Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise being two of the biggest movie stars ever is not breaking news. Neither is how excellent Cruise is at doing his own stunts. He not only does them, he demands to do so. Of course, that only further makes his films movie magic.
When we see flicks such as the Mission Impossible franchise, part of the fun is going into the film wondering what Cruise is going to do for stunts, and why he puts himself through that. His being placed in high-stress situations only causes us to have our own fears of what he is doing heightened.
But film fanatics might have missed out on an opportunity to see Cruise and Pitt team up for a movie about auto racing a decade ago because of Tom Cruise's approach to making movies.
In a recent interview with The National, Pitt said he and Cruise were originally attached to be the leads in Ford v Ferrari. Due partly to budget constraints, the film was eventually cast with Matt Damon and Christian Bale and was released in 2019. It is a wonderful work, though one is right to wonder what a Cruise-Pitt collaboration might have looked like.
Budget issues were not the only reason the film was not made with Cruise and Pitt, however. According to Pitt, Cruise lost interest in the project because he wouldn't be driving enough. The actor wanted to drive fast, just as he did in 1990's Days of Thunder, but the story did not allow for that.
Pitt said, "Tom and I, for a while there, were on ‘Ford v Ferrari’ with Joe (to direct). This was about 10 years before the guys who actually made it – and made it a great movie. What it came down to is that we both wanted to drive, and (Cruise) wanted to play Shelby, and I wanted to play Ken Miles. And when Tom realized that Carroll Shelby would not be driving much in the movie, it didn’t come through."
Of course, Cruise has made a good living out of making films, and he consistently has produced excellent content. One might wonder, though, how many movies he didn't make because there weren't enough stunts for him to do.
Playing a character is playing make-believe, and an actor of Cruise's ability and power can choose which roles he wants to do and which he doesn't, but the ones he doesn't would likely have been gems too.
Sonny Hayes, an aging Formula One driver, is the potential positive part. The potentially positive part is that Pitt was giving the interview partly as press work for his recently released hit, F1, in which the actor plays Sonny Hayes, an aging Formula One driver who is returning to the sport. Pitt mentioned a possible sequel, and maybe Tom Cruise would have a role in that.
Of course, that is all speculation currently. If the F1 sequel does come together with the acting icons, Brad Pitt simply needs to make sure there is loads of driving for Tom Cruise to do.
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