Hollywood has celebrities, but true legends? They’re few and far between. It turns out that Clint Eastwood, a legend in his own right, has a clear favorite: Tom Cruise.
In a recent New York Times interview, filmmaker Cameron Crowe shared an anecdote that highlights just how highly Eastwood regards Cruise.
Crowe, who has worked with Cruise on films like “Jerry Maguire” and “Vanilla Sky,” shares the same lawyer as Eastwood, which means they occasionally get invited to the same parties. During one casual conversation, Eastwood randomly mentioned Cruise’s name to Crowe, expressing his belief that Cruise’s career will be remembered for generations as one of the greats.
I have the same lawyer as Clint Eastwood, and he invited me to a dinner party. He sat me next to Clint Eastwood, and I was so nervous. What do you say to Clint Eastwood? So I’m sitting there and Clint Eastwood leans over and says, “Tom Cruise.” And I go: “Oh, man, Tom Cruise. I love working with Tom Cruise.” And he goes, “In a hundred years, they’re gonna look back — that’s the career, Tom Cruise’s career.
What’s remarkable is that Eastwood has never actually worked with Cruise. Yet, even without a shared project, he sees the screen presence and star power that few actors ever achieve. Cruise has consistently drawn audiences for decades, most recently with “Top Gun: Maverick” hitting the cultural zeitgeist.
Looking ahead, Crowe suggests Cruise may be closing the books on action movies to pivot into more character-driven roles.
I see that there’s a time coming, and it might have already started, where he’s going to segue into character roles as strongly as he segued into doing action movies of the highest quality. That Paul Newman character phase is just around the corner and will fry people’s minds.
He’s not wrong. It does seem like Cruise is re-entering the auteur phase of his career. His next film, already shot, was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Last year, even before the Iñárritu project was announced, Variety’s sources indicated that Cruise’s current career intentions were to move away from Mission: Impossible-type films and to reteam with auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson, whom he worked with on 1999’s “Magnolia.”
Over his four-decade career, Cruise has collaborated with legendary directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, Brian De Palma, Ridley Scott, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone, Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, Ron Howard, Neil Jordan, and John Woo. He used to relish working with these big-name auteurs, but the last decade, or so, he seemed focused on collaborations with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie.