tom. cruise 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 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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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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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 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

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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..

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.

• SEE ALSO : ‘Under the Bridge’ Review: A Miniseries That Interrogates the True Crime Genre

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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.

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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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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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’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.

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.

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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Tropic Thunder

Academy awards, usa.

• Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
• Robert Downey Jr.

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• Best Make-Up
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• Outstanding Achievement in Casting - Big Budget Feature - Comedy
• Francine Maisler

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• Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

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• Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role

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• Best Ensemble

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• Best Original Score for a Comedy Film

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The Most Hilarious 'Tropic Thunder' Quotes

The best quotes from Tropic Thunder make you realize how funny the movie really is, even if you haven't seen it in a while. Let's rank the greatest quotes from Tropic Thunder , with the help of your votes. Starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., and Jack Black, Tropic Thunder was directed by Ben Stiller and released in 2008.

What are your favorite lines from Tropic Thunder ? One of the memorable one-liners was when Kirk Lazarus said, "I know who I am! I'm a dude playing the dude, disguised as another dude!" Another great line from Tropic Thunder is, "I got the TiVo!" spoken by Rick Peck who was played by Matthew McConaughey.

Vote up your top Tropic Thunder quotes, regardless of which character they come from.

Tugg Speedman : What is with you people?!

Kirk Lazarus : Huh?! What do you mean, "you people?"

Alpa Chino : What do you mean, 'you people?'

Kirk Lazarus : Huh?

Dude Playin' The Dude

Kirk Lazarus : I know who I am! I'm a dude playing the dude, disguised as another dude!

It's A Theme Song

Alpa Chino : As for why I'm in this movie, maybe I just knew I had to represent. Cause they one good part in this movie for a Black man and they gave it to Crocodile Dundee.

Kirk Lazarus : Pump your brakes, kid. That man's a national treasure.

Alpa Chino : I just wanted to throw another shrimp on your Barbie.

Lazarus : That sh*t ain't funny.

Alpa Chino : I'm just f*cking with you, Kangaroo Jack. I'm sorry if a dingo ate yo baby.

Lazarus : You know that's a true story? Lady lost her kid. You about to cross a f*cking line.

Kevin Sandusky : Hey guys could we just cool it...

Alpa Chino : You know what, f*ck that, I'm sick of this koala-hunting ni**a-

Lazarus : For 400 years, that word has kept our people down.

Alpa Chino : ..what the f*ck!?

Lazarus : Took a whole lot of tryin, just to get up that hill, but now we up in the big leagues...

Alpa Chino : That's the theme songs from The Jeffersons.

Lazarus : Just cause it's a theme song doesn't mean it's not true.

Full Retard

Kirk Lazarus : (speaking about Simple Jack) You went full retard man, never go full retard.

Take A Step Back

Les Grossman : Okay, Flaming Dragon. F*ckface. First, take a big step back... and literally f*ck your own face! Now, I don't know what kind of pan-Pacific bullsh*t power play you're trying to pull here, but Asia, Jack, is my territory. So whatever you're thinking, you'd better think again. Otherwise I'm gonna have to head down there and I will rain down an ungodly f*cking firestorm upon you! You're gonna have to call the f*cking United Nations and get a f*cking binding resolution to keep me from f*cking destroying you. I am talking scorched earth, motherf*cker! I will massacre you! I will f*ck you up! (hangs up and asks assistant) Find out who that was.

DVD Commentary

Kirk Lazarus : I don't drop character 'til I've done the DVD commentary.

Tugg Speedman : I killed one, Rick... the thing I love most in the world.

Rick Peck : A hooker. Oh Jesus, you killed a hooker!

A Nutless Monkey

Studio Executive Rob Slolom : Wow. Eight Oscars, 400 million dollars at the box office, and you saved Tugg Speedman's career.

Les Grossman : I couldn't have done it without you.

Slolom : Really?

Grossman : No, dickhead. Of course I could. A nutless monkey could do your job. Now, go get drunk and take credit at all the parties.

Slolom : I wouldn't do that.

Grossman : Ah... joking.

Slolom : Ah, there he is! Funny. You're a funny guy.

Grossman : Yeah. But seriously, a nutless monkey could do your job .

Trained Actors

Alpa Chino : But they're trained soldiers.

Kirk Lazarus : Yes. But we are trained actors.

Master Blaster

Kirk Lazarus : What about you, Master Blaster? You got a certain someone you trying to get with back in the States?

Kevin Sandusky : What, Alpa Chino? He's like ten girls deep, 24/7.

Kirk Lazarus : No, you missin' me, man. I'm talking about something special. Big difference. How about it?

Alpa Chino : Yeah. Yeah, there is.

Kirk Lazarus : Well? What's the skinny? Y'all been on a date or what?

Alpa Chino : No. I mean... I always wanted to, but, I guess I just never had the courage to ask. It's...it's complicated.

