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Russell 2000, bitcoin usd, cmc crypto 200, how tom cruise's bizarre 'tropic thunder' character was created — and why we may see him again.

(Paramount) 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 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.

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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Why Tom Cruise Demanded Dancing And Fat Fingers For Tropic Thunder

Who could forget Tom Cruise 's legendary performance as Les Grossman in 2008's Tropic Thunder ? Not only did he invent the character , but he also almost got an entire movie centering around that character. How cool would that have been? It's no wonder Grossman ranks among Cruise's best characters ever . Cruise's genius, coupled with his innate ability to feel out characters before they're even fully fleshed out, helped turn Grossman into the phenomenon he is now.

Speaking to popular late-night host Conan O'Brien during “ ConanCon ,” Tom Cruise explained how the now-famous character came to be. After Conan showed a clip of Cruise's dance performance from the film's end credits, Cruise said that learning to dance and learning comedy were among many things he wanted to perfect. In his words:

I take classes all the time to learn things or I want to improve a skill… singing, music, something I’m studying. I take dance classes and I took hip-hop classes and then I’ll find a character to put that with.

Because Tom Cruise created one of Tropic Thunder 's best characters, he demanded that his input be put in to the finished product, and he was willing to learn whatever it took to get the job done. It was, and it was glorious. Les Grossman proved so popular and so in-demand that Cruise agreed to bring him to the MTV Movie Awards back in 2010. It's amazing what hilarious mid-credits dancing can do for your career.

After that earlier tidbit, Tom Cruise circled back to Les Grossman and said what everyone in the room (and probably on the planet) wanted to hear:

I said, ‘Look, I’d love to play this character, but I want to have fat hands and I’m gonna dance.'

Man, he's good. I mean, c'mon. Who doesn't love sausage fingers and a proclivity for outrageously bad dancing? The guy has a good eye for what the audience wants, and boy, does he deliver. I'd love to see more of him if the franchise is ever revisited. Here's to hoping it is!

In the last five or so years, Cruise has taken on more serious, more action-heavy roles, some of his more recent ones being Doug Liman 's American Made and the fourth, fifth, and sixth installments in the wildly popular Mission: Impossible franchise. He has always had remarkable range as an actor, a fact that his various film roles clearly reflect.

If you're itching for a new Tom Cruise performance, you can catch him in Top Gun: Maverick when it hits theaters in June 2020. Or, you know, you could just watch him in Tropic Thunder or any of the Mission: Impossible movies for the millionth time. It really doesn't ever get old and it satisfies two very different moods.

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Conan : How Tom Cruise Embodied Tropic Thunder’s Les Grossman

Remember when Tom Cruise played a shystie studio executive in Tropic Thunder, but it took us all a little bit to recognize him because he was in a fat suit? All Cruise’s idea. Cruise told Conan and the San Diego Comic-Con audience that when Ben Stiller approached him for the role, he had two conditions: “I wanna have fat hands, and I’m gonna dance.” Apparently Cruise takes classes all of the time and incorporates what he learns into characters. For Grossman, Cruise brought back his old hip-hop dance training. To Stiller’s consternation, he insisted that he bring back his old hip-hop dance training. And now we have a gif that won’t die. So never doubt the instincts of Tom Cruise.

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Screen Rant

Tom cruise's mission impossible demands make his strangest role funnier.

Mission: Impossible's Tom Cruise is known for his demanding reputation, which makes his role as Tropic Thunder's Les Grossman even funnier.

If Tom Cruise's publicized  Mission: Impossible   demands prove anything, it's that his bizarre   Tropic Thunder role as Les Grossman is even funnier than before. Cruise's Les Grossman is the studio executive for  Tropic Thunder' s eponymous project who is characterized by his explosive outbursts while on the phone. By also donning a fat suit, fake large hands, bald cap, and extra-hairy chest, Cruise's Grossman has been compared to studio producers like Stuart Cornfeld and Scott Rudin. However ,  Tropic Thunder  star and director Ben Stiller stated that Tom Cruise made Les Grossman up entirely (via Esquire ). Cruise noted that the script needed a studio representative, so working with Stiller, he created Grossman.

Like Grossman, Tom Cruise has a reputation for being demanding and hot-headed. The  Mission: Impossible  movies depend on Cruise , and because of that, he holds a lot of sway over the franchise and has taken advantage of this. Paramount revealed plans to make  Mission: Impossible 7 available to stream only 45 days after its theatrical release, but Cruise has been fighting with the studio to keep it at the 90-day industry standard. It was also revealed that Cruise blocked Paramount's efforts to create a  Mission: Impossible  television show. The audacity of his demands marks his influence over  Mission: Impossible, considering that he's the franchise's lead and was a producer on all six  M:I  installments.

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

Cruise has long been known to be demanding to work with, and his actions regarding  Mission: Impossible' s seventh installment and blocked TV series only add to the list of stories regarding his power over the franchise. Even if  Mission: Impossible 8  will be Cruise's last for the franchise, his influence over it will remain strong due to the studio giving into his bold demands. In relation to his Les Grossman character, that role becomes especially meta when considering how much Tom Cruise acts like Grossman in real life, particularly toward the  Mission: Impossible  franchise. It's a case of life imitating art, underscored even further by his recent demands.

Because of his heavy prosthetic makeup, audiences were shocked to discover that it was Tom Cruise playing Les Grossman, which is ironic considering how much Cruise has sometimes exemplified Grossman's more explosive characteristics. In 2020, Cruise went on a highly publicized tirade against the crew members of  Mission: Impossible 7  for disregarding the set's COVID-19 protocols. In Grossman-esque fashion, Cruise threatened to have them fired.  Mission: Impossible 7,  with its more dangerous stunts  and pandemic obstacles, put even more pressure on the production. In addition,  Mission: Impossible 7' s budget of $290 million is higher than any  M:I  movie budget to date, adding the further need for the installment to succeed. Nonetheless, Cruise's demands for the movie play no small part in amplifying his vociferous reputation.

Cruise's  Tropic Thunder   character adds a necessary component to the movie's satirical Hollywood portrayal. It's no surprise that he suggested the character himself to Stiller, especially when Tom Cruise exemplifies a similarly uproarious approach to conflict.  Mission: Impossible   is a franchise that Tom Cruise holds a lot of control and influence over. Because his demands for the franchise are bold, and at times even combative, he is therefore in some ways a real-life representation of Les Grossman.

Next:  Tom Cruise Already Spoiled Part of Ethan Hunt’s Mission: Impossible Ending

Key Release Dates

Mission: impossible - dead reckoning part one, mission: impossible - dead reckoning - part two.

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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Tom Cruise Revives Hilarious 'Tropic Thunder' Character, Reveals the Secret Behind Dance Moves

Over 10 years after playing the character on screen in  Tropic Thunder , Tom Cruise brought Les Grossman back to life

Dave Quinn is a Senior Editor for PEOPLE. He has been working at the brand since 2016, and is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book, Not All Diamonds and Rosé: The Inside Story of the Real Housewives from the People Who Lived It.

Tom Cruise may have surprised fans at Comic-Con with the first trailer to his upcoming Top Gun sequel , but it was another movie in his illustrious catalog that Conan O’Brien asked about when Cruise appeared on the comedian’s talk show Thursday night.

In the episode, which was broadcast from the annual entertainment convention, O’Brien, 56, asked Cruise to step back into the shoes of Les Grossman — the skeevy studio executive Cruise played over a decade ago in 2008’s Tropic Thunder.

The actor, 57, was happy to oblige, showing off some of Grossman’s infamous dance moves.

Turns out, Cruise himself had pushed director Ben Stiller to incorporate those dance moves, as well as Grossman’s fat-suit, when he was first approached to play the role.

“I take classes all the time to learn things or I want to improve a skill, whether it’s singing, music — whatever subject I’m studying. So I take dance classes and I took hip-hop classes. And then what I find is, I’ll find a character to put that with,” Cruise explained on Conan, recalling how he told Stiller, ” ‘I’d love to play this character but I want to have fat hands and I’m going to dance.’ ”

“Sometimes with a character you just get an instinct about what you’re going to do,” Cruise added.

Stiller, according to Cruise, wasn’t completely on board with Cruise’s vision.

“For a couple of months he kept saying, ‘Maybe we don’t do the makeup. Maybe you just look like yourself,’ ” Cruise remembered. “And I said, ‘No, I need fat hands and I’m going to dance.’ ”

After the makeup was created, Cruise said finding Grossman was easy. “As you’re working on a character, you start becoming that character, you start discovering that character. And I just, I just started moving,” Cruise said, adding that Stiller was still confused. “There was no music. He was just looking at me like, ‘What’s happening.’ I was crushing Pepsi cans and Coke cans.”

Once Stiller added music to the scene though (specifically, Ludacris’s “Get Back”), he understood what Cruise wanted.

“He calls me the next day and cut it to that piece of music you see in the movie. And he said, ‘I get it, I get it, I get it. This is hilarious,’ ” Cruise shared.

Tropic Thunder earned Cruise a Golden Globe action nomination. The film also starred Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson.

Later on Conan , Cruise recited Grossman’s more colorful lines. “Stand back and literally f— your own face,” Cruise said, to the cheers of the crowd. “I will f— you up! I will massacre you!”

And though the next few movies Cruise has on his slate are action-based (including the aforementioned Top Gun: Maverick ), Cruise said comedy — and Les Grossman — will always have a special place in his heart.

“I love comedy,” Cruise said. “I used to write sketches when I was a little kid and would do imitations to make my mother and sisters laugh.”

“Les Grossman was a funny character,” he added. “That was a wild character. That was wild.”

Top Gun: Maverick is set for a June 26, 2020 release.

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

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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Tropic Thunder (2008)

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Tom Cruise Week

The Making of Les Grossman: An Oral History

The year was 2008. Tom Cruise was a national punch line. Then came ‘Tropic Thunder’ and the cameo role of a lifetime.

I n 2008, Tom Cruise needed to find a way to make people laugh. Hard. Probably at him. After two decades as a bona fide Hollywood sensation, the actor found himself in the midst of a crisis that seemed unimaginable. Over the past four years, he’d fired his publicist, who had told him to curb the Scientology talk, and made a fool of himself publicly, jumping on Oprah’s couch and lecturing Matt Lauer about psychiatry. Business had been better, too. On the heels of 2006’s Mission: Impossible III , which made nearly $150 million less than the franchise’s previous installment, Cruise’s longtime studio home, Paramount, severed ties. Company chairman Sumner Redstone delivered a public reprimand by way of a reason. “As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal,” Redstone told The Wall Street Journal . “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.”

Grossman gave even fewer fucks than Cruise had seemingly given in the years leading up to the film — and watching Cruise mock his own industry finally felt like he was back in the know. Tropic Thunder was a sendup of filmmaking itself: A troupe of actors shooting a war movie wander into a remote jungle and end up in hostile territory. They believe the dangers mounting all around them are simply there in the service of acting. One of them, Tugg Speedman, played by Thunder ’s cowriter and director, Ben Stiller, is captured and tortured. Grossman is asked to ransom the action star, but refuses. Actors can drop dead. Business is king. That’s the message. In the end, however, the film within the film — a disaster by all accounts — is ironically rewarded for its merits with Oscars. Just as unbelievably, in real life, Cruise came away from Tropic Thunder nominated for a Golden Globe and ready, Les Grossman–style, to shake his ass all the way back to the bank.

Stiller: 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.

Stiller: I had been talking to Tom about being in the movie. He read the script and actually came up with the idea for the character.

Cornfeld: Tom read the script when there was no Les Grossman and said, “I think you need another villain other than just the 12-year-old drug king. What about some greedy pig studio executive who really represents the gross part of Hollywood?”

Stiller: 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.

Cornfeld: We did a draft that incorporated that character and Ben gave it to Tom. Then, the frequency of our discussions slowed down. Tom Cruise is a busy guy.

Cohen: The character spent a year being “Studio Head.” July 2003, he becomes Todd Berlinger. October 2003, Todd Green. This was an interesting draft, because here’s the first draft where we really see the guy who became the profane Les Grossman, screaming at Flaming Dragon that if they so much as sneeze on the craft services table, he will fuck them up. Then, a couple weeks later — Phillip Green. For the life of me, I can’t remember why.

Cornfeld: 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.”

Stiller: And he said he wanted to dance.

Cohen: I met Tom at the table reading. It’s not a surprise that he is who he is. A lot of actors hold back at table readings. Tom was the opposite. 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.

Hader: Tom Cruise didn’t know who I was and was trying to figure it out. I said, “Seth Rogen’s a friend of mine and he said he went to your house.” I did a Seth Rogen impersonation for two seconds, like “Tom Cruise is amazing! We rode motorcycles in his backyard!” And it was like I did a magic trick. Tom Cruise started clapping and going crazy and he went, “You do impressions and you’re on Saturday Night Live .” Meaning, I was briefed and I now know who you are.

Connie Grayson Criswell (lead hair-puncher): It was kind of a pain in the butt because we were punching with very curly human hair. Curly hair is very hard to punch because it has a mind of its own.

Burman:   When we needed a point of reference — I didn’t even see this happening at first — people would come to me, because I may be a few pounds over what I should be and I’m sort of bald on top and at the time had a sort of scruff going. And people kept looking at me to see how my hair grows and what the weight is like and how things sit on me. At one point I thought they were trying to turn Tom into me.

Cornfeld: Some magazine said the character was based on me because I’m like, you know, fat and bald, and I thought that was hysterical. The character was an amalgam of a lot of traits. Les isn’t really based on anybody. 1

AP Photo/Matt Sayles Brandon T. Jackson, Jack Black, Tom Cruise, Bill Hader, Ben Stiller, and Matthew McConaughey at the premiere of ‘Tropic Thunder’ in Los Angeles.

Criswell: I didn’t know what the hair was for initially. I’m not fazed by actors. It’s all about the hair work.

Cornfeld: 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.”

Stiller: Tom choreographed all his own moves. I remember watching him do this stuff and thinking this is so frigging funny.

Hader: I remember him standing off in a corner just working on his moves.

Cornfeld: Most directors, if an actor in that situation said, “Maybe I should dance,” suddenly, the script has additions to it. All of a sudden the secretary is saying, “Oh, Mr. Grossman, you’ve got to practice your dance routine for your daughter’s bat mitzvah,” or something like that. But Ben was like, “Yeah, that’s good. This guy does what he wants and when he’s happy, he dances.” He didn’t need any explanation beyond that.

Hader: I had a hard time keeping a straight face when he said, “A nutless monkey could do your job.” You notice when he says that I’m not looking at him. Every time I looked at him I’d start laughing.

Burke: One day we were in the makeup room and Tom was rehearsing his lines and they were so vulgar and crass. I was taken aback and I thought something had happened to him. He’s swearing and saying these horrible things like, “Fuck you, I’m gonna fuck you!” Oh my goodness. It was not his normal thing.

Hader: When I was like 5, my dad took me out to these rain towers in northern Tulsa, where I grew up. And he had me on his shoulders and he said, “They’re shooting a movie over there called The Outsiders .” They were shooting the rumble scene in the rain and I was like, “Oh my god! They’re shooting a movie over there!” I told Tom that and he goes, “I was there. You were there. And now we’re here. How awesome is that?”

Caefer:  With such a heavy makeup and the heavy workout he was getting, we really had to tend to the actor all the time because there are risks involved — dehydration — so we had to have water for him all the time.

Hader: Justin Theroux deserves a ton of credit for the Les Grossman character. Theroux was the one when I was around who was coming up with all these Grossman lines. “You shit the money bed” was just so good.

Stiller: We shot all Tom’s stuff in like three days.

Hader: They didn’t put him on any of the posters. And when I did press I didn’t want to talk about it because I just wanted it to be a surprise. 3

Caefer: At the end of the movie, people were seeing his name on the screen, and questioning, Who the heck was Tom Cruise? Which one was Tom Cruise?

Cohen: Les Grossman was so beloved that he appeared at the MTV Movie Awards. 4

Burke: Dancing with Jennifer Lopez.

Hader: I remember even getting phone calls, saying, “Hey, we’re maybe going to do a Les Grossman movie.” And I said, “Hey, that sounds great.” I think one was written, but I don’t know. 5

Cornfeld: So much of it is about availability. Hopefully something will happen because he’s such a great character.

Hader: At the premiere, Tom Cruise was like, “Hey, Bill, how’s it going, man?” And I got a little starstruck. Like, I’d never hung out with Tom Cruise before. I’d just been with Les.

Cornfeld: The whole thing was just a gift. Seeing it come together had this weird cosmic layer. Tom comes up with the idea of the character — the dance, having big hands — and he ends up playing the character. It’s just rare that these sorts of surprises end up working. But think about Tom Cruise’s body of work. Coppola, Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Paul Thomas Anderson. You know Tom Cruise doesn’t do things by accident.  

Playing a round of “Who’s Les Grossman, really?” was a popular guessing game around the time of the film’s release. Sumner Redstone and Harvey Weinstein were front-runners. In its review of the movie, the  New York Times called out  Tropic Thunder , which also employed blackface as a plot device, for perpetuating cartoonish Jewish stereotypes with the Grossman character. “What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface,” wrote critic Manohla Dargis , “is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface.”

Caefer was also charged with making last-minute cosmetic fixes to Cruise’s headpiece, which included punching individual hairs into a mat of silicone one-eighth of an inch thick and already glued to the actor’s head. “That was terrifying,” Caefer says. “I started punching hairs into this appliance and everybody was suddenly silent. Tom closed his eyes and for half an hour, nobody said anything until I was through.”

After photos of Cruise in a fat suit leaked during filming, Cruise’s lawyers reportedly threatened to take legal action against any publication that used them.

The 2010 MTV Movie Awards, two years after Tropic Thunder’s premiere.

Three days after the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, Entertainment Weekly and Nikki Finke’s Deadline reported that a Les Grossman movie would be made by Paramount — the same studio that had dropped Cruise four years earlier. Ben Stiller is quoted in the release as follows: “Les Grossman’s life story is an inspiring tale of the classic human struggle to achieve greatness against all odds. He has assured me he plans to quote, ‘F**king kill the sh*t out of this movie and make Citizen f**king Kane look like a piece of crap home movie by the time we are done.’ I am honored to be working with him.” A series of reports in 2012 quotes screenwriter Michael Bacall ( 21 Jump Street ) about drafting a Les Grossman script.

Filed Under: Tom Cruise Week , oral history , Tom Cruise , Tropic Thunder , Ben Stiller , Les Grossman , Sumner Redstone , paramount , Justin theroux , Etan Cohen , Bill Hader , Robert Downey Jr.

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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.

Tom Cruise's Les Grossman Character Is Finally Returning In The Best Way Possible

Released in 2008, "Tropic Thunder" is one of the more polarizing comedy flicks to come out of the era. Sure, it boasts a stacked cast, including Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and more, and the idea of a bunch of actors ending up stranded in a dangerous jungle while filming their latest movie certainly has comedy potential. Although, things like  RDJ's character, Kirk Lazarus, wearing blackface for most of the film , and the portrayal of Tugg Speedman's (Stiller) Simple Jack character , have led many to take a second, more critical look at the film.

