In the 2000s, Tom Cruise began to move away from making a variety of movies belonging to different genres. He focused solely on action or action-thrillers. The Mission Impossible franchise is the best example of this, but there’s another cult-classic film that makes the list as well.
However, instead of just stunts, the acclaimed actor also had to do character acting for the film that grossed $220 million on a $65 million budget. But that’s not all. As part of character research, he had to do something that would have raised anyone’s eyebrows.
How Tom Cruise Got Into Character For His Academy Award-Nominated Film
In Collateral (2004), Tom Cruise plays Vincent, a hitman who can go anywhere and mix in seamlessly with the crowd. This ability allows him to kill people without arousing suspicion. Director Michael Mann wanted Cruise to be able to do just that in real life. So he made the actor do plenty of FedEx deliveries in a courier’s uniform to see how well he blended in. IMDb states:
“According to Michael Mann, Vincent is a man able to get in and out of anywhere without anyone recognizing or remembering him. To prepare for the movie, Tom Cruise had to make FedEx deliveries in a crowded Los Angeles market without anyone recognizing him.”
Contact Music quoted Tom Cruise saying, “We had the wardrobe, I got my mission – go in and deliver this package to this place. Then go and buy coffee and sit down and just talk. It was a great acting exercise. I’m a very good stalker now.”
Mann explained his lead actor’s mission as “The objective was simply to be somebody else. Tom could put on a beard, sunglasses, and baseball hat and someone still goes, ‘There’s Tom Cruise.” So the actor had to completely immerse himself into the character and disguise himself so that he could mix in without arousing suspicion. But this wasn’t the only prep the Top Gun actor had to do for the role.
Collateral Director Taught Tom Cruise Mock Assassination Exercises
In 2019, Michael Mann did a Q and A where he revealed that he had trained Tom Cruise to do mock assassination exercises. Screen Rant reported that “Mann would select people from his office for the actor to stalk, so he could learn their patterns and ‘kill’ them by slapping a post-it note with ‘You’re Dead’ written on it.”
Whether it was pushing Cruise to deliver parcels or teaching him how to ‘kill’ people, many thought that these were unorthodox ways to get into a character. But whatever Mann did certainly worked because the Minority Report actor gave one of his best career performances in the movie. Today, Collateral is regarded as a cult classic that allowed Cruise to flex his acting muscles as well as perform stunts as an action hero.
Collateral is streaming on Netflix.
Source: IMDb
