20 Years Ago, Tom Cruise Played a Villain. It’s Still His Best Role.

Tom Cruise was known for always playing a good guy, until Michael Mann's 'Collateral' turned him into a terrifying hitman villain in 2004.

TO MANY, TOM Cruise has become inseparable from his role not only in the Mission: Impossiblefranchise, but in action movies at large. He’s made playing the hero a core part of his identity, exclusively portraying the noble, moral-centered character for most of the last two decades, all while, of course, pursuing the most dangerous stunts possible. However, 20 years ago this week, Cruise stepped out of his comfort zone to play a different kind of character, moving away from his death-defying savior bonafides to instead embody something different: the bloodthirsty killer.

Michael Mann’s 2004 thriller Collateralcenters on Vincent (Cruise), a hitman who convinces a cab driver named Max (Jamie Foxx) to drive him around as he carries out his murderous to-do list for the night. Collateral screenwriter Stuart Beattie first thought of the idea during a cab ride of his own from the airport as a teenager. “I had one of those weird twisted thoughts,” he explains. “I could be a homicidal maniac sitting back here, and here we are talking like we’re best friends.”

Cruise is known for the intensity that he brings to not only his roles as action heroes like Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt, but to his more dramatic roles as well. His behind-the-scenes persona is well-documented, and you know someone needs to be locked into be the daredevil stuntman that he’s been immortalized as. Collateral,in turn, allowed Cruise to turn all of that on it’s head. For once, he wasn’t the hero addicted to saving lives and beating bad guys; he was the killer, a villain ruthlessly pursuing the one goal he set out to do. And for every bit as noble as he is in those other movies, he was terrifying in Collateral.There were a lot of great villains in the 2000s, but Vincent stands ahead of just about all of them.

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But getting the recipe just right for Collateral—and getting Cruise into the mix—was more complicated than meets the eye.

Beattie used his initial cab driver concept as inspiration to write a script when he was in college, and eventually pitched it to friends he knew in Hollywood. Collateral(originally called The Last Domino) was first sold as a TV movie to HBO. The project, however, wound up in “turnaround,” meaning HBO decided they weren’t going to make it anymore; this allowed Beattie to shop it around, and, as a huge Steven Spielberg fan, he pushed for a meeting with the iconic filmmaker’s studio, DreamWorks. He saw the options for his movie as landing there, or landing nowhere. Thankfully, the stars aligned in his favor.

During this time, Collateral had a continuously changing slate of directors and actors attached. Russell Crowe was originally signed on to play Vincent, and in tune, convinced Michael Mann—already an iconic director at the time for his work on movies like Heatand Thief—to direct after the two built a good relationship working together on 1999’s The Insider. Crowe eventually had to leave the production, as Beattie describes, because the production schedule wouldn’t have ended in time for the birth of his child. At one point, Adam Sandler was even signed on to play Max; in another world, things could have been quite different in Collateralland.

Mann and the casting team eventually ended up with Cruise and Foxx, the latter of which the director had already worked with on Ali. (Foxx joined following Sandler’s departure, as the comedic actor had a schedule overlap.) Beattie pointed out that Collateral’s casting basically considered any and every male actor who was popular in the early aughts for the lead roles.

Cruise, meanwhile, was at the height of his game. He had long since become a household name, having made his reputation doing films like Top Gun and winning a pair of Golden Globes for Risky Businessand Magnolia. His only other villain role came when he played Lestat in Interview with the Vampire. At the time that Cruise’s casting was announced, many doubted his ability, including the book’s author Anne Rice. However, after watching his devilish performance, Rice changed her mind.

“I like to believe Tom's Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered,” the late author once said. “Others may play the role some day, but no one will ever forget Tom's version of it."

Despite all of his successes, Cruise has never been one for complacency. He wanted to continue looking “for a challenge and something that's different,” he said during a Los Angeles press conference in July 2004.

Collateral was Cruise’s next step, accepting the role after meeting with Mann. “I’d grown up on Tom Cruise movies,” Beattie explains. “He’s always the good guy. So, to see him in something as the bad guy was just fascinating. It made me think, ‘This is genius casting. Man, I think this is going to be something really special.’”

Two decades later, Vincent’s dark and devious nature, coupled with Cruise’s cemented star power, has allowed Collateralto find new audiences at home and on streaming, and remain part of the conversation among movie lovers everywhere.

