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Add being yelled at by Tom Cruise in character as Les Grossman to the list of uniquely awkward Hollywood experiences that could likely only happen to Michael Cera (or perhaps Seth Rogen’s character in The Studio).
During a recent interview, Michael Cera — who was most recently seen starring in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme — recalled doing a bit with Tom Cruise for the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, which featured Cruise as his iconic Tropic Thunder character Les Grossman.
According to Cera, he felt the wrath of both Cruise and Grossman after he got caught talking during a rehearsal take.
“Tom runs 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 f—— take?’” Cera explained on The Louis Theroux Podcast.
“He was joking, but it was also like, ‘Do shut up,’ you know? But so surreal. Then I met him and he is like, ‘Talking during a f—— take.’ 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.’”
It’s certainly an interesting time for Cera to reveal that Les Grossman anecdote, as Cruise and his creative partner/Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie have recently teased that they’ve been mulling ideas on how to bring the character back.
“The conversations we’ve had about Les Grossman are so f—— funny. [Cruise and I are] talking about it, we’re having very serious conversations about it, and how best to do it. It ultimately comes down to what that character is,” the Mission: Impossible director said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
“We don’t even think about the structure, we play with scenes,” he continued. “Just to be sitting at a breakfast table, not talking about the movie we’re making for a minute, is such decompression. And just riffing with Tom playing Les Grossman at the table, it was one of the real joys of making this movie. It was all the stuff we were doing, planning the future while slugging out the present.”
Cruise was, of course, most recently seen starring in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which has grossed over $546 million at the global box office at the time of this writing.
The legendary actor’s next film is set to be a drama with The Revenant director Alejandro Inarritu, which releases in October 2026. He’s also developing a variety of projects with McQuarrie, a deep-sea movie with Doug Liman (and potentially Ana de Armas), Top Gun 3, and even potentially a sequel to his NASCAR movie Days of Thunder.