gathered to see the movie, which is still in rough cut, “If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them directly on the Internet.”

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Tom Cruise and ‘Tropic Thunder’ 10 Years Later

Ten years ago today, tom cruise began to win back the public with 'tropic thunder,' a movie he nor hollywood would touch with a 10-foot pole these days..

Tom Cruise Tropic Thunder

There are few things as intangible and fluid as celebrity, a concept the fickle public agrees on until it doesn’t. That the film industry is built upon and upheld by the idea of celebrity is a doozy. In-demand stars use their popularity to push their careers forward, establishing mainstream appeal and acceptance and a track record of bankability, and then they are suddenly elevated to Movie Star status. It’s a tenuous position that is carefully earned but can so easily be lost.

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Which brings us to Tom Cruise and Tropic Thunder .

The Ben Stiller –directed comedy, which was released 10 years ago today, was a $92 million movie bankrolled by Paramount (PARA) / DreamWorks . While the film didn’t exactly redefine the genre like Animal House or speak to a generation like Superbad , it did serve a very important purpose: it cemented Cruise’s comeback.

After a disastrous streak of bad PR in the mid-2000s, a rebound for the actor seemed like an impossible mission indeed, yet this small supporting role helped redeem him. When the film hit theaters, Cruise’s character, Les Grossman, emerged as a scene-stealing, vulgar burst of rage; his behavior might have echoed Cruise’s own internal fury directed at a Hollywood system that had raised him up and then torn him down. The performance had former naysayers back on his side. However, a decade later, the part carries with it a whiff of irony— Tropic Thunder was both a lifeline for Cruise and his brand and a project that he would never touch today.

It’s fascinating that Cruise was back in good graces after  Tropic Thunder , an occasionally hilarious movie that veers, if not leaps, into offensive territory. In a spoof of method actors like Russell Crowe , Robert Downey Jr . plays an overly serious and committed Australian Oscar winner who undergoes a controversial procedure in order to play an African-American sergeant in the film’s war movie within a movie. It was basically a roundabout way of putting blackface in a major studio comedy. It’s problematic on multiple levels, yet Downey Jr. still earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination at that year’s Academy Awards. (Then again, the Academy could never be accused of being “in touch.”)

Tropic Thunder is also misguided in its depiction of Southeast Asia and the mentally challenged, painting the former as a corrupt drug den of stereotypes and showing Stiller tackle the latter for cheap laughs. Watch it now, and the film is really just a mixed bag of crude humor hurled at those who’ve been historically mocked. Yes, it’s funny at times, but it lacks any empathy for its targets; it’s surprising we weren’t more turned off at the time.

Taking a risk like this today would threaten Cruise’s marketability. There’s a reason the actor has largely stepped away from the serious dramas and Oscar bait that helped define his career in the ’80s and ’90s. Over the past decade he’s leaned almost entirely on action blockbusters, the type of innocuous output that keeps him squarely in the multiplex. There’s nothing wrong with that— Mission: Impossible-Fallout   is spectacular—but his choices are the Hollywood equivalent of coloring inside the lines.

So how and why did he choose to appear in something so out-there and potentially hazardous in 2008? Because around the time of Tropic Thunder , Cruise’s stock was trading lower than MoviePass’ is today.  There was his infamous couch jumping on Oprah in 2005, an early YouTube phenomenon and ancestor of the viral meme. As  The Ringer ‘s Kate Knibbs noted, “People hated it. More importantly, they loved to hate it. Most importantly, they loved to talk about hating it.” It was followed by a public feud with Brooke Shields in which he seemed to dismiss the notion of postpartum depression. Later, Cruise made some regrettable comments about the field of psychiatry. And on top of all this, he was becoming increasingly vocal about his controversial Scientology beliefs.

Suddenly, the world’s biggest, most likable movie star was a punchline. So what better way to escape the laughter than to amplify it on his own terms?

Cruise’s Les Grossman was largely absent from Tropic Thunder’ s promotional materials. Instead, he popped up in the movie in a sort of double-take-inducing cameo. With his balding head, forest-thick chest hair and fat suit, he was nearly unrecognizable. It was the perfect disguise, one that hinted at some meta truths. As Les, he was no longer running from the sneers and the snickers—he was poking fun at himself, and offering a cathartic release for the masses.  Look! T om Cruise is in on the joke. How bad could he be?  Just like that, the narrative began to shift back in his favor. Writer Sara Vilkomerson wrote at the time that Cruise gave “an astonishingly funny and surprising supporting performance.” Cruise’s reputation had been burnished; he was viewed as a lovable eccentric goofball.

However,  Tropic Thunder wouldn’t pass muster today. Major studio comedies are struggling at the box office. Releases with beloved names like Ferrell and Fey attached to them can’t seem to gain much traction. With the rise of major superhero franchises, the mid-budget movie is being  squeezed out of existence . If studios are afraid to touch them, a $92 million offbeat, irreverent comedy like  Tropic Thunder would never get made today. The project would be the type of box-office high-wire act that doesn’t fit with a studio’s financial forecasts. Audiences have mostly tuned out big-screen comedies to indulge in the countless streaming TV comedies on offer. More important, its polarizing material wouldn’t fly in these racially charged times. But a decade ago, it was the exact kind of bizarre, only-in-Hollywood path to redemption Cruise needed to land back on top. Lucky for him, the thunder came when it did.

Tom Cruise and ‘Tropic Thunder’ 10 Years Later

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tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

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Shaurya Thakur

It’s 2006, and Tom Cruise isn’t on Hollywood’s Christmas shopping. Despite cementing his movie star status with ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies, Paramount Pictures cut ties with this. While promoting ‘War Of The Worlds,’ the actor does an exaggerated couch jump to declare his love for Katie Holmes. 

Tom Cruise was scrutinized when he publically shredded Brooke Shields for using antidepressants. Despite being a great actor, everyone was cutting ties with what they called a PR nightmare. Being on the outs with Hollywood, the 61-year-old decided to do the most dangerous stunt of his career – a comedy. 

Related: Why Was Tom Cruise Reluctant To Return For ‘Top Gun: Maverick’?

Tom Cruise Stars In Ben Stiller’s ‘Tropic Thunder’

Les Grossman in 'Tropic Thunder.'

Ben Still, friends with Tom Cruise , sends him a script to read. Titled ‘Tropic Thunder,’ the ‘Jerry Maguire’ star was impressed with the script. But there was something amiss. The movie star suggested that the film studio must be involved in a film about moviemaking. 

The suggestion led to the birth of a glorious cameo in the film. Tom Cruise played Less Gross, the Diet Coke-chugging, ill-tempered studio executive. The character is said to be a commentary on the people who pull the strings behind movies and movie stars. 

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The ‘Mission: Impossible’ Star Created Les Grossman Especially For The Movie

Les Grossman wan entirely the creation of the 61-year-old actor.

Ben Still told Esquire that everything about Les Grossman came from Tom Cruise. After making the suggestion, the 61-year-old actor couldn’t get the character out of his mind. He did makeup tests, with someone coincidentally handing him a diet coke. Ben Stiller’s only condition was that the character would look like the ‘Jerry Maguire ‘ actor. 

During an interview with BBC Radio 1 , Tom Cruise remembered his two essential conditions for Les Grossman. The ‘Mission: Impossible’ star said, “I started reading, I read this character, and I said, “Okay, this is fun. Do you mind, Ben… I wanna play this character. I wanna have fat hands and I wanna dance.”

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tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

One of the highlights of the 2008 Ben Stiller comedy “Tropic Thunder” is Les Grossman, the venom-spewing, Diet Coke-drinking studio head who doesn’t care that the lead actor (Stiller) in his multimillion-dollar movie has been kidnapped in the jungles of Vietnam.

The reason why the character is so memorable is simple: He's played by Tom Cruise.

Well, it was probably the best time for Cruise to do something that’s not in his wheelhouse. Back then, Cruise was still getting over the box-office disaster of “Mission: Impossible 3,” and his public statements about Scientology caused Viacom chair Sumner Redstone to tell a reporter , “We don’t think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot.”

Thankfully, Cruise's friend Ben Stiller wanted him to be in “Thunder.” And as the movie’s coscreenwriter Justin Theroux tells it, they wanted Cruise to have a larger part.

“We were talking to Tom about maybe doing Ben’s part — we wanted him in the movie,” Theroux told Business Insider while doing press for “Zoolander 2,” which he also cowrote. “We thought it would be a real coup to get him in the movie.”

But Cruise pushed for the minor studio-head role, so Theroux went to work on the character.

(Jeff Spicer/Getty) Justin Theroux.

“I went back and started working on it and sketching it out and basically creating the most vile character I could create,” Theroux revealed. “And there was a moment of going, ‘Oh, s--t, eventually Tom is going to see these pages and he’s going to be like, 'What the hell are you doing?’”

But that was far from the case. In fact, Cruise encouraged Theroux and Stiller to make the character even more offensive.

And when it came to the Les Grossman look — balding and overweight — Cruise suggested another memorable feature.

“He wanted these prosthetic hands — big, chubby hands,” Theroux said of Cruise's pointer.

In many ways. the Les Grossman character made Cruise hip again to an audience that was starting to write him off.

Since the release of “Tropic Thunder,” many have pushed for a spinoff that focuses on Grossman.

Theroux, for one, is game, and it seems like it might be tentatively in the works.

“We’ve talked about it,” Theroux said. “But it’s one of those things where we go, we don’t want to jam anything, we just want to make sure the tone is right and it would be the right story.”

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15 years ago, Tom Cruise revived his career with an uncredited role in Tropic Thunder

After a string of controversies and a split from longtime studio paramount, cruise was slipping out of favour with hollywood. that was, until he suggested the character of a diet coke-guzzling terror of a movie producer for his friend ben stiller’s new film, article bookmarked.

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Fifteen years ago, Tom Cruise took on a role that has since been credited for reviving his career. Now, with the latest Mission: Impossible film just released and Cruise enjoying his time as one of the top 10 highest-grossing lead actors of all time, it’s hard to imagine. But back then, he was falling out of favour due to a spate of controversial public behaviour.

In 2006, Cruise was a PR nightmare dominating headlines for all the wrong reasons. The previous year, he’d caused uproar with his notorious couch-jumping stunt during an interview with Oprah. He was supposed to be promoting Steven Spielberg ’s movie War of the Worlds , but instead decided to declare his love for fellow actor Katie Holmes , in the most over-enthusiastic manner possible.

