Ben Stiller: Tom Cruise Insisted on Being Jewish in ‘Tropic Thunder'
Ben Stiller may have inadvertently fanned the flames of Tropic Thunder's several controversies in a Monday episode of Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, revealing that Tom Cruise insisted that his character 'be Jewish' if he joined the 2008 comedy-action film.
Cruise 'had two requests,' Stiller told O'Brien of Thunder's movie studio character, Les Grossman. 'He wanted to have big, thick forearms that were hairy and he wanted to be Jewish,' he continued, 'I mean it's never really stated, but that's kind of implied.'
Cruise shared his two requests for playing in the film himself in an interview with BBC Radio One in 2018, telling his interviewer that he told Stiller after reading the Thunder script, 'I want fat hands and I want to dance.'
Stiller has long held that the Grossman character was Cruise's idea, but even given the backlash following Cruise's portrayal of the obviously Jewish character—a foul-mouthed studio executive who acts as the 2008 film's antagonist—Stiller didn't shy away from pinning the character's ethnicity onto Cruise. He did, however, sidestep the controversy over the actor's use of 'Jewface.'
'He had this idea of playing a studio exec, and so we went back and came up with Les Grossman, and it changed the whole plot of the movie, but made it so much better,' Stiller explained. Grossman's character was just one of many things some viewers found offensive in the film—including Robert Downey, Jr.'s donning blackface donning blackface or his and Stiller's character discussion of going 'full retard' leading to a nationwide boycott campaign at the time.
Meanwhile, Stiller's co-writer on the film Justin Theroux has said that he did have a specific person in mind as he crafted the character. 'I had just had a really bad experience working for Harvey Weinstein on a movie that I'd directed and I just wanted to somehow memorialize that bad experience,' he said in a 2023 interview. 'And so that's how I got that character.'
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