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'Tropic Thunder'

Ben Stiller reveals Tom Cruise’s two demands before participating in ‘Tropic Thunder’

Speaking to Conan O’Brien, Stiller looked back on his recruitment of Cruise for the 2008 comedy ‘Tropic Thunder’.

Tom Cruise está a punto de aumentar su fortuna con el estreno de ‘Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Pt.1′. Así es la fortuna actual del actor.
AMR ALFIKYREUTERS

Tropic Thunder actor, co-writer and director Ben Stiller says Tom Cruise made two very specific demands about the character he’d play before the Hollywood icon agreed to join the cast for the 2008 comedy.

Who did Cruise play in Tropic Thunder?

Tropic Thunder saw Cruise make a show-stealing cameo as Les Grossman, a bald, foul-mouthed studio executive who, in one memorable scene, boogies on the dance floor to rapper Ludacris’s song “Get Back”.

Cruise’s small but impactful role has even been described as “arguably his best performance ever” in a four-decade big-screen career.

In an interview last week on Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, Stiller looked back on how he brought Cruise on board for the satirical action film, in which a group of actors go to the jungle to shoot a high-budget war movie, only to be captured by drug lords who think they are narcotics agents.

Recalling his conversations with Cruise about Grossman, Stiller remembered that the Mission: Impossible star was insistent his character should have “big, thick forearms that were hairy”. What’s more, Stiller said, “he wanted to dance”.

Cruise “changed the plot of the movie but made it so much better”

Stiller, who played the action-film star Tugg Speedman in Tropic Thunder, added that it was Cruise who first suggested the inclusion of a studio exec in the lineup of characters.

It’s a strange set of circumstances the way this happened,” the Severance director said. “We had done this little short for the MTV Movie Awards where I play this stuntman, and we had met a couple of times over the years before that. We had a great time doing that together, and had stayed in touch since then.”

Stiller continued: “We finally had this script [for Tropic Thunder], and I had talked to Tom about it. Originally I wanted Tom to play my part. But I was really too nervous to ask him to do it, because he’s Tom Cruise! He has other stuff to do. And we were friendly and hanging out, he was so nice and just, like, the greatest guy, and I didn’t want to bother him, really, with this.

“But eventually I sent him the script and he was like, ‘This is great! I’d love to be a part of this!' And I was like, ‘Well, maybe you could play like an agent role.’ But he was like, ‘Well, no, I’ve played an agent before,' in Jerry Maguire. It was his idea, this character. He said, 'But you don’t have a studio exec in the movie.'

“This was like three months or maybe like two and a half months before we started shooting, and [co-writer] Justin [Theroux] and I were like, ‘Well, Tom would like to be in the movie, and he had this idea of playing a studio exec.’ And so we went back and came up with Les Grossman, and it changed the whole plot of the movie but made it so much better.”

Watch the trailer for Tropic Thunder:

How much did Tropic Thunder gross at the box office?

Also starring Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Steve Coogan and Nick Nolte, Tropic Thunder was released in August 2008. Per Box Office Mojo, it grossed just over $110 million in U.S. movie theaters, and $195 million worldwide.

On the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, Tropic Thunder has an 82% Tomatometer score from 251 critics; in other words, just over eight out of 10 reviews it has received are positive.

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