The clip was viewed millions of times around the world thanks to a new website called YouTube, sparking a reported feud with Spielberg, who apparently believed that Cruise’s behaviour had damaged War of the Worlds ’ success at the box office. (Cruise would later tell Oprah in a 2015 interview that the moment was “real” for him and he was unsure if he’d take it back.)

That same year, Cruise was heavily criticised for his remarks about Brooke Shields, where he accused her of spreading “irresponsible misinformation” about antidepressants. Shields, who struggled with conception, revealed in her book Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, that she’d taken medication to help treat her condition.

In a heated discussion on The Today Show, Cruise told then-host Matt Lauer that Shields “didn’t understand the history of psychiatry”, and went so far as to brand her “dangerous”. Shields then wrote a New York Times op-ed, in which she suggested Cruise “stick to fighting aliens”. He was also criticised by medical experts who warned that he risked increasing the stigma surrounding mental illness.

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Shields said that Cruise apologised for his remarks in person, and that she’d been impressed by his apology, during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “He apologised for bringing me into the whole thing and for everything that happened,” she said.

“And through it all, I was so impressed with how heartfelt it was. And I didn't feel at any time that I had to defend myself, nor did I feel that he was trying to convince me of anything other than the fact that he was deeply sorry. And I accepted it.”

By 2006, Cruise was rapidly falling out of favour with Hollywood, even as he was ranked as the world’s most powerful celebrity by Forbes . His influence and box-office success were indisputable, of course, but industry figures – and the public – appeared to be growing tired of his highly publicised antics.

Evidence of this emerged when Paramount Studios cut ties with Cruise after a 14-year relationship, and Sumner Redstone, then-chairman of the studio’s parent company, Viacom, cited the actor’s public behaviour as one of the reasons behind the decision.

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“It’s nothing to do with his acting ability, he’s a terrific actor,” Redstone said at the time. “But we don’t think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot.”

This shocking upset, which landed after years of success since Cruise first starred in Top Gun in 1986, caused many Hollywood critics to wonder if this was the end of his career. That was, until 2008, when Cruise showed up in a cameo role in his friend Ben Stiller ’s box office hit, Tropic Thunder – about a cast of prima donna actors shooting a movie in Vietnam – as the balding, Diet Coke-guzzling, expletive-uttering movie executive Les Grossman.

Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaughey in ‘Tropic Thunder'

Opening up about Cruise’s role in an Esquire interview, director Stiller revealed that it was actually his friend’s idea to play Les. “Tom Cruise had the idea to play Les Grossman in the movie,” Stiller says. “That part did not exist. He said, ‘Well, there’s no studio executive and that would be really fun to be that guy.’ And he had this whole idea of what the guy should look like. It was his idea to dance. And I remember when we did a makeup test, someone handed him a Diet Coke and then he just started moving.”

Cruise certainly committed to the role. In a 2019 interview with Conan O’Brien, he recalled that his two stipulations for the role were that he wanted “fat hands”, and he wanted to dance. Wearing a fat suit, prosthetic hands and a bald cap, he was virtually unrecognisable as the suave Hollywood star the world knew, dancing to Ludacris’s “Get Back” one moment, screaming at a film crew the next (OK, the latter sounds more familiar after his notorious Mission Impossible diatribe in 2020 ). For many watching Tropic Thunder at the cinema, it wasn’t apparent that Cruise was behind the character until the end credits began to roll.

The film itself was controversial, not least for Robert Downey Jr’s performance, which involved wearing blackface to play method-loving Australian actor, Kirk Lazarus. Cruise’s character was also scrutinised: the New York Times noted how Grossman was “heavily and heavy-handedly coded as Jewish…the character is murderous, repellent and fascinating, a grotesque from his swollen fingers to the heavy gold dollar sign nestled on his yeti-furred chest”.

Yet audiences adored Cruise in the movie, and in the years since, his performance in Tropic Thunde r has been widely credited for “resurrecting” his career, along with proving he could do comedy, as well as action. Since then, fans have been begging Cruise to reprise the role, and it seems they might actually get their wish. Last year, in a Deadline report about him and his regular collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, it was claimed that the duo are “fixated” on the character of Les Grossman, and are working out how best to bring him back.

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Ten Years On, Tropic Thunder 's Still a Brutal Kick In Hollywood's A--

Five reasons ben stiller's controversial, career-reviving satire still sticks in the memory and in the industry's craw..

tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

(Photo by © DreamWorks)

In 2008, Tropic Thunder hit screens like a dynamo, shocking audiences with its stunt casting and blunt satire and racking up $110.5 million in domestic box office receipts. Ten years on, it still stands out as an audacious and controversial piece of American comedy – and we’re digging into why.

Written, directed, and produced by Ben Stiller, the movie sits Certified Fresh at 82% on the Tomatometer and earned  Robert Downey Jr. a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Kirk Lazarus, a white Australian method actor portraying a black character, Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris, in a fake movie. It was also blessed by  Tom Cruise ’s brilliant cameo as ostentatious douchebag Hollywood agent, Les Grossman.

Performances are one thing, substance is another. Tropic Thunder might have been just another big studio comedy when it landed in theaters on August 13, 2008, but it had weight to it and stuck in our memories in a way that few comedies-of-the-week do. Here are some of the reasons it cut through, and holds up.

1. It Surpassed Some Of Its Most Notable Influences

Chances are, you’ve seen 1999’s Galaxy Quest , a Star Trek parody so funny, rich, and solid that some Trekkies even hold it among the canonical Star Trek movies. (Critics liked it too – it sits at 90% on the Tomatometer.) The film told the story of a band of down-and-out actors from a  Star Trek -like   series who are forced to play their TV roles when they’re kidnapped by a beleaguered alien race that thinks their TV reruns are real-life documentaries. Chances are, too, that you’ve herd of  Three Amigos! , released 13 years earlier, which also saw a band of actors mistaken for their onscreen characters, this time South of the Border. The two films’ influence on Thunder – in which, yet again, the story of actors mistaken for their characters is used to skewer aspects of the movie-making business – is such that some online writers have dubbed them an unofficial trilogy. The trilogy’s finale, though, takes its satire to the darkest place: the very heart of the dream factory.

If Galaxy Quest captured Star Trek and its surrounding culture in a nutshell, Tropic Thunder captured Hollywood itself. Stiller’s script held a funhouse mirror to his contemporary actors, portraying its entitled prima donna actor characters with zero self-awareness about themselves, their peers, or their impact on audiences. More, Stiller held that same mirror to the Hollywood industrial complex, with the characters’ agents being varying degrees of oblivious, short-tempered, and manipulative. Despite all this, nearly every character in Tropic Thunder learns to get over themselves in a Sullivan’s Travels sort of way (yep, it even had a very Hollywood ending). While Galaxy Quest posits that even disposable entertainment has intrinsic value, Tropic Thunder argues that most folks in Hollywood, while often misguided, ultimately have the best intentions at heart.

Well, everyone but Les Grossman.

2. It Gave Tom Cruise a Much-Needed Post-Couch Big Win

The mid-2000s were rough for Tom Cruise’s image. Mission: Impossible III   didn’t exactly light up the box office, Lions for Lambs bombed outright, and then there was the Oprah couch incident. It seemed like the impossible had happened: Cruise’s star was fading. That was until his explosive performance as Hollywood agent Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder . Rumored to be based on Harvey Weinstein, Grossman was a hilarious, over-the-top deconstruction of the stereotypical Hollywood executive: brash, profane, arrogant, egotistical, manipulative, greedy, and grandiose. He might be a bit much to swallow – and a bit harder to watch, given what we know about the man who some say inspired him – but his meme-able dance moves go down smooth.

3. IT WAS PART OF THE “YEAR OF ROBERT DOWNEY JR.”

Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Kirk Lazarus, who plays the black Sergeant Lincoln Osiris in the movie-within-the-movie, is one of Tropic Thunder’s most memorable — and infamous — elements. Already riding a big career uptick following 2005’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang   and 2007’s Zodiac , Downey Jr. had a truly banner year in 2008 with the releases of  Iron Man and Tropic Thunder . The actor proved he could lead a blockbuster with the MCU’s first entry, but Tropic Thunder  reminded people that he also had range to spare. It was an uproarious and uncomfortable satire of Hollywood whitewashing and the industry’s often problematic casting decisions – and let’s face it, one that is still relevant today.

4. IT HELPED KICK OFF THE MCCONAISSANCE

Make no mistake, we were riding the Matthew McConaughey train well before  Tropic Thunder – he was a rom-com king in  Failure to Launch ,  How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days , and Fool’s Gold , and he gave us a decent villain in the apocalyptic Reign of Fire . But he was rarely given serious consideration for roles that were, shall we say, more challenging. He changed that perception in Tropic Thunder  playing Rick Peck, a comically oblivious agent who was absolutely hellbent on getting his client a TiVo. From there, McConaughey enjoyed a string of successes including Mud , Magic Mike , and Dallas Buyers Club , and notably on TV’s True Detective .  Prior to  Tropic Thunder , he starred or appeared in just five Certified Fresh movies across a span of 15 years; in the 10 years since the movie’s release, he’s been in nine.

5. IT WAS WOKE AS HELL, ESPECIALLY FOR THE TIME

Another infamous element of  Tropic Thunder ? Ben Stiller’s action star Tugg Speedman formerly played the titular character in  Simple Jack , an in-universe critical-and-financial failure centered on a young man with learning disabilities. As with the Tropic Thunder ‘s treatment of blackface, the concept of Simple Jack held Hollywood’s feet to the fire, skewering the way able-bodied actors have portrayed people with disabilities to earn those awards-season accolades. Tropic Thunder also featured Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, a hyper-masculine – but closeted – rapper-turned-actor. When he accidentally comes out to his co-stars, he is met only with encouragement. We also got to see Chino with his boyfriend at the end of the film in a heartwarming moment.

The 2000s saw their share of important comedies, with Superbad , The 40 Year Old Virgin , and Knocked Up digging into a number of issues on the tip of people’s tongues, but Tropic Thunder  cracked the egg of Hollywood itself. For that – and for its rollicking deconstructions of entitlement, race, fame, the creative process, and self-actualization – it won’t soon be forgotten.

Tropic Thunder was released in theaters August 13, 2008

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Tropic Thunder  rewatched and reconsidered, 10 years later

Darren is a TV Critic. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFranich for opinions and recommendations.

tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

The summer of 2008 broke history, and rebuilt it. America suffered through a bitter presidential election on the road to a globewrecking financial crisis. In theaters, cinematic generations were rising — and falling. Superheroes, Will Smith, George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro, Emma Stone, Mike Myers, Sisterhood s and Step Brothers , Batman, and ABBA, adaptations of TV shows we still tweet about, new installments of movie franchises studios won't stop rebooting: everything Hollywood was before, alongside everything it still is.

