Tom Cruise Gets Personal With Select Press About ‘Digger,’ His Most Transformative Role Yet
It’s not every day you get to hang out with one of the last true action heroes, let alone Tom Cruise, one of the biggest, most fearless and relentlessly dedicated movie stars of our time. For decades, Cruise has pushed himself to the edge for audiences, jumping out of planes, scaling the world’s tallest building, hanging from the side of an aircraft during takeoff and driving motorcycles off cliffs, all in pursuit of creating unforgettable moments on the big screen.
But on this particular afternoon, there were no helicopters, motorcycles or death-defying stunts. Instead, a select group of press were invited to the Warner Bros. lot for an intimate afternoon with Cruise himself, where we were among the first audiences to get a glimpse at his upcoming film, Digger, directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
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And somehow, after more than four decades of watching Tom Cruise on the big screen, he has found another way to surprise us.
In Digger, Cruise is practically unrecognizable. This isn’t Ethan Hunt racing against the clock to save the world, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell climbing back into the cockpit or the polished and instantly recognizable movie star audiences have followed for generations. Cruise disappears into Digger Rockwell, a strange, charismatic and unpredictable character at the center of a film that appears determined to take both its star and its audience somewhere completely unexpected.
Before we watched the trailer, Iñárritu joined us remotely from London, where he was finishing the film’s sound mix, to introduce the project. The filmmaker revealed that the idea behind Digger had been living with him for nearly a decade, beginning not as a completed screenplay or even a traditional story, but as an obsession with a character he could not stop thinking about. Iñárritu knew how Digger spoke, how he survived and how he could manipulate reality and the people around him into bending to his perspective, but he didn’t yet know the right way to tell his story.
That search took nearly ten years, and when Iñárritu finally discovered the film he wanted to make, he knew exactly who he needed at its center. For the filmmaker, casting Cruise wasn’t simply about attaching one of the biggest movie stars in the world to his project. He believed the role required everything Cruise had learned throughout his career, describing the actor’s transformation as astonishing and recalling Cruise telling him that it had taken 40 years to become capable of playing this character.
After seeing the first footage, it’s easy to understand why.
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Cruise looks dramatically different, but the transformation goes far beyond makeup. There is something unusual about the way Digger carries himself, speaks and interacts with the world around him. Even in the brief footage shown, the character feels unpredictable, leaving you unsure whether you should trust him, fear him or laugh at him. That uncertainty appears to be exactly the point, with Iñárritu describing Digger as charming, funny and almost impossible to look away from—the kind of person who can convince you to agree with him even when every instinct tells you that you probably shouldn’t.
Cruise seemed energized while discussing the challenge of discovering the character. During our conversation, he explained that he approached Digger the same way he has approached many of the most memorable performances of his career: by searching for the specific rhythm, movement and physicality that makes a character believable. Comedy, Cruise explained, has its own musicality, and the rhythm of Risky Business is different from Jerry Maguire, just as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder operates differently from his character in Edge of Tomorrow.
Digger required Cruise to discover an entirely new rhythm. That process meant studying everything from movement and language to makeup, costumes and dance, while constantly questioning whether the performance was hitting the right balance between comedy and drama. Before filming began, Cruise spent days listening as Iñárritu read the screenplay aloud, allowing him to understand not only the words on the page but the world that existed inside the filmmaker’s imagination.
The collaboration was decades in the making. Cruise recalled first seeing Iñárritu’s Amores Perros more than 25 years ago and immediately becoming fascinated by the filmmaker behind it. He wasn’t simply impressed by the story; he was studying everything from the staging and performances to the cinematography, production design and colors within each frame. Cruise began calling friends and people throughout the industry, urging them to watch the film and asking the same question: Who is Alejandro?
Over the years, Cruise continued following Iñárritu’s career, watching each new film and waiting to see what the filmmaker would do next. Eventually, the two artists found their opportunity to work together, and Digger appears to have become the kind of experience Cruise is still searching for after more than 40 years in the industry: the opportunity to step into unfamiliar territory.
Cruise admitted that he had never been challenged by a project in quite this way, and neither had Iñárritu. That shared sense of creative risk can be felt throughout the footage, with the world of Digger appearing visually strange, ambitious and carefully constructed. Every detail matters, from the color of a pair of cowboy boots and the design of a costume to the makeup, sets and way the characters move through each frame.