TikTok is filled with adoring fan edits of the character, set to bubbly K-pop tracks like Girls Generation’s “Mr. Taxi” or moodier picks with Lana Del Rey’s “Ultraviolence.” Younger users in recent years love taking scenes of their favorite characters and reassembling them to a song, usually as a tribute to their love for someone’s performance or the fact that they find them attractive.

On other social media platforms, popular accounts like X user @MichaelMannFacts help keep a spotlight on the director’s entire filmography. As a whole, Mann has remained a popular director online, with his movies continuing to generate buzz among the film-loving community. Writer Brandon Streussnig, who swears by Mann’s filmography, sees the way Collateral allows Cruise to perfectly use his action-hero skillset to a completely opposite goal. “It takes what makes his heroes so watchable, their unwillingness to stop until the goal is completed, and flips it on its head to sinister effect,” he says.

“It compares so interestingly to Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, because both are such sad performances,” Streussnig continues. “Underneath the flamboyance of the former and the coldness of Vincent, there’s a loneliness that provides an insight into who they really are beyond anything on the page.”

Paul Klein, an editor at Filmhounds and a pre-2005 Cruise lover, calls the turn as Vincent his “last truly great performance.”

“There’s a calm, reasonable element to him,” Klein says. “Vincent is like any businessman you might find. He just happens to be a hitman. He stands out because he’s likable in a strange way.”

Despite the cool Vincent puts on his surface, as the film continues, Max, and the viewers, come to realize that he's an unpredictable and utterly unrelenting villain. The film pulls a sly trick, scattering in a few warm moments—like when Vincent picks up flowers for Max's ailing mother in the hospital—designed to make the viewers (and Max) wonder if he might have a bit of humanity after all. But Vincent is always willing to kill without thinking, which closes any ambiguity about the nature of his character.

This is best put on display during a tense scene at a jazz club that keeps viewers on edge for several minutes. In the scene, a musician Daniel’s (Barry Shabaka Henley) life ultimately hinges on stakes that Vincent set up, stakes that make no sense to us, but make perfect sense to him; his life is staked on getting a trivia question about Miles Davis correct. This film-defining moment creates will-he-won’t-he tension for several minutes; from the second he enters the club, you know something bad is coming. You just don’t know when. There’s a dread that comes naturally from the combination of Cruise’s intensity and Mann’s patient direction, and it pays off in one of the film's most intense moments.

Cruise’s preparation to play Vincent included "assassination exercises," which Mann revealed during a 2019 Q&A. This training found the actor choosing several office targets, learning their daily schedules, and then serving them with “You’re dead” on a Post-It note.

“It was kind of an anti-social character,” Cruise described in 2004. “We discussed a lot of different aspects of where I live, and how I became the way I became as Vincent. So it will emotionally inform the movie and start to look at where does this fracture happen. Vincent is impinging on Max. I'm driving that car from the back seat, and then bring my attention to the things I have to do to get my job done.”

Mann and Cruise’s dedication to developing a backstory for the character allowed the latter to become properly immersed and terrifyingly convincing. “I take characters that I feel are a personal challenge to me,” Cruise added. “Vincent is a character I haven't played before. I like acting because creatively you do your work, but it is really a team sport… It's with Michael, with Jamie, we had these scenes together. With Jada [Pinkett-Smith], it's all of us together.”

There are very few lightning-in-a-bottle movies, but Collateralis one of them. Beattie’s thoughtful script, Mann’s pioneering digital direction, and the top-notch cast of actors were pieces of a puzzle that all fell neatly into place. It’s no wonder Foxx nabbed a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars and Cruise’s performance is still widely-lauded today. Beyond the awards cycle, it has continued to serve as a testament to the pre-smartphone era and how a well-constructed nefarious role provided a new layer to Cruise’s career.

Although Cruise has unquestionably been etched into film history as a hero, his work in Collateral proved that he’s got just as much talent in tapping into his darker side. Sure, he’s an action star, but he’s also a true movie star, which includes the ability to continually push boundaries by unveiling another chameleon-like aspect of yourself, even if that means becoming a character that ultimately lives in some viewer's nightmares.

It's been two decades since Collateral,and we haven't seen a performance like it from Cruise since. But as the now 62-year-old superstar has been hinting toward a new stage of his career—working with auteur directors and more—the possibility remains that he could, at some point, play another villain who chills our spines and haunts our dreams. If he wants to take another wild, unpredictable night's ride, we can be sure that there will be an audience right there along with him.

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