Tom Cruise has never read one of his own scripts: 'I don't want my ideas to invade it'

Dubai: Tom Cruise has one rule when a director brings him a film: don't send the script, read it to me.

The actor explained his process on Jason and Travis Kelce's New Heights podcast, in an episode released on 18 September, while promoting his new film Digger. The point, he said, is to hear the story the way its makers hear it, before his own instincts get in the way.

'I have them read it to me'

Cruise, 64, said he approaches a new project as a listener rather than a reader.

"What I do with directors and writers is, I don't read the scripts. I have them read it to me. I have them read it to me because I don't want my ideas to invade it yet. I want to understand: What is their communication? They've been working on it, and they have things that are just there," he said.

The set-up is deliberately simple. "So they come to me, and I just sit there, and I'm like, I want you to read it to me."

Listening as an audience, not an actor

What he's testing in those sessions is not the dialogue or his own part. It's whether the film works.

"I'm the audience. I am a movie; I'm a popcorn guy. Like, I'm a meat-and-potatoes, popcorn guy. Is it moving me, or am I invested? Am I not invested? Where am I engaged? Where am I not engaged? That's just who I am," he said.

For a star known for obsessive preparation, it's a notably passive first step, and one that puts him in the seat of the person buying the ticket.

Then come the questions

Once the story is in his head, the interrogation starts. Cruise said he wants to know how a director plans to shoot the thing, down to the lighting, the lenses, the wardrobe and the choreography.

"We get to a place where I start to understand, and then I'm like, 'I know how to contribute to that motion.' Now, it sparks ideas, and I kind of have certain ideas that I have and certain things that I'd like to play with. And then, I don't necessarily talk about it. I just do it."

He added: "I'm not going to sit here and say I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. I hear all the notes. I know the lenses. I know the choreography. I know tonally what they're going for."

For Digger, that reading process reportedly stretched across several days with Iñárritu.

Six hours in the make-up chair, cut to one

The same conversation produced another glimpse of how Cruise works.

For Digger, he is buried under heavy prosthetics, and he told the Kelce brothers he worked with the make-up team to cut his time in the chair from six hours to under an hour.

He also addressed his reputation for intensity on set directly, saying he expects a lot and is upfront about it, and that the rumours about him are true.

What Digger is

Digger marks Cruise's first film since Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning in 2025, and his first original film outside a franchise in over a decade.

Directed and co-written by Alejandro G Iñárritu, who won back-to-back best director Oscars for Birdman and The Revenant, it is a satirical black comedy. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate described as the most powerful man in the world, who unleashes a disaster and then sets out to prove he is humanity's saviour before it destroys everything.

The cast includes Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, Michael Stuhlbarg, John Goodman as the US president, Emma D'Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Burn Gorman and Robert John Burke.