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Tom Cruise is having serious discussions about reviving his iconic Tropic Thunder character Les Grossman, according to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie.
Christopher McQuarrie, who broke out by winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for The Usual Suspects in 1995, has been Tom Cruise’s go-to creative collaborator for over a decade now, as he’s either written, produced, or directed: Jack Reacher, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the last four Mission Impossible movies, Valkyrie, Edge of Tomorrow, The Mummy, and Top Gun: Maverick.
As such, if there is anyone in Hollywood who knows what Tom Cruise is cooking up, it’s “McQ”, and he says that the pair had “serious discussions” about potentially bringing back Cruise’s Les Grossman character while filming Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
Les Grossman is the cartoonish Hollywood agent that Cruise played, and stole scenes with, in Ben Stiller’s beloved 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder.
“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.”
Tropic Thunder has stood the test of time to become one of the iconic comedies of its era, as it made a mockery of the Hollywood machine right at the dawn of the comic book movie era, which only exasperated the very aspects of the business that Tropic Thunder clowned on.
In addition to Cruise, the absolutely stacked cast of Tropic Thunder also starred Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr. (in an equally iconic role of Australian Black-face wearing actor Kirk Lazarus), Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, and Matthew McConaughey.