Still, Tom Cruise 's Les Grossman is as funny as ever.

A gruff, money-hungry studio executive stationed in Los Angeles, California, Grossman spends much of the film overseeing Speedman, Lazarus, and the rest of the crew's progress — or lack thereof. All the while, he throws child-like temper tantrums and shows next to no respect for those beneath him. Nevertheless, he's among the most fondly remembered parts of "Tropic Thunder" thanks to Cruise's eccentric approach to the character coupled with the makeup and prosthetics that make it hard to tell it's the "Mission: Impossible" star in the first place.

While a "Tropic Thunder 2" hasn't materialized up to this point, as it turns out, Les Grossman is finally going to make a comeback in the near future. Here's what we know.

Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie are eager to bring Grossman back

As reported by Deadline on August 8, 2022, Tom Cruise and producer Christopher McQuarrie are putting together a handful of new projects. The first aligns more with Cruise's typical cinematic efforts since it's an action flick with the potential to become a franchise, and the second is an original song and dance-style musical that would give Cruise a nice break from his usual endeavors. As for the third, it will supposedly focus on Les Grossman in some form or fashion. Time will tell if this will put the character front-and-center in a production of his own or if he'll merely appear as a supporting player.

Talks of a Les Grossman spin-off date back to the early 2010s, with "Barry" star Bill Hader confirming in 2011 that it was even written (via MovieWeb ). However, as time went on, it never came to fruition, though Cruise has been vocal about wanting to return to the role in some form. "I don't know. I did Les Grossman for the MTV Awards...We'll have to see. That could be fun," he told ComicBook.com in May of 2022 of giving Grossman another shot, which, bearing in mind Deadline's report about Cruise and McQuarrie's next efforts, means we could be closer than ever to Grossman's triumphant return to the silver screen.

One can only hope that in the coming months, we hear more about all of Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie's upcoming collaborations — the Les Grossman title, especially.

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Tom Cruise revives Tropic Thunder character at Comic-Con with Conan O'Brien

The spirit of Les Grossman is alive and well.

After making a surprise appearance at San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday to debut the first Top Gun: Maverick trailer , Tom Cruise popped over to Conan to relive the glory of days of Tropic Thunder with host Conan O’Brien.

Cruise, 57, reminisced about his strangely specific demands for the character in the Ben Stiller-directed action-comedy, and he brought back some dance moves and signature Grossman cussing.

“I take classes all the time to learn things or I want to improve a skill… singing, music, something I’m studying,” the actor said. “I take dance classes and I took hip-hop classes and then I’ll find a character to put that with.”

When Stiller approached Cruise for the role of a vulgar Hollywood studio executive, the Mission: Impossible star had some demands: “I said, ‘Look, I’d love to play this character, but I want to have fat hands and I’m gonna dance.'”

The end credits for the 2008 film contain a particularly iconic sequence in which Cruise, in the Grossman fat suit, is just dancing like no one’s watching. Cruise recalled, “[Stiller] created the makeup and we did the makeup test… As you’re working on a character, you start becoming that character, you start discovering the character, and I just started moving. There was no music. He was just looking at me like, ‘What is happening?'” Stiller would later cut these moves — including, as Cruise demonstrated through seat dancing, the crushing-the-Pepsi-can — to the music heard in Tropic Thunder .

At the behest of O’Brien, Cruise also brought back a classic Grossman line: “Would you stand back and literally f— your own face!”

Related content:

Tropic Thunder rewatched and reconsidered, 10 years later

From the EW archives: Robert Downey Jr., Ben Stiller, and Jack Black riff on Tropic Thunder

Top Gun sequel trailer revealed as Tom Cruise surprises Comic-Con

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