In our weekly column Two Thousand Late , we'll explore the big hits and curious flops from a summer that has never really ended. Next week: Summer ends and a new era dawns with The House Bunny . This week: critic at large Leah Greenblatt and TV critic Darren Franich on Tropic Thunder .

DARREN: We've revisited a lot of movies this summer, Leah. But I have to admit, nothing made me more anxious than the prospect of rewatching Tropic Thunder.

For director-star Ben Stiller, this was magnum opus territory: A big-budget comedy about big-budget excess, stuffed with hard-R ultraviolence and offensive-on-purpose material. Stiller was an influential cult-comedy voice in the '90s before he became a full-blown franchise-launching megastar across the 2000s. On Thunder , he assembled an all-star lineup from across the cinematic universe of humor: fellow comedy star Jack Black, Apatow-adjacent Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride, stand-up Brandon T. Jackson, eternal "he's much more popular in Britain" talking point Steve Coogan. And that's not to mention Tom Cruise under heavy makeup, Robert Downey Jr. under heavy makeup, and Matthew McConaughey in the wilderness years.

Tropic Thunder was a phenomenon upon initial release. It was the movie that finally pushed The Dark Knight off the top of the box office, maintaining a No. 1 position in domestic theaters through Labor Day. And thanks to Downey, it became the rare comedy hit to receive Oscar attention, earning the star a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Downey's role-within-a-role might be the big talking point here. As a vaguely Crowevian method actor Kirk Lazarus, Downey spends most of the movie exhibiting "pigmentation alteration" — meta-blackface, basically.

It seems impossible that any actor would play a role like that today, though on some level "wouldn't happen today" is the vibe of the whole movie. Tropic Thunder opens with a comedy assault, fake trailers, fart symphonies, a Brokeback ish Oscar parody, the sight of Stiller's hands exploded into Sarlacc-y stumps. The opening scene openly quotes Platoon and Apocalypse Now , two films which symbolize an earlier era of auteurist overreach.

You're primed for a scathing satire of Hollywood…and then the film never really lives up to that prologue. There are some isolated bits in Tropic Thunder I really enjoy. I forgot just how fully committed and semi-psychopathic Jack Black was in the part of a druggy tabloid star. On some deeply pathological level, I will always think it's hilarious when Tom Cruise says bad words. But there's something a little backpatty in the film's tone, halfway to Entourage. You feel everyone's very proud of everything they're getting away with — and the fact that Stiller ends Tropic Thunder with his character's Oscar victory feels like meta-narcissism falling backwards into light egomania.

What was your experience watching Tropic Thunder this go-round, Leah?

LEAH: Mine was the same honestly, though maybe I enjoyed it just a smedge more than you did? Or the first 45 minutes at least; much like Ben Stiller's biceps, the last hour is the kind of swole that you makes you think, "That is a whole lot of effort, for my mere mild amusement." Especially when you remember that this is the same director who made his debut less than 15 years earlier with Reality Bites , where his character purposefully represented all the smash-cut emptiness of modern pop culture that Winona and her scrappy little band of gas-station bohemians were trying to get away from. The student has become the blaster.

But there are so many moments in Thunder that I still love, too: the loony cameos (don't tell me that Tobey Maguire's performance as the homoerotic priest in the Kirk Lazarus trailer-within-a-trailer doesn't deserve at least a Cable Ace award), Jack Black and his jellybeans; Danny McBride's reverse lightning-bolt mullet; RDJ's "never go full retard" speech. And you're so right, even rewatching that speech scene alone on my laptop, I felt uncomfortable; I don't feel great even typing the words now. But there is real Academy wisdom in that speech too — and his delivery is perfect.

I actually enjoy this Downey performance way more than anything he's done in spandex over the last few years; it's so goofy and free. But to me the biggest revelation in this movie is probably Tom Cruise — not strictly because of the acting, necessarily, or the fat suit, though he works hard for both, but just that this is the last time I remember him distinctly not playing himself. He's a hairy-knuckled bear-daddy Diet Coke-head with a nuclear rage problem, and he looks like he's having so much fun. I don't know that I've enjoyed him this much as a pure actor, and not as a dude playing the dude who is always Tom Cruise™, since Magnolia .

I also just realized, is there a lady in this movie with a line of dialogue besides "Please hold"? Not that every script has to pass the Bechdel test , but man that is a low ratio, when secondhand Maria Menounos on a closed-circuit TV beamed over the hotel breakfast buffet is your main female.

DARREN: You've also got Tyra Banks, Christine Taylor, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Alicia Silverstone in steadily more cameo-ish cameos. Which could be the point! Like the same summer's Step Brothers , the overriding vibe here is dudely self-destruction. Stiller wrote the screenplay with Etan Cohen and (hello!) Justin Theroux, and it almost feels like they aligned their core characters with the Seven Deadly Sins. Stiller's Tugg Speedman envies Lazarus. Lazarus is a white actor prideful enough to think he can play a black man. Black's Jeff Portnoy is a glutton, like a chocoholic, but for heroin. Grossman's greedy. Brandon Soo Hoo's teen guerilla Tran is all wrath. And, um, is that seven yet?

In a lot of ways, this movie seems like the apex of a particular moment in comedy, sitting alongside 2005's dirty-joke shockfest The Aristocrats and 2006's Borat feature. Back then, it felt like the point of movie comedy was to push past every possible barrier of good taste. (This was also the era when the horror genre slipped into torture porn, a correlation proving nothing except that the 2000s were a weird, dark time.) It's a kick to see how far Tropic Thunder wants to push itself, no doubt. Along with the "full retard" speech (god help me, I laughed again!), there's that bit when Grossman decides the best business move is to let his lead actor die.

We're halfway to Network territory there — but you feel the kid gloves come on after that, like the movie can't get too sharp in its showbiz satire, like there's this quality of safely laughing with instead of dangerously laughing at . I guess it's a tricky question of our age, Leah. Even when a movie explicitly sets out to deconstruct powerful Hollywood men, will it inevitably wind up celebrating them? It looks fun to be a powerful asshat! It's like that old Francois Truffaut line, how there's no such thing as a truly anti-war film, because war inevitably looks awesome on the big screen. I know, I know, quoting Truffaut now are we? , but that could be some ultimate point of Tropic Thunder , too. These dudes go to the jungle looking to make a sober war epic, lose their movie, lose their minds, and still wind up with awards-y financial success. Huzzah for failing upwards!

Cruise as Grossman is a delight. Also, maybe we're just all the way through the rabbit hole here, but I forgot how much I enjoyed McConaughey as Stiller's agent! I've just seen a lot of his Serious Face stuff post-McConaissance, so it's a kick to watch his anxiously fratty agent face off against magisterial Grossman. Can we reunite these two characters in a spinoff? Written by, like, Tina Fey?

LEAH: Darren, this is in my top-three McConaughey performances for sure; my Mconaugh-three. He's not doing Kate Hudson romance or gaunt Oscar bait, but he is acting out the perfect flipside of his '90s John Grisham types: he has a noble cause and he will fight to the death for it! Except the cause is the Tivo clause in his client's set rider , and he will fight unless the death of that client means he gets his own G5.

It's funny what you say about the movie pivoting from satire to self-congratulation, because as two people who work adjacent to show business (and by "adjacent" I mean, like, the seagulls in the dumpster behind the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), do you think you and I are more susceptible in general to this kind of inside-baseball shenanigans?

Thunder 's whole plot obviously hinges on some knowledge of Hollywood self-regard, but it's not setting a super high bar: Any steady pop-culture consumer would recognize those tropes (like the opening string of fantastically bad fake trailers); they're like an action-movie amuse-bouche that Stiller and Theroux gave us eight years before Deadpool .

Now that you brought up Tina Fey though, the script does feel like a sort of feature-length cousin to one of her and Amy Poehler's Golden Globes monologues: a big, winky pin in the bloated balloon of industry ego. I think they might be better at it than Justin Theroux — but of course 10 killer minutes onstage is not the same as sustaining a whole movie. (And 10 great minutes is about exactly what Sisters had.)

As far as men being both the only target and, in the end, the only heroes here, Cruise's turn did make me think for a minute about another one of my favorite left-field casting coups: Tilda Swinton's ruthless lad-mag editor in Trainwreck . She's just pure, venal joy with no real redemption arc at all, and I loved that.

I'm not really sure how to end this thing, so I'll give you the one of the seven deadly sins you missed: Sloth! I'm tapping out. But I'm glad this assignment made us rewatch and reconsider a movie I probably wouldn't have gone back to without, say, a long weekend in a log cabin with a very limited DVD collection.

My final takeaway is: Brandon T. Jackson is underrated. Cruise and McConaughey definitely need to get weird more often. And if there's going to be any kind of spin-off, I vote for RDJ and Kate McKinnon just jabbering their crazy Australian accents at each other for two straight hours. Fin.

Complete Summer 2008 Schedule:

May 2: Iron Man and Made of Honor

May 9: Speed Racer

May 16: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

May 22: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull

May 30: Sex and the City

June 6: Kung Fu Panda

June 13: The Happening

June 20: The Love Guru

June 27: WALL-E

July 2: Hancock

July 11: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

July 18: The Dark Knight

July 25: Step Brothers

Aug. 1: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Aug. 13: Tropic Thunder

Aug. 22: The House Bunny

The Truth About Tom Cruise's Character In 'Tropic Thunder'

Tom was supposed to play the leading role that Ben Stiller ended up taking.

Love him or loathe him, there's no denying that Tom Cruise basically stole Tropic Thunder. While the movie was filled with controversy, such as Robert Downey Jr.'s character's acting choices , the 2008 film remains beloved. In the film, Tom Cruise played a vile Hollywood mogul named Les Grossman. Given Tom's incredible filmography , it makes sense that he brought this character to life so well. But given Tom's recent set outburst as well as his not-so-clean reputation among some in Hollywood perhaps his casting was even more calculated. Either way, Tom Cruise absolutely knocked this role out of the park. Thanks to a fantastic article by Grantland , we now know how he was able to do this...

