Cinema: Tom Terrific

In his fiery new film, Hollywood's top gun aims for best-actor status

  • Share
  • Read Later

(8 of 9)

In Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise had no Hoffman to play actor's Ping- Pong with. In front of the camera, he was on his own. Behind it, he would be led by two Viet Nam vets, Stone and Kovic. "I chose Tom," Stone says, % "because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit. I sensed that they came from the same working-class Catholic background and had a similarly troubled family history. They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like Ron too, Tom is wound real tight. And what's wrong with that?"

Throughout, Stone kept winding Cruise tighter. "I put a lot of pressure on Tom," he says, "maybe too much. I wanted him to read more, visit more hospitals. I wanted him to spend time in that chair, to really feel it. He went to boot camp twice, and I didn't want his foxhole dug by his cousin. At one point I talked him into injecting himself with a solution that would have totally paralyzed him for two days. Then the insurance company -- the killer of all experience -- said no because there was a slight chance that Tom would have ended up permanently paralyzed. But the point is, he was willing to do it."

Cruise was willing to do anything for the picture; he tabled his usual multimillion-dollar salary, and will earn no money until the box office sends some back. He spent hours with Kovic, peppering the vet with questions, soaking up the man's life. In matching wheelchairs, the two men would go shopping; Cruise was rarely recognized. In a Westwood, Calif., electronics store, he was asked to leave because his wheels were leaving marks on the rubber carpet. "He was furious," recalls Kovic. "Everyone in the store turned and looked at him when he shouted, 'I have as much right to be in this store as everyone else!' "

They shot for 65 exhausting, twelve-hour days (on a slim budget of $17.8 million), and Cruise would not trade a day of it. "At the beginning I thought, 'Oh, man, I just don't want to blow this. Every day I am going to give it everything I have. In the Philippines, where we shot the Viet Nam stuff, I was thinking, 'I don't know how it's going to be, but all I know is, I have got absolutely nothing left.' I was burned out. Burned out. But when I think back to the happiest moments in my life, I think of when we finished Born on the Fourth of July. You're looking down from the mountain and saying, 'Jesus, I had no idea it was this big.' I love that feeling of conclusion, accomplishment, overcoming obstacles."

One obstacle a married movie star must overcome is the time he spends away from his wife. (Another annoyance is tabloid tales of imminent splitsville, and Cruise has heard those too.) But Cruise and his wife, actress Mimi Rogers | (Someone to Watch Over Me), spend as much time together as possible in their New York City apartment and visit each other when they are filming in far-flung locations. Cruise says it helps to have a wife in the business: "It's like trying to explain how driving a race car feels. You can't do it. They've got to get in the car themselves. I need someone to understand what I'm doing, so I get good input, so I'm not in it alone." But Rogers, 34, is also, obviously, another crucial woman in Cruise's family. "The most important thing for me," he says, "is I want Mimi to be happy."

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9