Kirk Lazarus : No! It's simple as pie, man. You plant your feet on the ground, you look her square in the eyes, you say, "Hey. Baby, you and me's going on a date." That's the end of the story. What's her name?

Alpa Chino : ...Lance.

Kirk Lazarus : "Listen here, Lance..." Lance? What the f*ck did I just hear? Lance?

Kevin Sandusky : Did you say, "Lance?"

Alpa Chino : No!

Kevin Sandusky : That sounded like "Lance."

Alpa Chino : No, I said "Nance."

Kevin Sandusky : It sounded like "Lance."

Alpa Chino : Look, I'm Alpa Chino, okay? I love the p*ssy, all right? Lay your *ss back down and look at the stars.

Kirk Lazarus : When you wrote "I Love Tha P*ssy", was you thinking of dangling your dice on Lance's forehead?

Alpa Chino : Naw, hell no! What? Come on, look...

Kirk Lazarus : Man, everyone's gay once in a while!

Alpa Chino : I'm not gay!

Textile Factory

Jeff Portnoy : So, what's the plan, man? You gonna talk Vietnamese to those dudes?

Kirk Lazarus : No, no. Mandarin Chinese. What I can tell, it's what they're speaking down there.

Jeff ​​​​​ Portnoy : How the hell do you know Chinese?

Kirk Lazarus : Land of Silk and Money with Gong Li. Second Globe, third Oscar. I prepped for that one by working in a Beijing textile factory for eight months.

I Don't Read

Kirk Lazarus : I don't read the script. The script reads me.

Suck My Unit

Tugg Speedman : This is insane. Are you really going to abandon this movie? We're supposed to be a unit!

Kirk Lazarus : Suck my unit.

Kirk Lazarus : God dammit! We lost! We fuckin' super lost, man!

The Money-Bed

Les Grossman : Which one of you f*ckfaces is Damien Cockburn?

Damien Cockburn : Uh, that's me, sir. It's an honor to finally meet you. Get some face time.

Grossman : And who here is the key grip? You? You! Hit that director in the face, really f*cking hard!

Key Grip : (walks to Damien) Sorry, man. ([punches Damien in the face)

Grossman : This is all your fault, you Limey f*ck! You sh*t the money-bed, my friend.

A Blind Kid

Rick Peck : It was like pistol-whipping a blind kid.

Kirk Lazarus : There ya go, get him chugging on some of Alpa's "*ss-Water" that will bring him around, it's a cure all.

Rick Peck : Let me get this straight. You want me to let my client of fifteen years, one of my best friends, die in the jungle alone for some money and a G5.

Grossman : Yes.

Pecker : A G5 airplane.

Grossman : Yes. And lots of money. Playa....

Slolom : Yeah! Smack it up, flip up, rub it down, hoo!!

Tugg Speedman : It's just corn syrup you guys! Blood flavored...corn syrup.

Blow The Bridge

Tugg Speedman : I was wrong! Blow the bridge! Blow the f*cking bridge!

Damien : Crisis meeting? What does that mean, exactly? I mean, you know, are we in a crisis?

Rob : He's the head of the studio. He's reaching out. We're 10,000 miles away. He just wants a little face-time.

Damien : I know. It's just you said he called it a crisis meeting. So, you know...

Rob : It's Les Grossman. He throws these words around. "Crisis," "explosion," "not rolling," "fired." These are just words.

She Walked Past

Alpa Chino : Hell nah, I ain't pee on that girl. No no listen, here's the story she was in the way when I was peeing she walked past.

Writers Lie

Cody : Dude, dude, what the hell is going on here? Where are we?

Four-Leaf Tayback: I have no idea, I've never been outside the States.

Cody : Wait what?! Are you f*cking kidding me?! Did you make this whole goddamn thing up?! Dude you weren't even in the f*cking service?!

Tayback : Yes! Of course! Coast Guard!

Cody : Coast Guard.

Tayback : Sanitation Department.

Cody : Oh my God! You're a f*cking garbage man! Dammit! F.L. Tayback lies to me and the whole goddamn U.S. of A.

Tayback : I wrote the book as a tribute! I'm a patriot.

Cody : Yeah, you're the Milli Vanilli of patriots okay? You lied about fighting in the Vietnam War. It's like - It's like punching the American flag in the face goddammit! God, to think I believed you!

Tayback : Writers lie all the time!

Cody : Can I be tied to another post please?

Rick Peck : I got the TiVo!

Damien Cockburn : This walkie talkie goes to the helicopter, and the helicopter is God. And I am Jesus Christ. And you are my chosen disciples.

• Tropic Thunder
• Movie Quotes
• Weird History

The greatest, funniest, and most iconic movie and TV quotes from your all-time favorite comedies (and a few you probably haven’t seen).