Tom Was Supposed To Play Ben's Role Until He Gave A Very Specific Script Note

Tom Cruise needed to repair his image in 2007. Years of conflict with marriages, jumping on couches, and squabbles with the studio making his Mission Impossible movies put him in a bad light. Ultimately, Tropic Thunder was the film that helped (momentarily) rehabilitate his image. But Tom wasn't supposed to play Les Grossman, the vicious studio executive who clearly believed actors were disposable. Actually, Tom was supposed to play the leading role that Ben Stiller ended up taking. It made sense that Ben wasn't initially interested in the lead role. After all, he was already directing it and writing it with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen.

"Justin Theroux and I had been working on the script on and off for eight years," Ben Stiller said to Grantland. "We had an outline and about half a script. I knew how it should end. Then we brought Etan on and got a full draft."

When Etan Cohen came on in 2002, he basically came up with the idea that would lead Tom Cruise to essentially create Les Grossman.

Related: Amidst The Tom Cruise Controversy, Katie Holmes Seems Unbothered And Is Focusing On Christmas

"We were still figuring out why the actors would get abandoned and no one would notice that all these stars were gone," Etan Cohen said. "So I had written this throwaway thing at the side of the document that said: 'Maybe the studio has an insurance policy on production. When the director dies they recoup all their expenses, so the studio doesn’t care about the actors.' Then we totally went away from that for years."

By that time, Tom Cruise had already read the script and claimed that there was a need for another villain. In fact, he even stated that it could use a greedy studio exec who 'represents the gross part of Hollywood'.

"His idea to show the studio head actually fixed a problem we had for a long time. We never cut back to the real world for any of the previous drafts. All the Grossman scenes totally fixed the plot holes" Ben Stiller claimed.

Related: Tom Cruise Trolled For 'Social Distancing From His Daughter' After Fiery Audio Leaks

Soon after, a new draft was written and Ben gave the role of the studio exec to Tom, who couldn't take it due to scheduling conflicts. But there was no name for the character at first. In fact, it took an entire year for 'Les Grossman' to officially be created.

"Ben decided he was going to play Speedman, and then he got a phone call from Tom, who said he just couldn’t get the script out of his mind. Tom asked, 'What else is open?' And Ben said, 'Well, we haven’t cast the Les Grossman role yet.' Tom was like, 'I’d play that,'" producer Stuart Cornfeld said.

Les Grossman's Look Was Half The Performance

While Tom brought a certain amount of energy to the role, his hair, make-up, and prosthetics were really what made the performance memorable. After all, Tom was barely recognizable.

"I was Tom’s go-to makeup person from Interview With the Vampire on. I did a lot of big, iconic looks for him," makeup designer Michèle Burke said. "I got a text saying, 'Tom wants to have hairy arms.' And I was thinking, Oh, OK, we can get hairy arms. Then they were like, 'We want him to have a hairy chest.' Then suddenly it was like he’s going to have big hands, and I’m sitting there thinking, This is getting bigger than I expected. Then they started sending me pictures of other people who looked a bit like this. You know, with the gold jewelry, the hairy chest. I thought, OK, now I’m beginning to get the picture, this is full-on."

Then, of course, there was the fat suit which was a bunch of custom pads made out of foam and beading from the inside of a pillow. This beading accurately mimicked the jiggle that human fat makes when it moves; something that was vital for the dance number...

All About Tom Cruise Dancing

"We’re doing the makeup test and it’s the first time Tom’s in the Les Grossman outfit. He stops and says, 'Maybe I should dance in this. You know, I haven’t danced in a movie in a long time,'" producer Stuart Cornfeld said.

The Mission Impossible and Eye Wide Shut star ended up choreographing all of his own dance moves which just made everyone on the set burst out laughing.

"I remember him standing off in a corner just working on his moves," co-star Bill Hader explained.

The outrageous costume, hair, and make-up, the hilarious lines (mostly written by Justin Theroux), as well as the performance and energy that Tom Cruise brought to the role, ended up creating a truly memorable character.

Next: Why Did Tom Cruise Agree To A Cameo In 'Austin Powers'?

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How Tom Cruise clawed his way back to the top with the weirdest character of his career

Tom cruise was battling professional and personal setbacks in the mid-2000s, when he conceived, from scratch, the character that would take his career to the next level..

tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

Tom Cruise’s stardom , which he has sustained for over four extraordinary decades, was further cemented some weeks ago with the release of Top Gun: Maverick. The film proved that Cruise is still a big draw at the box office, especially when he’s playing iconic characters in large-scale spectacles. Maverick has since become the year’s biggest hit, grossing over $1 billion worldwide and setting the stage for the next two years in Cruise’s career, with back-to-back Mission: Impossible films up for release.

From the outside, it might look like things have never been this good for Cruise, at least professionally speaking. But this is a position that he has had to claw his way towards. It wasn’t always smooth sailing for Cruise, but thanks to a carefully crafted last decade–both professionally and personally–the actor has managed to hit greater heights than probably any 60-year-old star ever.

tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

On his birthday today, here’s looking back at the exact moment thing started turning around for him. In the mid-2000s, Cruise experienced the worst PR crisis of his life. His antics on Oprah’s couch made him the butt of all jokes before social media was even a thing. It was around the same time that Cruise said publicly that Brooke Shields’ use of antidepressants to battle postpartum depression was ‘irresponsible’. And then there was the leaked video in which he spoke passionately (and to regular folks, rather menacingly) about Scientology. His affliation with the Church of Scientology seemed to be the bedrock for virtually every controversy he found himself involved in, and certainly, this is something that has always proven to be a thorn in his side.

In desperate need of a career reinvention and after two full years without a proper hit–the third Mission: Impossible underperformed–Cruise bounced back with a role that would not only recontextualise him in popular culture as someone who was willing to poke fun at himself, but also an actor first and a star second. In 2008, Cruise appeared in a surprise extended cameo in director Ben Stiller’s war/film industry satire Tropic Thunder . He played the fat, balding studio head Les Grossman (a character that may or may not have been modelled after Harvey Weinstein) and earned himself a place in the audience’s good books, and also a nomination at the Golden Globes.

The idea of Grossman, who pops in regularly to scream obscenities at people on the phone and dance to pop music while sipping soda, was entirely Cruise’s, Stiller told Esquire some years ago. “That part did not exist. He said, ‘Well, there’s no studio executive and that would be really fun to be that guy. And he had this whole idea of what the guy should look like. It was his idea to dance. And I remember when we did a makeup test, someone handed him a Diet Coke and then he just started moving,” he said.

Festive offer

Cruise had said something similar a couple of years before that. “I read the script, and he had all of the characters, but the studio wasn’t there,” he told BBC Radio 1 in 2017. “There was a structural compression missing down on those characters, you know, that keeps the pressure on these guys that really drives the story. I was like, ‘You need the studio.’ So he came back, like a few weeks later, and I started reading. I read this character and I went, ‘Okay.’ I said, ‘This is fun,’ I said, ‘Do you mind Ben? I want to play this character. I said, ‘I want to have fat hands, and I’m gonna dance.’ And he looked at me, he was like, ‘What?’ …”

Cruise continued, “He said, ‘Look, are you sure you can’t just be you? Like, look like you and do it?’ I said, ‘No, no, no man, I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to play this character.’ So then I did the makeup test, we’ve tested the fat hands, you know, and the whole look, and so we’re doing the wardrobe and there was no music playing … I said, ‘Look, let me just—I wanna do some moves for you…’ He just called me, and it was—he was laughing… He picked the music out, he edited this thing together, he was just pissing himself.”

Of course, it’s unlikely that Grossman could exist in a movie today. The character hasn’t aged particularly well. And neither has the movie. Even then, Tropic Thunder (despite being a hit that made nearly $200 million worldwide and scored Robert Downey Jr an Oscar nod, further his own career comeback) had attracted criticism for its treatment of mental illness and its use of Blackface. But despite everything, there still seems to be an appetite for the character–something that mirrors Cruise’s own career, which has thrived in spite of his connections with Scientology, and his famously demanding nature on set.

Cruise reprised the character at the MTV Movie Awards in 2020, which was followed by the news of a Les Grossman spinoff being put into production with Cruise returning.

Click for more updates and latest Hollywood News along with Bollywood and Entertainment updates . Also get latest news and top headlines from India and around the World at The Indian Express .

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Happy 10-year anniversary to Tom Cruise’s greatest role ever: Les Grossman

“I will massacre you.”

Tom Cruise’s long acting career boasts many celebrated roles: “Maverick” in  Top Gun , Jerry Maguire in  Jerry Maguire , Ethan Hunt in the  Mission: Impossible  series. Together, they tell the story of an artist extraordinarily committed to his craft, one who knows only one gear and that’s the highest. Tom Cruise is perhaps the last bona fide American movie star left.

And none of his roles exemplify his career in totality more than Les Grossman in  Tropic Thunder , a film that turns 10 this month.

Grossman, for the uninitiated, is merely a supporting character in the 2008 comedy starring Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. as actors in a Vietnam War film who get lost in the jungle, and are pursued by a real and very dangerous drug gang that controls the area. Grossman is the blustery, foul-mouthed, reprehensible studio executive in charge of the ill-fated action movie. Donning fake hair and gobs of prosthetics, Cruise’s famously handsome features are nearly unrecognizable.

Les Grossman is not one of Cruise’s biggest roles, nor surely his most impressive performance. (Cruise fans don’t agree on what is, though Frank Mackey in  Magnolia  and Vincent in  Collateral  are often cited among his best work.) Rather, Grossman offers audiences a microcosm of Cruise’s process, his intensity, his signature chutzpah. It’s all of Cruise’s most admirable traits as an actor, distilled into one fat suit.

The story of how Grossman came about is almost as Tom Cruise-y as the role itself. As Grantland’s 2015 oral history of Grossman pointed out, Grossman materialized during a low point both personally and professionally for Cruise. It was three years after the infamous Oprah couch debacle , and two years after his studio, Paramount, dropped him following some controversial comments the outspoken Scientologist had made about psychiatry. Cruise needed a role that would endear him to audiences—and the industry—once again.

Cruise came up with the idea for Grossman (who was not in the original script) himself. Besides the violent drug gang, Cruise thought, the film needed a second antagonist, but one back in Hollywood who’d exert pressure on the fictional movie with unhinged rants, rather than with guns. Etan Cohen, one of the film’s writers, remarked that Cruise was all systems go from the jump. “A lot of actors hold back at table readings. Tom was the opposite,” he told Grantland. “He worked insanely hard at making that character unique. You could tell that he’d never done anything like it before and was embracing it.”

