Tom Cruise talks divisive 'Digger': 'The door's open, now I want to push it again'

Tom Cruise isn't backing away from Digger. At a packed Academy Museum screening, the 64-year-old star took the stage after a showing of Alejandro G. Iñárritu's wildly ambitious, deeply weird new comedy to explain why he keeps chasing roles that test him. "I was very successful since I was a kid," Cruise told the 945-seat David Geffen Theater. "OK, the door's open. Now I want to push it again."

In Digger, Cruise plays a Texas oil tycoon forced to face the music after an environmental disaster puts the world at risk. The Warner Bros. release, with a reported $125 million production budget, lands just as Paramount nears its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery — and it has already split critics savagely, with The Hollywood Reporter's own review among the harshest.

Cruise, 64, and Iñárritu, 63, are near-exact contemporaries taking the leap together. Cruise has gone offbeat before — an Oscar-nominated turn in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, and unrecognizable under prosthetics in Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder — but his recent years have belonged to the escalating Mission: Impossible set pieces. Digger demands a different leap of faith, from Cruise and from the audience he hopes will follow him.

Finding the tone

Iñárritu was disarmingly candid about how hard that tone was to pin down. "We were laughing all day," the four-time Oscar-winning filmmaker recalled. Then he'd watch the dailies. "Oh my God. This is not working. This is shit." Nudge the performance and it tipped the other way: "It's too naturalistic. It's not so funny." The tone, he said, had to live in the actors' bodies and voices. "Nothing can be written in tone. It doesn't exist."

He compared Cruise's precision to the "micro decisions" the star makes during a dangerous stunt, "when one second is the difference between life and death" — watching where Cruise placed his hands, when he winked and when he stayed silent. Reviews be damned, Cruise is treating Digger like his next impossible mission.