Tom Cruise makes a bold move with 'Digger.' But will Oscar dig it? - USA Today

Everybody has a picture when they think of a young Tom Cruise. Dancing in his tighty-whities. Being the coolest guy in a fighter jet. Yelling “Show me the money!” 

Cruise needed every one of those roles over his 45-year career in Hollywood to find aging oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, his power-hungry and gonzo character in director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new disaster movie satire “Digger” (in theaters Oct. 2). Some of those parts became iconic. Some are fan favorites. Some won Oscar attention. None were Digger, however.

“I’d never read a character like this,” Cruise, 64, told USA TODAY at the film’s Hollywood premiere. “I was very fortunate at the beginning of my career to have a character like in ‘Taps,’ to have that kind of progression: ‘The Outsiders,’ ‘Risky Business,’ ‘All the Right Moves.’ … I learned so much, and it's never stopped.”

Had he played Digger earlier, “it definitely would have been just very different,” he added. “But I feel privileged to be able to have it now. It’s a wild ride.”

And it’s the kind of transformative performance that wins the hearts of awards season voters and pundits, though Cruise might have a few hurdles on the way to the Academy Awards stage. While he was feted with an honorary Oscar at last year's Governors Awards, Cruise has never won a competitive Oscar after four nominations. No. 5 isn’t a given with mixed reviews so far for “Digger” (52% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), a film that leans more niche than his usual box-office blockbuster. (There's already an ad firing back at critics with Cruise's Digger character saying, "You know what, f--- those people.")

“This just happens to be a hugely competitive year, and a divisive film just gives him another obstacle that he's going to have to work against,” says Debra Birnbaum, editor-in-chief for awards site Gold Derby.

In “Digger,” an ice shelf breaks free from an oil-drilling platform in Greenland and careens toward Europe, bringing catastrophic tsunamis in tow. President Compson (John Goodman) tells his buddy Digger to get the situation fixed, and Digger has to figure out how to control the narrative of a climate-crisis conundrum. 

The movie is an example of “the oldest story ever,” about greed, power and responsibility, Iñárritu says. And to “make it fun,” he needed Cruise’s “incredible sense of humor” and rhythm.

“Tom is the ultimate American actor, right? He's a mythological actor, basically,” the director says. “What really was very surprising for me is the way he got and understood where we were going (and) to have this archetype of the most powerful man in the world understanding the human nature of it.”

Riz Ahmed, who plays Digger’s nervy environmental scientist Ganesh, says both he and Cruise “lost ourselves a little bit" in these larger-than-life characters. Cruise was “so invested” and immersed in the facial prosthetics and costumes that he was mainly Digger.

“I felt more comfortable around Digger than I did around Tom,” Ahmed admits. “When he didn't have the prosthetics on, it was like, ‘Whoa, dude, why is Tom Cruise on set?’ ”

Sandra Hüller had a similar meta moment. The German actress never saw him out of the prosthetics until one day when he finished filming and came back from the makeup trailer to watch her work. “I didn't see it coming, and he said, ‘Hi, I'm back,’ ” she recalls. “I literally fell off the chair, because it was the most embarrassing moment of my entire life. I hadn't seen Tom Cruise before. I just saw Digger. This is kind of the impact that his true appearance had on me.”

Goodman knew Cruise way before “Digger”: They met at a party at Bruce Willis’ house in the early 1990s. It was only a brief encounter, “but he remembered it,” Goodman says. “As an actor, you want him as a wingman, or you want to be his wingman, because he's got this curiosity about everything, and I think that's what's driven him through his whole life. 

“You don't want to disappoint the guy, and he's so damned energetic and curious and fun to be around, it rubs off on you.”

As head of marketplace trends at Rentrak, Paul Dergarabedian can tell you all about Cruise’s box-office bona fides. But first, he was a fan of Cruise’s talent, recognizing how good of an actor he truly was after seeing his acclaimed role in 1989’s “Born on the Fourth of July,” which scored Cruise his first best actor nod. “He didn't always trade on his leading-man looks,” Dergarabedian says. Then he saw Cruise do something “really cool,” going from his usual protagonist roles to being an Oscar-nominated pseudo-villain in 2000’s “Magnolia.”

“His range is astonishing,” Dergarabedian says. “I don't want to say he's the last movie star, but he is of a time, a place and an era that may not exist again.

“This guy's probably going to live to be 120. So he's in the middle of his career at this point,” Dergarabedian quips.

He compares Cruise to Lon Chaney, the old-school horror icon also known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces.” Cruise’s “Digger” transformation is clearly Cruise’s “swing for the Oscar,” Dergarabedian says, and it’s “the classic move for a major Hollywood star to express themselves on screen in a way that's unexpected.”

In that way, Dergarabedian feels Cruise’s “Digger” is sort of like Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” and whether or not it’s a box-office bonanza is beside the point: “Tom Cruise doesn't have to prove anything to anybody. He continues to challenge himself, and if the audience wants to go along for that ride, they can.”

The big question is, will Oscar voters saddle up for "Digger"? You have arguably the theatrical experience’s most outspoken proponent on the PR trail, doing the Kelce brothers’ podcast, attending packed Academy screenings, chatting with movie-loving influencers, appearing on YouTube channels, and driving a marketing machine much different than a “Top Gun” or “Mission: Impossible” flick.

“He is the best salesman for his own work,” Birnbaum says of Cruise. “There's a long road between September and March. Is he going to shake every hand and kiss every baby? He may well do that.”

What doesn’t help his chances is the fact that the best-actor field is “a bloodbath” this year, she says. Right now, Birnbaum thinks Andrew Scott (“Elsinore”), John Malkovich (“Wild Horse Nine”) and Matt Damon (“The Odyssey”) are all locks – that’s three out of five slots, and like Cruise, none of them have an Oscar win. Gold Derby experts currently have Cruise in fourth (with odds at 63%) yet a slew of actors, including Robert Pattinson (“Primetime”), Ryan Gosling (“Project Hail Mary”), Pedro Pascal (“Behemoth!”) and John Turturro (“The Last Pickpocket in New York”) all loom as strong contenders.

Birnbaum appreciates how “Digger” is “like going from zero to 3 million” for Cruise. “I applaud not playing it safe,” she says. “That's what art is. But we also have to recognize, Oscars are not participation trophies.” 

And if Cruise misses out on Oscar glory, “he doesn't seem to be the kind of guy who would just give up and nor do I think he will,” Birnbaum adds. “Is he still going to be flying off the back of planes? I'm sure. But I'm also impressed that he tried this.”

Iñárritu, for one, can’t wait to see Cruise to do more of it: “He is a fearless man and he will be always looking for the future and do whatever he wants, which is a great thing.”