Tom Cruise is back, but you might need a second look to recognize him!
The Top Gun: Maverick superstar sent shockwaves through CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Tuesday, joining Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu to unveil the first footage of their highly anticipated—and formerly top-secret—project, Digger.
While fans are used to seeing Cruise, , hanging off planes or riding motorcycles, his latest role is a “transformative” departure that has social media losing its mind. Forget the leading-man locks; in Digger, Cruise appears as Digger Rockwell, a balding, big-bellied industrialist with a thick Southern accent and a serious attitude problem.
In the first trailer, which left the audience in stitches, Cruise’s Rockwell is seen in his pajamas, swinging a baseball bat and screaming at himself in a mirror: “Hustle is something you sorely lack, you lazy piece of sht!”
The dark comedy follows Rockwell, arguably the most powerful man in the world, as he races to fix a global environmental disaster he accidentally unleashed. From arguing with a scientist via Zoom about the size of a “five-foot crack” in an ice shelf to managing a sick cat, Cruise is leaning into a side of his comedy chops we haven’t seen since his iconic turn as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.
“Watching Tom Cruise becoming Digger, I was not prepared for that,” Iñárritu told the crowd. “We know that he is fearless: the stunts, the planes, the jumps. But I have to say, I think this is another kind of fearless. This role possibly could be [his] most challenging.”
The collaboration has been a long time coming. Cruise revealed that he first began discussing a project with the Birdman director seven years ago. The actor was so eager to work with Iñárritu that he recalled jumping on his motorcycle “in the middle of the night” to meet the director while he was still filming Top Gun: Maverick.
“This kind of movie is why I want to make movies,” Cruise told the audience, calling the project “wild and funny.”
The film features a star-studded cast including John Goodman—who plays the President—alongside Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, and Riz Ahmed. Goodman’s character sums up the high-stakes plot perfectly in the trailer: “Digger got us into this, and Digger is going to dig us out.”
On X (formerly Twitter), the reaction was instant. “Tom Cruise doing a dark comedy with Iñárritu? Take my money now,” one fan wrote. Another added, “The ‘big-belly’ era of Tom Cruise is something I didn’t know I needed, but I’m here for it.”
Iñárritu, who previously described the film as a “wild comedy of catastrophic proportions,” couldn’t stop praising his leading man’s range. “He makes me laugh every day,” the director said. “I was so fcking impressed and happy.”
Digger is set to hit theaters—and only theaters, as Iñárritu emphasized it was shot in Vistavision—on October . Prepare yourselves: the summer of stunts is making way for the autumn of Rockwell!
