Mission Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie has revealed that Tom Cruise’s fan favourite Tropic Thunder character Les Grossman might be getting his own spinoff.
In a podcast appearance, McQuarrie said that he and Cruise have had “serious conversations” about a standalone film for the character.
“The conversations we’ve had about Les Grossman are so f***ing 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,” he said on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast.
The 2008 satirical action comedy followed a group of hapless actors making a Vietnam War film, and starred Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr, Jay Baruchel, and Steve Coogan, among others.
Cruise made a cameo as the balding, Diet Coke-guzzling, ill-tempered studio executive Les Grossman, known for his volatile temper and giant hands.
McQuarrie went on to share that talking about a potential Les Grossman film helped Cruise and the director as a distraction while filming the latest instalment of the Mission Impossible series.
“We don’t even think about the structure, we play with scenes. 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 director Stiller has said in a previous interview that the idea to play Grossman came directly from Cruise himself.
“Tom Cruise had the idea to play Les Grossman in the movie,” Stiller said in an Esquire interview. “That part did not exist. He said, ‘Well, there’s no studio executive and that would be really fun to be that guy.’ And he had this whole idea of what the guy should look like. It was his idea to dance. And I remember when we did a makeup test, someone handed him a Diet Coke and then he just started moving.”
McQuarrie and Cruise are enjoying strong reviews for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, which premiered at Cannes.
The film marks the possible conclusion of a franchise that began in 1996, with Cruise not only starring but also making his debut as a producer.
In a four-star review of the film for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey said that she “absolutely adored it,” writing: “This (potentially final) entry in the long-running franchise is inherently absurd, but who cares?”
“The Final Reckoning, final or not, presents us with a fascinating contradiction: Ethan Hunt is both a pure singular and a state of mind. He’s cinema as the madman dreamer’s paradise,” she added.
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