Unlike some of his more energetic characters, Grossman did not require that Cruise climb the Burj Khalifa or do barrel rolls piloting a helicopter , but he did need to dance in a fat suit. Cruise was so committed to the character that he was at an actual risk for dehydration, Aida Caefer, who fashioned the suit for the movie, told Grantland. He choreographed his own dance moves, often practicing them out in the open on set. It took a 12-person team of makeup experts to design the silicone prosthetics that transformed the movie-star proportion of Cruise into the unkempt husk of the debased Hollywood mogul Grossman.

Viewers have long wondered if Grossman was meant as a caricature of anyone in particular—Harvey Weinstein comes to mind. The disgraced executive, who bears something of a physical resemblance to Grossman, was also notorious for his extreme outbursts as the head of Miramax, among the other, more criminal predilections that 87 women have now accused him of.

The character was so successful that Cruise appeared in costume at the MTV Movie Awards two years later, dancing in a skit that made fun of Cruise’s famous routine from  Risky Business ,  and again live on stage with Jennifer Lopez . Rumors were floated of a Les Grossman spinoff movie in the works in 2010, but it never materialized.

Tom Cruise is an inscrutable figure off the screen, one who’s closely associated in Scientology, with its dubious philosophies , and some of its even more dubious leaders . That has made it tough for some moviegoers to separate his on-screen persona from the man.

Les Grossman was an opportunity for Cruise, for the first and perhaps only time in his career, to poke fun at himself and his compulsion to do everything as big and as bold as it can possibly be done. As silly and grotesque as the character may be, Cruise’s performance gave us a glimpse of the man beneath the tabloid headlines. And he’s a man who likes to dance.

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Tom Cruise And Christopher McQuarrie Are Reportedly ‘Fixated’ On Making More Les Grossman (And A Musical) Happen

Mike Redmond

After lighting the box office on fire with Top Gun: Maverick , and delivering a much-needed win to theaters, Tom Cruise can pretty much do whatever he wants now, and apparently, what he wants to do is more Les Grossman . As Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie get ready to bring the Mission: Impossible franchise in for a landing, the duo are reportedly hard at work on the next phase in Cruise’s career. They’ve narrowed the sights down to three targets, and one of them involves Cruise returning to his fan-favorite comedy role from 2008’s Tropic Thunder .

Oh, and also, he’d kind of like to do another musical. Via Deadline :

One is an original song and dance-style musical they’ll craft as a star vehicle for Cruise. They are also setting up another original action film with franchise potential, and they are also fixated on Les Grossman. The latter is the gruff, dance-happy studio executive Cruise played in cameo for Tropic Thunder . It’s unclear if they will create a whole movie around Grossman, or borrow him for inclusion in either of the other vehicles.

Even though the film is over 14 years old, Cruise has repeatedly talked about getting into the Les Grossman prosthetics again. In fact, he got his wish a few years back when he busted out his old dance moves for Conan O’Brien at Comic-Con 2019 . Sure, Cruise loves riding motorcycles off of cliffs and jumping out of helicopters, but it really seems like the guy’s true passion is wearing a fat suit while dancing to Ludacris. Who are we to stop him?

(Via Deadline )

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Tom Cruise’s 7 Greatest Cameos and Minor Roles, Ranked

"A G5 airplane?... Yes. And lots of money. Playa."

Sure, we know him as Ethan Hunt and Maverick —and Jerry Maguire — but Tom Cruise was not always this well known. He started out, as many actors do, with very small, and sometimes even unnoticed roles. There have even been a few instances when he has played a part in a film, and as an actor, remained uncredited for the film.

While many of his roles have been well-known, or downright iconic, there are a few that might go unseen if you aren’t actively looking for him. It just goes to show that Tom Cruise, despite being one of Hollywood’s greatest leading men, understands there is no such thing as too small of a role. If it adds to the quality of the film, he is all about joining the party and being part of the beautiful history of film.

7 ‘Young Guns’ (1988)

The year was 1988, and we were introduced to the greatest reasons why the West was wild with the film ‘Young Guns’. With Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Lou Diamond Phillips , all at the peak of their greatness, this was bound to be a success. And a success it was, grossing a little more than $45 million in the box office! Unfortunately, despite the financial success of the film, it received a heavy batch of mixed reviews from critics.

But wait a second, where is Tom Cruise in this adolescent Western? Well, this is one of those rare appearances that you truly will miss if you aren’t actively looking for it. In a very brief moment, Tom Cruise shows up as a henchman for Jack Palance’s character, Lawrence Murphy. Cruise is on-screen for hardly a moment before he is shot down. If you look hard enough, and if you can see past the truly glorious mustache, you’ll see a young Tom Cruise in all his cowboy glory.

6 ‘Austin Powers in Goldmember’ (2002)

Yes, believe it or not, Tom Cruise was in this marvelously silly Austin Powers film. In this third installment of the franchise, we once again get to watch as Mike Myers brings the titular character to life with his fantastically awkward way of doing just about everything. In this installment, Powers revisits the pain of his father, Nigel Powers ( Michael Caine ) being so absent all his life and feeling that deep sense of loss.

RELATED: 6 Tom Cruise Movies That Could Use A Sequel Like Top Gun Maverick

The film plods along with all the typical ups and downs of an exciting ‘Austin Powers’ rollercoaster, but towards the end, there is a moment of surprise. During a sequence that shows the entire story of the film was being turned into a film (how very mise-en-abyme ). This sequence shows the one-and-only Tom Cruise starring as famous Austin, alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and directed by Steven Spielberg as their director. It is a wonderful nod to the industry giants.

5 ‘Rock of Ages’ (2012)

While not a cameo, this is one of Cruise’s smaller roles, but likely one of his most memorable. Portraying Stacee Jaxx, a legendary rocker in Rock of Ages , Cruise saunters shirtless, covered in tattoos, long hair flowing righteously, and eyeliner for days. Not only does Cruise look the part of the quintessential 1980s hair metal rockstar, but he sounds the part, too. That’s right, Cruise did all his own singing in this wonderful rendition of this wildly entertaining story.

Cruise is joined by a talented cast of Julianne Hough , Alec Baldwin , Russell Brand , Diego Boneta , Bryan Cranston , Catherine Zeta-Jones , and Paul Giamatti . Seeing Cruise show off not only his chiseled Hollywood physique, but his diamond level vocals, proved to be one of the most amazing roles he has ever taken. While the film suffered as a box office flop, Cruise received universal praise for his incredibly dynamic and fantastic role.

4 ‘Endless Love’ (1981)

In what is Cruise’s first credited film role, he briefly appears as Billy, a troubled young man, in Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love that stars Brooke Shields , Shirley Knight , Don Murray , James Spader , and a young Ian Ziering . It would have been no surprise that such a full cast of A-listers would have gone on to be a huge success, but that was, unfortunately, not the story with this film.

RELATED: 'Mission: Impossible': 10 Wildest Stunts, Ranked

Despite high hopes for the film, based on the success of the novel it was adapted from, and the brief box office success, it was a critical failure. Critics detested it and reviews were universally negative towards the plot and presentation of the story. Some praised Shields’ performance, but other than that, the film was not received well.

3 ‘Taps’ (1981)

A group of military school students decide that to save their school, they are going to take it over at gunpoint, hoping that somehow saves it from closing. Despite the maybe taboo subject matter at the time, ‘Taps’ was a box office success. With a budget of just $14 million, the film left the box office having made a little more than double that.

In what was Cruise’s second role in a film, he showcased a new set of talents and performance abilities, as well as showing how well he works with an ensemble cast – as this film boasts the talents of Sean Penn (in his first role), Evan Handler , Timothy Hutton , and George C. Scott . This film served as a springboard from which Cruise launched his career.

2 ‘The Outsiders’ (1983)

Finally, this film is likely the film that really put Cruise on the map in Hollywood. While his role was still not as prominent as his later films, Cruise was noted for his performance in the film. Along with Cruise, ‘The Outsiders’ had the incredible cast of up-and-comers Rob Lowe (in his film debut), C. Thomas Howell , Matt Dillon , Patrick Swayze , and Diane Lane .

Tom Cruise has demonstrated, in this small role and each of his other small and cameo roles, that he is absolutely a force to be reckoned with. He can make an impact on the big screen, whether he is the singularly greatest star in the movie, or if he simply appears without credit. Cruise is and continues to demonstrate that he really is Hollywood’s most versatile and valuable leading man.

1 ‘Tropic Thunder’ (2008)

In one of his most incredible and well-known, albeit uncredited, roles, Tom Cruise sneaks onto the screen as Les Grossman, the fat handed, foul-mouthed, movie studio executive. This wildly ridiculous character was thought up by none other than Cruise, himself, and that just adds to the sheer genius of Cruise. He decided, after speaking with Ben Stiller , that Les Grossman would take shape as he did, and while Stiller may not have been fully on board at first, it ultimately paid incredible dividends.

RELATED: Every Tom Cruise Movie Ranked from Worst to Best

While the film could likely not be made in today’s culture, Tropic Thunder was something of a comedic masterpiece with a truly wonderful cast including Oscar-nominated Robert Downey, Jr. , as well as Jack Black , and Matthew McConaughey (among others). Even though his part is so small, Cruise’s character of Grossman is, without a doubt, the best part of the film. The wonderful unexpected nature of his appearance is what makes it so delightfully enjoyable.

NEXT: Every 'Mission: Impossible' Movie Ranked From Worst to Best

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tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

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20 facts you might not know about 'Tropic Thunder'

War films can be tricky, and war comedies are even trickier. What about a comedy about making a war movie? Tropic Thunder made that a reality. The film spoofs method acting, frequently in uncomfortable ways, and much more. War is hell, but these 20 facts about Tropic Thunder will hopefully be much more pleasant for you.

Ben Stiller had the idea long before he made it

Tropic Thunder wouldn’t be released until 2008, but Stiller first got the idea decades earlier. The actor-turned-director got the first germ for the concept while acting in the war movie Empire of the Sun in 1987.

Another actor helped write the film

Stiller co-wrote, directed, and starred in  Tropic Thunder . One of the other writers on the movie? Justin Theroux . He’s primarily known as an actor, perhaps best known for The Leftovers . He also has writing credits on Iron Man 2 and Zoolander 2 .

The plot changed a bit

Tropic Thunder was always going to be about actors taking themselves too seriously, but the nature of the plot changed. Initially, the script was about actors who go to a boot camp and return with PTSD. Then, they pivoted to a version of the story that could also lampoon war movies. The proliferation of celebrity news and companies like TMZ over the years helped make writing the script easier since Stiller and Theroux realized moviegoers would be more aware of the inner workings of Hollywood.