Even the cameras and lenses used to capture the performances became part of the film’s identity. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki shot the movie using VistaVision, a filmmaking format with roots dating back to the 1950s, while also working with specially developed wide vintage-style Leica lenses created for the production. The goal was to give the movie a distinctive, handcrafted visual language that could match the unusual world and characters at the center of the story.
Cruise’s excitement while discussing the filmmaking process was impossible to miss. At one point during production, he remembered hearing the sound of film running through the VistaVision camera and asking everyone around him to be quiet because he simply wanted to listen to it.
That moment says a lot about Tom Cruise. For all the attention given to the impossible stunts, global premieres and blockbuster box office numbers, sitting just feet away from him as he spoke about filmmaking revealed something much simpler: he genuinely loves movies. Not just starring in them, but the cameras, lenses, performances, audiences, people working behind the scenes and generations of filmmakers who passed their knowledge down to the artists who came after them.
Cruise spoke about being a young actor on the set of Taps, asking cinematographer Owen Roizman endless questions about lenses and cameras even when he didn’t fully understand the answers. He also remembered watching Paul Newman perform while Martin Scorsese directed and realizing how fortunate he was to simply be in the room absorbing knowledge from the people around him.
Decades later, that curiosity hasn’t disappeared. Cruise still talks about filmmaking like someone who believes there is always more to learn, refusing to approach his career as though he has reached some final destination. There is always another filmmaker, another character, another skill and another dream waiting to be discovered.
Perhaps that is what makes Digger such an interesting moment in his career. At a time when Cruise could comfortably continue making massive action spectacles, he has instead placed himself in the hands of one of cinema’s most uncompromising filmmakers and allowed himself to become almost completely unrecognizable.
The physical transformation will undoubtedly generate conversation, but Cruise made it clear that creating Digger wasn’t simply about putting on makeup or changing his appearance. Every element had to communicate something about the character, from the way he moves and occupies a room to what he wears, what makes him funny and what makes him dangerous.
Those questions seem to sit at the heart of the film. Iñárritu described Digger as absurd, dangerous and comedic, arguing that some of the greatest comedy comes directly from tragedy. That combination gives the movie a tone that is difficult to define after watching only the trailer, and that may be one of its greatest strengths.
At a time when audiences often know almost everything about a major movie before entering the theater, Digger still feels like a genuine mystery. We know the character is charismatic, unpredictable and potentially dangerous, and we know he may be capable of convincing the people around him—and perhaps the audience itself—to follow him somewhere they probably shouldn’t go. Exactly where Iñárritu and Cruise are taking us remains unclear.
What is clear is the scale of the ambition behind the film. Iñárritu said he has never prepared a project with this level of precision, with every frame, lens, color, costume, object and symbol carefully considered. Cruise echoed that commitment throughout our conversation, emphasizing that filmmaking remains a collective experience in which actors, directors, cinematographers, costume designers, production designers and every department work together toward one goal: creating something capable of completely immersing an audience.
Audiences remain central to the way Cruise thinks about movies. Despite spending most of his life as one of the most famous actors on the planet, he still describes himself as an audience member first. He loves opening weekends, sitting inside theaters with crowds and traveling around the world to watch how audiences from different cultures respond to stories. He remains curious about whether people laugh at the same moments, feel the same emotions and connect with characters in similar ways.
For Cruise, that curiosity is part of the magic of cinema. Everyone enters a theater carrying different experiences, perspectives and tastes, but for a few hours, hundreds of strangers can experience the same story together. That belief has driven Cruise throughout his career, and now it has brought him to Digger.
After spending an afternoon listening to Tom Cruise speak about the movie, one thing became increasingly clear: he doesn’t view this film as simply another role. It represents another step in a lifelong pursuit of discovering what else cinema can do and what else he is capable of doing within it.
Cruise has spent decades pushing the physical limits of filmmaking, but with Digger, the biggest risk may be allowing audiences to see him in a way they never have before. There is no Ethan Hunt, no Maverick and no familiar action hero persona to hide behind—just an actor, a filmmaker and a character they have spent years building together.
We were only shown the first glimpse of that collaboration, but if the trailer and our afternoon with Cruise are any indication, Digger could become one of the most unexpected and transformative performances of his career. Even after more than 40 years at the center of Hollywood, Tom Cruise is still chasing the next challenge, and somehow, he still seems convinced that the most exciting movie is the one he hasn’t made yet.
