Tom Cruise Once Considered Playing a Squirrel—Yes, Really—and Here’s How Close It Got
Tom Cruise Almost Voiced a Squirrel in a Short Film & It Was Surprisingly Close to Happening (Photo Credit – Instagram)

Tom Cruise once thought a talk show couch was the perfect launchpad for showing the world he had more energy than caffeine and adrenaline combined. Well, since then he has gone into cruise control, quite literally, sticking to what he knows best like sprinting, leaping off cliffs, clinging to planes and occasionally flying them. If the role does not require him to defy gravity, he usually does not answer the call.

Why Tom Cruise Sticks to Action Movies and His Upcoming Project

In the last decade and a half, Cruise has rarely stepped outside his action-movie comfort zone, unless you count that time he did Rock of Ages and dressed like a leather-wrapped karaoke nightmare. But even his attempts at comedy tend to end with him hanging off something very high while looking very serious.

You see, the pattern’s simple. Cruise plus danger plus Christopher McQuarrie equals box office gold and while this formula has not exactly hurt his career as the man still draws crowds like free pizza, it has made him a very predictable kind of unpredictable.

That is why Alejandro González Iñárritu’s upcoming mystery project is raising eyebrows. For once, Cruise might be swapping explosions for emotions and actual acting might take the wheel instead of a motorcycle doing backflips. If the stars align and no one throws him off a building mid-scene, it could be his best shot at an Oscar since Magnolia.

Tom Cruise Almost Voiced a Squirrel in a Stop-Motion Short Film

Now, here is where things get squirrelly, literally. Cruise almost ended up voicing a stop-motion squirrel in a short film about a boy racing to a mountain biking event while things went hilariously sideways. Not exactly Mission: Acorn Possible but it was a real offer from a group of Welsh teenagers who decided to shoot their shot.

As it turns out, they nearly scored. If not for a scheduling hiccup, we might have had Tom Cruise as a small furry woodland creature navigating teenage bike drama. It was not a hoax, a dare, or a fever dream. The organisation behind it, TAPE, backed it up, confirming that Cruise actually responded to the request, took it seriously and only backed out because something else popped up in his calendar, probably something with parachutes.

“The Tom Cruise thing was a genuine idea. And we very nearly got him as well,” Steve Swindown of TAPE told the BBC. “It was a scheduling change that stopped it from happening in the end. But if we hadn’t asked, we wouldn’t be here. The confidence in the room with the young people when their question to Tom Cruise was heard and taken seriously, and they got a response, the next day, changed people’s self-belief.”

Imagine that timeline, one where the most bankable man in Hollywood swaps high-octane stunt work for squeaking out squirrel lines. That version of Tom Cruise might be weirder than the couch-jumping one and possibly more entertaining.

For more such stories, check out Hollywood News

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