Stiller didn’t originally intend to star

When Stiller first conceived the film, he thought he would only play the smaller role of Rick Peck, Tugg Speedman’s agent. Keanu Reeves was who he had in mind for the role of Tugg. Eventually, Stiller starred as well as directed.

The big cameo was almost Rick Peck

With Stiller playing Tugg, the role of Rick was offered to… Tom Cruise . Cruise pitched the idea of a studio head character. Stiller went along with it, and thus, the character of Les Grossman, perhaps the best remembered part of the movie, was born.

Cruise was very serious about keeping his cameo a secret

Cruise buried himself in prosthetics to play Les (the big hands were his idea), and he and Stiller did not want the cameo ruined. Paramount did not release any images of Cruise in the film, and his overall involvement in the movie was supposed to be kept secret. Then, pictures of Cruise in costume popped up online. After this, Cruise’s lawyers sprung into action. Soon enough, the photos of Cruise as Grossman were removed from the internet.

The casting of Rick changed again

With Cruise playing Grossman, somebody still had to play Rick Peck. Enter: Stiller’s frequent co-star Owen Wilson. Sadly, Wilson attempted suıcide in 2007 and understandably dropped out of the role. He was replaced by Matthew McConaughey.

Kirk Lazarus was changed by Robert Downey Jr.

When the character of Kirk Lazarus was written, he was supposed to be Irish. Perhaps the ultimate method actor was spoofing Daniel Day-Lewis. However, Downey Jr. asked him to be Australian instead. He had done an Australian accent before and felt more comfortable doing comedy and improvising with an Australian accent.

Tobey Maguire swooped in to save the day

The production needed a last-minute replacement for the actor starring alongside Kirk Lazarus in Satan’s Alley . Enter: Maguire. He was only available for two hours but still managed to film his small role. Fittingly, Downey Jr. and Maguire played characters who have a sexual tryst in Wonder Boys .

A famous comedian turned down a role

Brandon T. Jackson plays Alpa Chino, but the role was initially offered to Kevin Hart. However, Hart turned down the role because he did not want to play a gay character.

Steve Coogan’s character takes inspiration from a real director

Coogan’s Damien Cockburn and his experience are purportedly partially inspired by the saga of South African director Richard Stanley. Stanley had been hired to direct  The Island of Dr. Moreau but was beset by issues on set, including having to deal with Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando, two of the most difficult actors ever to walk the face of the Earth. He was fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer, but Stanley secretly returned to the shooting location to spy on the film. Hey, at least he wasn’t blown up by a landmine.

Jack Black wasn’t sure about doing the film

Black was offered the role of Jeff Portnoy, but he was initially hesitant. Specifically, he did not like the idea of dying his hair blonde. That ultimately didn’t keep him from doing the film, but he still expressed his displeasure with his hair in the movie. To add injury to insult, Black bruised his ribs early in production and had to gut it out.

They shot in Hawaii

Stiller considered shooting in Southern California, Mexico, or Hawaii. He ended up choosing Hawaii. He shot on the island of Kaua’i, where he just so happened to own a home. The production was the first on the island in five years and was reportedly the largest film production in the history of Kaua’i.

A revered military adviser worked on the movie

After retiring from the Marine Corps, Dale Dye founded Warriors Inc., a company that provides military training and advisement on films. Over the years, Dye has worked on many serious movies and TV shows, such as Platoon and Band of Brothers . Dye and Warriors Inc. worked on Tropic Thunder . Stiller wasn’t sure how Dye would feel about the film, especially since Nick Nolte plays a character who effectively pokes fun at people like Dye. However, Dye relished the opportunity to work on a broad comedy.

The last day of shooting was an unusual one

The last scene shot for Tropic Thunder ? That would be the commercial for Alpa Chino’s energy drink Booty Sweat. Also, it was shot early on Thanksgiving morning, and after filming, Brandon T. Jackson rushed to the airport to fly home to spend the holiday with his family. By the way, for a brief moment, Booty Sweat was available as a marketing promotion.

There’s not a lot of death in the film

The war movie filmed in Tropic Thunder is quite gory, and the action gets all too real for the actors. However, this is not a movie with a terribly high body count, at least on screen. Two of the on-screen deaths are animals — a panda and a bat. The other is director Damien Cockburn, whose death is admittedly violent but resulted from an accident.

A mockumentary was made for the movie

Tropic Thunder went all in on the marketing. Part of that was creating a mockumentary about the making of the film being made in Tropic Thunder . The film, which stars Theroux as the documentarian, is called Rain of Madness and serves as a parody of Hearts of Darkness , the iconic documentary about Apocalypse Now .

It was a big box office hit

Tropic Thunder was moved from a July release date to a mid-August release date, considered a less robust time for films. It was also a time when R-rated comedies had been hitting. The move paid off.  Tropic Thunder was the top movie at the domestic box office for three weeks in a row. The film made $195.7 million worldwide from a budget of $92 million.

The movie received a surprise Oscar nomination

The Golden Globes have categories for musical and comedy films, so the fact Downey and Cruise got nominations is not surprising. However, Downey was a big hit on the award circuit for Tropic Thunder . He was also nominated for a BAFTA, a SAG, and, yes, an Oscar. Downey did not win, losing to Heath Ledger for his turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight . A guy from a comic-book movie beat a guy from a comedy. It was a weird year for the Academy Awards.

There may be a spinoff

Cruise loves playing Les Grossman. He played him at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, and that year, talk of a spinoff movie about Grossman began. After years of laying fallow, it was reported in 2022 that Cruise and his go-to director Christopher McQuarrie are developing the spinoff once again.

Chris Morgan is a sports and pop culture writer and the author of the books  The Comic Galaxy of Mystery Science Theater 3000  and  The Ash Heap of History . You can follow him on Twitter @ChrisXMorgan .

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Tom Cruise in talks to reprise his Tropic Thunder character for spinoff with Mission Impossible 7 director

Tom cruise is in talks to star as les grossman, his famous character from the 2008 film tropic thunder, in a potential spinoff..

In his long career, Tom Cruise has repeated very few characters on screen, given his aversion to sequels. Apart from Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible series, Pete Mitchell in the two Top Gun films and Jack Reacher, there hasn’t been a character that Tom has reprised. But that is to change now. As per reports, Tom is in talks with Mission Impossible 7 director Christopher McQuarrie to create a film for Les Grossman, the foul-mouthed studio executive he played in the 2008 film Tropic Thunder. Also read: Tom Cruise is irrelevant, been doing the same part for 35 years: Mickey Rourke

Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in a still from Tropic Thunder.

As per a new report in Deadline, Tom and Christopher--who is directing the actor in the upcoming Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 --are in talks for three different films. The report says one film is a musical, one a potential franchise-starting action film, and one will see the return of Les Grossman. Deadline say the two are “fixated on Les Grossman” but does not specify if the character will star in his own film or play a supporting role in any spinoff.

Les Grossman was a surprise cameo that Tom did in the Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr -starrer comedy Tropic Thunder. The character was an overweight, profane, and dance-loving studio executive producing the titular film within the film. The movie earned rave reviews and RDJ even won an Oscar nomination for his performance. But Tom’s cameo also won hearts with many fans campaigning for a spinoff featuring him. Looks like, it is finally happening.

Earlier this year, Tom had hinted that he would be in favour of playing the character again. Talking about a character of his he would love to play again, he had told ComicBook.com, “I did Les Grossman for the MTV Awards and we’ll have to see. That could be fun. But I really don’t know at this moment.”

Tom was last seen in Top Gun Maverick, which has become his most successful film ever. With worldwide earnings of $1.3 billion, it is also the highest-grossing film of the year. The actor will be next seen in the two part Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, releasing in 2023 and 2024.

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Tom Cruise Invented Tropic Thunder's Les Grossman, Starting With 2 Hilarious Requests

Les Grossman Tropic Thunder

Tom Cruise has had a lot of great roles over the course of his career, but of the supporting characters he's played, Les Grossman might just be the best. The studio executive who represents the worst of Hollywood appeared in the comedy Tropic Thunder , and as the story goes Tom Cruise was actually crucial in creating the character. Cruise created the idea of a studio executive character for the comedy and then agreed to play him, but he had two requests: that the character had "fat hands" and that he had to dance. Cruise recalled:

I said, 'This is fun.' I said, 'Do you mind Ben? I want to play this character.' I said, 'I want to have fat hands and I want to dance. And he looked at me; he was like, what? I remember Ben and [saying] 'No, no. Ben. I want fat hands. And I'm gonna dance.' He said, 'Look, are you sure? Why don't you just be you.' I said, 'No, no, no. I'm sorry man. I don't know how else to play this character.' So then I did the makeup test and we tested the fat hands and the whole look. So, we were doing the wardrobe and there was no music and I was just like, 'Look, I want to do some moves for you.' So I just started working on Les. He picked the music out, he edited it together, he was just pissing himself.

Back when Ben Stiller was still trying to get Tropic Thunder -- a comedy about clueless actors trying to make a war film -- made, he asked Tom Cruise to take a look at the script. At this point in time, there was no Les Grossman or any studio executive in the movie. Crusie was the one who suggested that they need that type of character to put pressure on the main characters to create their movie. This was the missing piece of the puzzle for Stiller, and a few weeks later, he gave the script back to Cruise. Cruise loved it and wanted a part. The only role that was really open was the newly-created Les Grossman, and Cruise went "Yeah, I can do that."

Ben Stiller had assumed Tom Cruise would play the role looking like, well, himself, but the only way Cruise could see himself doing this was if he had fat hands and danced. Cruise told BBC Radio 1 that he did a makeup test for the whole look of the character, and while he was in wardrobe, he offered to show some moves for Stiller. Later, Stiller added music and edited it together and clearly loved it. Cruise is super funny in the movie, and he clearly had a blast yelling ever kind of profanity he can think of.

You can next see Tom Cruise in American Made , which hits theaters on September 29, 2017. For more movies dropping in 2017, take a look at our movie release schedule .

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Matt Wood

Matt has lived in New Jersey his entire life, but commutes every day to New York City. He graduated from Rowan University and loves Marvel, Nintendo, and going on long hikes and then greatly wishing he was back indoors. Matt has been covering the entertainment industry for over two years and will fight to his dying breath that Hulk and Black Widow make a good couple.

