Tom Cruise cut six-hour Digger make-up down to under an hour
Six hours in the make-up chair was too long for Tom Cruise.
Cruise said his first transformation for Digger took six hours, speaking on a Friday episode of Travis and Jason Kelce's New Heights podcast, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. He wanted it faster. So he turned the process into a timed exercise.
He brought a chalkboard into the make-up room and had someone time each prosthetic piece with a stopwatch. Piece by piece, the team broke down where the hours were going. The target was clear: get the full application under one hour.
They did it. Cruise said the hair and make-up team succeeded in bringing the routine down to under an hour.
The change matters because the look is a full rebuild. In Digger, Cruise plays eccentric oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, with grey hair, wrinkles and a larger frame than Cruise himself. Rockwell is ordered by the United States president, played by John Goodman, to fix an environmental disaster after causing one.
The film is directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and opens in theatres on Oct. 2. Iñárritu, the Academy Award-winning film-maker behind Birdman and The Revenant, developed Digger as an original film, according to Warner Bros.. Cruise and Iñárritu promoted it together on stage to theatre owners earlier this year, where it was described as a dark comedy, according to Reuters.
It is Cruise's first character role needing heavy prosthetics since his turn as studio executive Les Grossman in the 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder.
What makes this stand out for fans is the method. Cruise is known for doing his own stunts. Here he applied the same stopwatch logic to the make-up chair.
