For forty years, Tom Cruise has sold us one thing: a man who will not stop running. In Digger (2026), Alejandro G. Iñárritu casts him as an oil tycoon in prosthetics, only for the trailer to remind us of every Tom Cruise who came before. What happens when the ultimate movie star tries to disappear into a role?
Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom take Digger as a starting point to ask whether a movie star can ever truly play against type, or whether the persona is always visible beneath the performance. From Henry Fonda turning killer in Once Upon a Time in the West to Adam Sandler unravelling in Punch-Drunk Love, they explore why some of the most revealing performances happen when actors push against the image we already have of them. And what happens when Jesse Plemons walks into Digger and threatens to steal the show?
A follow-up to our earlier episode asking whether Tom Cruise could save cinema. The first half is spoiler-free. The alarm sounds at 18:01.
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A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.
With the latest installment of the Mission Impossible franchise in cinemas now, we pose the question if Tom Cruise, the enigmatic star of classics like Top Gun (1986), Magnolia (1999), Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and so many others, is singlehandedly trying to save a dying breed of visceral (action) cinema.
Is Cruise the last of the genuine movie stars? How do his on and offscreen antics relate to his persona? Does he fit into a long-standing tradition of mavericks like Buster Keaton and other risk-it-all icons of the silver screen? And is he, as he recently claims, really doing it 'for us', the audience?
In this episode, we dive deep into his illustrious body of work as well as his infamous image to see what really lies behind the mask of the Cruise.