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Tom Cruise, in Bit Role, Nips Studio’s Top Gun

By Michael Cieply

  • April 3, 2008

LOS ANGELES — Take that, Sumner Redstone.

At an industry screening Tuesday night of the forthcoming comedy “Tropic Thunder” from Paramount Pictures and its unit DreamWorks, Tom Cruise brought down the house with his surprise portrayal of a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools.

The several hundred Hollywood agents, managers, publicists and reporters at the screening on the Paramount lot here couldn’t have missed the joke. In August 2006 Mr. Cruise — after spending many years at Paramount and appearing in some of its biggest hits, including “Top Gun” and the “Mission: Impossible” series — was sent packing by Mr. Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, the studio’s parent.

Two years later Mr. Cruise is back in a Paramount movie, playing a craggy ingrate in what is shaping up as one of the studio’s best prospects for the summer. The movie, a raunchfest directed by Ben Stiller, about a bunch of actors whose jungle war movie turns unexpectedly real, also stars Mr. Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey and Nick Nolte.

The humor may have been heightened by knowledge that Mr. Cruise and Mr. Redstone only last week kissed and made up over a very public lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Mr. Cruise, 45, has been a hunk (“Cocktail”), a heartthrob (“Far and Away”), an action hero (“Minority Report”) and a series of extraordinary ordinary guys (from “Taps” to “War of the Worlds”). He has also done some comic scenes. In 2002, for instance, there was a bit as Austin Powers, in “Austin Powers in Goldmember.”

But nothing on his résumé predicted the rapturous reaction he received Tuesday night. (Only a turn by Mr. Downey — who plays most of the movie in blackface, as a present-day white Australian trying to get inside the head of an African-American grunt during the Vietnam War — received as warm a reaction.)

Mr. Stiller, speaking before the screening, said he expected the movie to be rated R. The first few words out of Mr. Cruise’s mouth would guarantee that. As for his dance, that will be best described by the critics.

Representatives of Mr. Cruise, Mr. Stiller and Paramount declined on Wednesday to discuss the role.

Mr. Cruise’s latest appearance comes on the heels of a flop, “Lions for Lambs,” which was released by United Artists, a studio he now oversees with his longtime associate Paula Wagner. And the comedy’s August release will precede Mr. Cruise’s performance in “Valkyrie,” a fall film from United Artists, in which he plays a German officer who tries to assassinate Hitler.

Mr. Stiller, who played Mr. Cruise’s obsessive stunt double in a popular Web video (and who is expected to co-star with him in “Hardy Men”), first talked with Mr. Cruise, his friend, about taking a role more than a year ago, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with the film’s promotion. Mr. Cruise chose the studio chief’s role, and went through four days of makeup tests in order to get it right.

The director had planned to keep Mr. Cruise’s uncredited performance a surprise. The studio has not included Mr. Cruise in the movie’s trailer and has declined to release any images of his character. But a photo of a mostly bald Mr. Cruise donning a fat suit popped up on the Web late last year.

In any case, the performance is likely to draw attention, since Paramount is weighing a plan in which it would build buzz with extensive screenings of “Tropic Thunder” before its Aug. 15 release, much as 20th Century Fox did in 2006 with “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” At Tuesday’s screening Mr. Stiller told attendees that his new film was still in rough form. “If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them directly on the Internet,” he said.

Screen Rant

Tom cruise wants to make les grossman tropic thunder spinoff.

Tom Cruise is reportedly interested in once more teaming up with director Christopher McQuarrie for a Les Grossman Tropic Thunder spinoff project.

Tom Cruise is reportedly interested in developing some type of  Tropic Thunder spinoff involving his character, Les Grossman. Released in 2008,  Tropic Thunder tells the story of a group of actors who attempt to set off into the jungle to create the greatest Vietnam War movie ever made. Directed and starring Ben Stiller,  Tropic Thunder proved generally popular with both audiences and critics and boasted a standout cast, including Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Brandon T. Jackson, Jay Baruchel, and Danny McBride.

While the performances from Stiller and Downey Jr. remain highlights, it's Cruise's cameo as studio executive Les Grossman that has perhaps become one of the most memorable aspects of the film. In a movie filled with wacky characters, Grossman stands alone, defined by angry, profanity-laced outbursts, his love of diet coke, and a penchant for dance. In one of  Tropic Thunder 's more memorable (and meme-able) moments, Grossman turns on "Low" by Flo Rida and dances while the end credits roll. Wearing a bald cap and body prosthetics, the legendary  Mission: Impossible star is nearly unrecognizable in the role.

Related: Why Ben Stiller Wanted To Cut Tom Cruise's Tropic Thunder Dance

Per a new report from  Deadline , Cruise is apparently looking to continue his working relationship with renowned Mission: Impossible franchise director Christopher McQuarrie for several new projects, among them a Grossman spinoff of some sort. It's not clear whether this  Tropic Thunder spinoff would be a movie centered around Grossman or if the Cruise character would simply make a cameo in another project. With Cruise and McQuarrie still filming  Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2  and with Cruise also slated to film a movie in outer space, it's unclear when a Grossman project could actually come to fruition.

While  Cruise's deplorable studio executive from  Tropic Thunder remains a highlight all these years later, it remains to be seen whether the character could carry an entire film. After all, the over-the-top nature of Grossman as a character lends itself more to a cameo-type role rather than the anchor for an entire movie. Despite this, however, it was rumored that a Grossman solo movie was in the works not long after  Tropic Thunder  came out, but the film never ended up coming to fruition. If Cruise does take on the role of Grossman once more, it would certainly mark a significant departure from the types of roles the star has taken on recently.

Now 60 years old, the last decade of Cruise's career has essentially seen the actor double down on one type of role. From  Mission: Impossible and  Oblivion , to  Edge of Tomorrow  and  Top Gun: Maverick , Cruise's recent career has revolved around traditionally likable leading men in action-heavy roles. While once again donning the body prosthetics and bald cap and busting out some dance moves would certainly be a surprising turn from the actor,  Tropic Thunder fans would surely be happy to see Grossman make his big-screen comeback in one form or another.

More: Tropic Thunder: Why RDJ's Blackface Wasn't Controversial  

Source: Deadline

tom cruise cameo in tropic thunder

Tom Cruise Made a Blink-and-You-Miss-It Cameo in a Brat Pack Western

  • Tom Cruise's cameo in Young Guns is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment that lasts only seconds.
  • Cruise's face is concealed beneath a hat, mustache, and sideburns, making it difficult for viewers to even recognize him in the film.
  • Cruise became good friends with Young Guns star Emilio Estevez on The Outsiders .

Would it be accurate to dub Tom Cruise “The King of Hollywood”? He’s easily the most powerful actor of his generation, and given that his filmography reads like a compilation of the most critically and commercially successful films of the last forty years, there’s an argument to be made there. It’s the sort of achievement that only comes from a lifetime dedicated to one leading performance after another, and for the most part, Cruise has done just that. But this doesn’t mean that he’s above the occasional minor role . When used appropriately, such as in Austin Powers in Goldmember or Tropic Thunder , these minor appearances can serve as delightful self-parodies that exemplify why Cruise is such a beloved actor. However, the same cannot be said for a strange blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Young Guns , a 1988 Western released shortly after his rise to Hollywood legend. It’s easily the most perplexing role of his career. Considering this is the same man who introduced the world to foul-mouthed studio executive Les Grossman, that’s saying a lot.

When Does Tom Cruise Appear in 'Young Guns'?

The 1980s saw the release of numerous coming-of-age films centered on a select group of young actors nicknamed the “ Brat Pack ." Young Guns isn’t a core entry in this movement, but thanks to a starring turn by the group’s unofficial president Emilio Estevez — alongside appearances by two of its associated members, Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland — it can absolutely be included in the conversation. The film recounts the escapades of notorious outlaw Billy the Kid (Estevez) during the Lincoln County War of 1878, starting with Billy’s recruitment into the Regulators posse by rancher John Tunstall ( Terence Stamp ) and ending with the gang’s collapse following the infamous Battle of Lincoln. Despite being one of the year’s biggest box office successes (enough to warrant a sequel two years later that chronicled the remainder of Billy’s life), reviews were decidedly mixed, with The Washington Post comparing it to a “Western-style dress-up party for Hollywood kiddies.” Years later, this frat house energy would see Young Guns becoming a moderate cult classic, although its overall reputation still languishes beneath other Westerns from the same period like Dances with Wolves and Pale Rider .

Tom Cruises Only Western Is Old Fashioned Romance at Its Best

Those intrigued about watching Young Guns because of the promise of a surprise Tom Cruise cameo should know that they’ll be waiting a long time. It takes until the climatic shootout between the film’s vying factions for Cruise to waltz his way into the carnage as a henchman to the villainous Lawrence Murphy ( Jack Palance ), but don’t take that as a sign to cheer and applaud. Indeed, Cruise barely has time to fire his revolver before he’s gunned down by Charlie Bowdre ( Casey Siemaszko ), resulting in a total screen time that can be measured in seconds . It’s an outcome that will disappoint fans, and given how heavily Cruise’s face is concealed beneath the obligatory wide-brimmed hat, mustache, and comically large sideburns, most probably won’t identify him even with advanced knowledge. It’s possible this was an intentional choice by director Christopher Cain to prevent the sudden appearance of the high-profile actor from distracting from the wider film (for context, Top Gun had been released two summers earlier). A sensible decision, but it also made his cameo even more baffling.

Tom Cruise and Emilio Estevez Became Friends on 'The Outsiders'

Which brings us to the salient question here – why did Cruise accept such a minuscule role? Cruise himself has never provided an answer, but interviews with his coworkers suggest that it was simply a bit of fun between friends . Cruise had met Estevez when he appeared alongside him in Francis Ford Coppola ’s seminal coming-of-age drama The Outsiders (a milestone in both their careers), and the two had enjoyed a close relationship ever since. When Cruise visited Estevez on the set of his latest film a few years later, this friendship is what allowed him to make a brief (uncredited) appearance. Jump forward to 1996, and history would find itself being repeated when Estevez made a brief (uncredited) appearance in Cruise’s latest starring vehicle, Mission: Impossible . While Estevez would survive long enough to get his screen time measured in minutes, his equally abrupt send-off has sparked rumors that his involvement was a form of delayed retribution for Cruise’s anticlimactic death in Young Guns . Estevez himself has denied this — in an interview with Uproxx , Estevez claimed that his hiring was part of a larger plan to enlist recognizable actors to be killed during the film’s prologue, thereby raising the stakes for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt — but it’s still an interesting theory.

