Tom Cruise takes his sets seriously — even when filming a segment meant strictly for laughs. Michael Cera — who can currently be seen in Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” — found this out the hard way when shooting a pre-taped sketch for the MTV Movie Awards in 2010. In it, Cruise reprised his “Tropic Thunder” character, Hollywood agent Len Grossman (whom Cruise has hinted at possibly spinning off into his own movie).
Per Entertainment Weekly, Cera recalled on the “Louis Theroux Podcast” his “little moment” with Cruise during the segment, one of a series of moments the “Mission: Impossible” actor had with other performers.
“Tom runs the set,” Cera said. “I was really there for like five minutes, but what I observed was, he was like the first AD on the set… I mean, he was such a leader. The first moment I had with him, I arrived, they were shooting, and I was talking to the writer. We were just kind of mumbling while they were shooting, but they could hear us. It was just like 40 feet away. And Tom Cruise looks at me, I’ve never met him, and they’re in the middle of a take and he looks, and he goes, ‘Is that Michael Cera talking during a fucking take?’ He was joking, but it was also like, ‘Do shut up,’ you know? But so surreal.”
Later, when it came time for Cera to shoot his portion, Cruise — seemingly kidding — called Cera out on his poor on-set conduct.
“Then I met him and he is like, ‘Talking during a fucking take,’” Cera remembered. “I knew he was playing around, so I was like, ‘Hey man, it wasn’t me, it was the writer.’ He was like, ‘I’m kidding, I’m kidding.’ And I was like, ‘I’m kidding, too.’”
Cruise is riding high on the success of the latest “Mission: Impossible” installment, and he recently insisted that he has no intentions of stopping his filmmaking career. He told THR in May, that he would not only be making movies into his eighties — as he has previously stated — but into his hundreds.
“I will never stop. I will never stop doing action, I will never stop doing drama, comedy films — I’m excited,” he said, adding that he was “very fortunate to be able to make the films that I make and I love it. I love just making movies.”