Tom Cruise Wants to Bring Back His Most Beloved Character

Newsweek

26-05-2025

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Tom Cruise has played a lot of memorable characters over the years, particularly of the action hero variety, but there is one who stands out as perhaps Cruise's most unique role. We're speaking, of course, of Cruise's turn as the foul-mouthed curmudgeon studio executive Les Grossman from the 2008 comedy "Tropic Thunder".
According to Cruise's frequent partner-in-crime, director Christopher McQuarrie, there have been "serious conversations" about finding a way to bring Grossman back to the big screen.
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McQuarrie was on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast talking about potential future projects like "Top Gun 3" and "Days of Thunder 2" when the filmmaker, unprompted, brought up conversations he's had with Cruise about bringing back the fat-handed dancing exec from "Tropic Thunder".
Tom Cruise arrives at the US Premiere of "Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning" at Lincoln Center Plaza in New York, New York on May 18, 2025.
Tom Cruise arrives at the US Premiere of "Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning" at Lincoln Center Plaza in New York, New York on May 18, 2025.for Paramount Pictures
"The conversations we've had about Les Grossman are so f---ing funny," McQuarrie said. "We're talking about it, man. We're having very serious conversations about it and how best to do it and where, you know, it ultimately comes down to what that character is."
In "Tropic Thunder", the heroes believe they're making a movie about the Vietnam War when in fact, their director has been killed and they're being stalked by a heavily armed drug cartel.
Most of the characters don't realize the true danger they're in until after Ben Stiller's character is kidnapped by the cartel, who tries to ransom him off to his movie studio. But the cartel is stonewalled by Les Grossman, who's decided that Stiller is worth more to him dead than alive.
Les Grossman is just about the antithesis of every Tom Cruise character you're used to. He's overweight, bald, and screams obscenities as if he were the drill sergeant from "Full Metal Jacket". Cruise famously requested fat prosthetic hands for the character, and the film ends with him dancing.
It isn't clear exactly what kind of project McQuarrie and Cruise would reintroduce Les Grossman in. McQuarrie told "Happy Sad Confused" that so far they've mainly just talked about different scenes they could put him in, and that riffing on him was a great source of "decompression" while making "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning".
Speaking of which, "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning" is playing in theaters now.
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