Young Guns co-star Kiefer Sutherland has also expanded on this episode in the succeeding decades. During an interview on the Loren & Wally radio show on WROR-FM in 2019, Sutherland reminisced about his experiences shooting both Young Guns films, with specific reference to two surprise cameos — Cruise, and musician Jon Bon Jovi :

“[Bon Jovi] and a few other people – Tom Cruise was one of them – they all wanted to say they had been in a Western, and no one was making them. So when we did Young Guns , a lot of Emilio’s friends came out and we put a beard on them, stick ’em on a roof [and] shoot ’em off the roof.”

Sutherland recalled the same story practically word-for-word to Spin magazine three years earlier , with both interviews supplying some much-needed explanation for Cruise’s appearance. Bon Jovi would later contribute to Young Guns II ’s soundtrack with the chart-topping hit "Blaze of Glory," in addition to making another cameo as a prisoner early in the film’s runtime. There’s no indication that Cruise followed suit, although given how sneakily he was inserted in the original, who can say for certain?

'Young Guns' Is a Fun Addition to Tom Cruise’s Filmography

Four months after the release of Young Guns , Cruise cemented his status as Hollywood’s next superstar thanks to a leading role in Rain Man , the Best Picture-winning dramedy that ended 1988 as the highest-grossing film of the year. Before long, he was receiving his first Academy Award nomination for Born on the Fourth of July and headlining box office sensations like it was child’s play. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. These days, few people are as ubiquitous with cinema as Tom Cruise — something that his unlimited popularity and endless acclaim seems keen to reinforce at every turn. A downside of this fame is that Cruise can never again appear in a film without dominating our whole perception of it , but that also makes his appearance in Young Guns even more worthy of celebration. In many ways, it’s the perfect cameo — flawlessly integrated into the existing film while serving as a fun piece of cinematic trivia for those in the know. Perhaps Cruise could be tempted to repeat it should the rumors of a Young Guns 3 ever produce something concrete. After the endless hardships he’s faced making the last few Mission: Impossible movies , maybe he could use a lighter and more fun role.

Young Guns is available to stream on Freevee.

Watch on Freevee

Tom Cruise Made a Blink-and-You-Miss-It Cameo in a Brat Pack Western

Jack Black wants Tropic Thunder co-star Tom Cruise to do another comedy with him

Exclusive: Jack Black talks to Total Film about Tom Cruise's role as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder

Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder

Over multiple decades, Tom Cruise has shown us the money, felt the need for speed, and everything else in-between. One of his most beloved roles, Tropic Thunder's wildly obnoxious movie executive Les Grossman, also proved he has comedic chops in spades.

Speaking to Total Film in our new issue , which features Dune 2 on the cover and is out this Thursday, co-star Jack Black recounts the character for our 'My Life in Pictures' feature.

"Tom Cruise was unrecognisable as Les Grossman. He was really channelling some angst, I think, about some studio executives that shall remain nameless," Black says. 

"I just didn’t know he had that gear in him. I guess he had done some comedy but not like this, with such broad strokes. And not such a character that he totally disappeared into."

Might we see Cruise tap into his funny bone once more? If so, he has a willing and ready comedy partner in Jack Black. 

"It does make you wonder when he is going to bust out and do some more comedy," Black says. "If he does, he should let me know. I’ll jump on board that choo-choo train."

  • Pre-order the Dune 2 issue of Total Film

Elsewhere in our conversation, Black also opened up his thoughts on the reviews of The Super Mario Bros. Movie , as well as about his role in the upcoming Minecraft film . "They’re both video game related but in terms of approach, live action is a different ball of wax," Black adds.

You can hear more from Jack Black, and a whole lot else besides, in the new issue of Total Film when it hits shelves and digital newsstands on Thursday, February 1. Check out the covers below:

Pre-order the issue here to bag your copy, or click here to subscribe to Total Film and never miss another exclusive. You'll get every issue before it's in stores, and you’ll get subscriber-exclusive covers.

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IMAGES

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  5. Tropic Thunder (2008)

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VIDEO

  1. Amazing Tropic Thunder Moment: Tom Cruise's Dance to 'Low' by Flo Rida and T-Pain #tomcruise

  2. Tom Cruise’s Dance in Tropic Thunder (2007) #tomcruise

  3. Tropic Thunder Blew Our Minds

  4. TROPIC THUNDER Facts You Didn't Know! #shorts

COMMENTS

  1. This Unexpected Cameo Is Tom Cruise's Best Performance Ever

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  6. How Tom Cruise Ended Up Casting Himself In Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder

    In 2008, Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller collaborated once again for the comedian's film Thunder Tropic. The movie stars Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Jay Baruchel, and Brandon T. Jackson ...

  7. How Tom Cruise's Cameo In 'Tropic Thunder' Put Him Back In Hollywood's

    Tom Cruise was scrutinized when he publically shredded Brooke Shields for using antidepressants. Despite being a great actor, everyone was cutting ties with what they called a PR nightmare. Being on the outs with Hollywood, the 61-year-old decided to do the most dangerous stunt of his career - a comedy.

  8. How Tom Cruise's bizarre 'Tropic Thunder' character was created

    Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in "Tropic Thunder." One of the highlights of the 2008 Ben Stiller comedy "Tropic Thunder" is Les Grossman, the venom-spewing, Diet Coke-drinking studio head who ...

  9. Tropic Thunder: How Tom Cruise revived his career as Less Grossman in

    That was, until 2008, when Cruise showed up in a cameo role in his friend Ben Stiller's box office hit,Tropic Thunder - about a cast of prima donna actors shooting a movie in Vietnam - as ...

  10. Ten Years On, Tropic Thunder's Still a Brutal Kick In Hollywood's A

    It was also blessed by Tom Cruise's brilliant cameo as ostentatious douchebag Hollywood agent, Les Grossman. Performances are one thing, substance is another. Tropic Thunder might have been just another big studio comedy when it landed in theaters on August 13, 2008, but it had weight to it and stuck in our memories in a way that few comedies ...

  11. Why Ben Stiller Wanted To Cut Tom Cruise's Tropic Thunder Dance

    Tropic Thunder cast Tom Cruise in a surprise cameo as Les Grossman, the monstrous producer behind the movie the actors are filming. Cruise was going through something of a slow period in his career prior to Tropic Thunder , with 2006's Mission: Impossible III proving to be the lowest-grossing of the series while award baiting drama Lions For ...

  12. Tropic Thunder: Revisiting Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey's roles

    Tropic Thunder. rewatched and reconsidered, 10 years later. The summer of 2008 broke history, and rebuilt it. America suffered through a bitter presidential election on the road to a globewrecking ...

  13. Tom Cruise in the Tropic Thunder

    This is the best scene with Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in the comedy hit "Tropic Thunder". You will watch here the best quotes, such as "I will f*ck you up!"...

  14. The Truth About Tom Cruise's Character In 'Tropic Thunder'

    The Truth About Tom Cruise's Character In 'Tropic Thunder'. Tom was supposed to play the leading role that Ben Stiller ended up taking. Love him or loathe him, there's no denying that Tom Cruise basically stole Tropic Thunder. While the movie was filled with controversy, such as Robert Downey Jr.'s character's acting choices, the 2008 film ...

  15. How Tom Cruise clawed his way back to the top with the weirdest

    In 2008, Cruise appeared in a surprise extended cameo in director Ben Stiller's war/film industry satire Tropic Thunder. He played the fat, balding studio head Les Grossman (a character that may or may not have been modelled after Harvey Weinstein) and earned himself a place in the audience's good books, and also a nomination at the Golden ...

  16. Tropic Thunder 10 years later: Les Grossman, Tom Cruise's best ...

    Tom Cruise is perhaps the last bona fide American movie star left. And none of his roles exemplify his career in totality more than Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder , a film that turns 10 this month ...

  17. Tom Cruise Really Wants To Bring Les Grossman Back

    Tom Cruise is still obsessed with his old 'Tropic Thunder' character. ... The latter is the gruff, dance-happy studio executive Cruise played in cameo for Tropic Thunder. It's unclear if they ...

  18. Tom Cruise's 7 Best Cameos and Minor Roles, Ranked

    5 'Rock of Ages' (2012) While not a cameo, this is one of Cruise's smaller roles, but likely one of his most memorable. Portraying Stacee Jaxx, a legendary rocker in Rock of Ages, Cruise ...

  19. 20 facts you might not know about 'Tropic Thunder'

    Tropic Thunder wouldn't be released until 2008, but Stiller first got the idea decades earlier. The actor-turned-director got the first germ for the concept while acting in the war movie Empire ...

  20. Tom Cruise in talks to reprise his Tropic Thunder character for spinoff

    Les Grossman was a surprise cameo that Tom did in the Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr-starrer comedy Tropic Thunder.The character was an overweight, profane, and dance-loving studio executive ...

  21. Tom Cruise Invented Tropic Thunder's Les Grossman, Starting With 2

    Back when Ben Stiller was still trying to get Tropic Thunder-- a comedy about clueless actors trying to make a war film -- made, he asked Tom Cruise to take a look at the script. At this point in ...

  22. Tom Cruise

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  23. Tom Cruise Wants To Make Les Grossman Tropic Thunder Spinoff

    Tom Cruise is reportedly interested in developing some type of Tropic Thunder spinoff involving his character, Les Grossman. Released in 2008, Tropic Thunder tells the story of a group of actors who attempt to set off into the jungle to create the greatest Vietnam War movie ever made. Directed and starring Ben Stiller, Tropic Thunder proved generally popular with both audiences and critics and ...

  24. Tom Cruise Made a Blink-and-You-Miss-It Cameo in a Brat Pack Western

    Tom Cruise's cameo in Young Guns is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment that lasts only seconds. ... When used appropriately, such as in Austin Powers in Goldmember or Tropic Thunder, ...

  25. Jack Black wants Tropic Thunder co-star Tom Cruise to do another comedy

    Exclusive: Jack Black talks to Total Film about Tom Cruise's role as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. Over multiple decades, Tom Cruise has shown us the money, felt the need for speed, and ...

  26. Tropic Thunder is a hilariously irreverent satire that skewers

    Isaiah Morgan | IG Growth Coach for Biz Owners (@the253vibe). 1 Reply. 3 Likes. Tropic Thunder is a hilariously irreverent satire that skewers Hollywood's excesses with razor-sharp wit. The film boasts a stellar ensemble cast including Stiller himself, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and Tom Cruise in a memorable cameo. The film's clever blend of comedy, action, and social commentary makes it a ...