Vice TV and The Nacelle Company’s Icons Unearthed series steps away from film and TV franchises for the first time with Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise. Instead of exploring well-known properties like Star Wars, The Simpsons, and Marvel, Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise charts the rise of one of the world’s biggest movie stars. Starting with Cruise’s origins in movies like Taps and The Outsider, the series aims to highlight a different aspect of Cruise’s life in each of its six episodes, which have titles like “The Stuntman”, “The Producer”, and “The Mentor”.
Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise marks the 10th season of the series, which was created by The Nacelle Company founder Brian Volk-Weiss. Volk-Weiss has directed every season of the series, from the first Star Wars-focused series to Icons Unearthed: Spider-Man. He also led the charge on The Nacelle Company’s other well-known series like The Toys That Made Us and The Movies That Made Us.
Screen Rant interviewed Volk-Weiss about finally getting to dive into Cruise’s life and work for his series (Volk-Weiss revealed his desire to cover Cruise during a 2022 interview with Screen Rant about Icons Unearthed: Star Wars). Volk-Weiss detailed the tricky task of choosing which of Cruise’s projects to focus on over the season’s 6 episodes and revealed the movie that inspired his interest in the subject. Plus, Volk-Weiss shared his account of meeting Cruise for the first time.
Brian Volk-Weiss Reveals The Impetus & Thought Process Behind Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise
“This Was The First Time We Covered A Human And Not A Franchise”
Screen Rant: When I interviewed you for Icons Unearthed: Star Wars [in 2022], you told me you would love to make an Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise one day. How long have you been working on this idea and trying to make it come together?
Brian Volk-Weiss: I would say, honestly, 90 seconds or less into Top Gun: Maverick. My favorite movie of the century is Mad Max: Fury Road. My second favorite movie of the century is Top Gun: Maverick, and I’m not even that big a fan of the original Top Gun, believe it or not. It’s funny you said it was apropos Icons Unearthed: Star Wars. I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but there are a lot of similarities between Top Gun: Maverick and Star Wars. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I always loved Tom Cruise—A Few Good Men is one of my favorite movies of all time—but after Top Gun: Maverick, he might be the first person to dethrone Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington as my favorite actor of all time.
Top Gun: Maverick is pretty recent. How’d you decide on where to pick up and stop with Tom Cruise’s career?
Brian Volk-Weiss: It’s really hard, and it’s a really tricky formula, because you need to balance a lot of competing interests. Essentially, we need to tell the story. While in 2024, you might not hear people talking about Risky Business every five seconds, you really can’t do a Tom Cruise documentary without talking about Risky Business. [That] also covers his life leading up to Risky Business. Consequently, you really can’t do a doc about Tom Cruise without talking about Top Gun. So, you really need these story points.
Then, this was the first time we covered a human and not a franchise, so there were different rules we had to follow. What we tried to do with Tom Cruise is break him down into sections of his life. There’s the guy who comes to Hollywood and ends up dominating—that’s section one. Section two is about how Tom Cruise decided he wanted to win Oscars, which he never did as an actor, so you can’t do that section without talking about Rain Man. Then, there’s Tom Cruise becomes Jackie Chan, so there’s that part of his career.
We broke the rule here, [but] I’m really into failure. I find failure a very interesting topic. Tom Cruise has had some interesting failures. Eyes Wide Shut is a failure on many levels. I think it’s a failure as a movie, and that’s subjective, but I think it’s undeniable that during the two years he spent making that movie—in possibly some of the most bizarre circumstance anybody has ever mada movie in—he lost out on a lot of other jobs.
What’s very interesting about Tom Cruise, that I hope we were able to capture, is that as talented as he is, he really is a businessperson. He was very smart about when he would go back to Mission: Impossible or [make] Top Gun: Maverick. He’s had this really interesting career where, other than Steven Spielberg, very few people have been able to balance commerce with entertainment [like that]. That’s what we tried to capture with this season, and that premise really affected how we picked the movies that we picked.
The Series Touches On Cruise’s Personal Life
“It Affected The Movies He Made”
Did you have to make a decision about how much to even attempt to talk about his personal life?
Brian Volk-Weiss: I don’t think you can do something like this without talking about his personal life, because the personal life affected his career. He and Spielberg didn’t talk for, I think, 20 years after the Oprah couch thing. Spielberg said War of the Worlds would’ve done another 50 million [dollars] had he not done that. His personal life with Scientology and his various marriages are a part of who he is. It’s a tiny part of our series, we don’t go crazy into it, but it affected the movies he made.
After War of the Worlds, he made these strange—strange for Tom Cruise—movies, and a lot of them are now retroactively perceived as classics. Oblivion was absolutely not a classic when it came out. It barely made a profit. He made weird [choices] not compared to other movies but compared to all his other work. Eyes Wide Shut is a good example. He’s made some choices that didn’t work before, but you understand why he took the swing. That’s what we tried to balance in the episodes we picked and in telling the story of the human that he is, and you really can’t do that without talking about Scientology and his various wives, because they affected the movies he made.
Cruise Is “Insanely Intense”, According To His Collaborators
But Also A Driving Force Behind The Scenes
You spoke with a lot of his collaborators. Did you feel like there was a prevailing opinion about him that was shared by everyone?
Brian Volk-Weiss: Everybody loves this guy. Everybody said the same thing. We interviewed people who worked with him when he was 21, and we interviewed people who worked with him when he was 58. They said the same thing: He’s insanely intense—and by the way, I’ve met him. I’ll tell you a great story—it can make you a little bit uncomfortable and on edge, but you get used to it and realize he will have a lot to do with why you’re working on something that will be important forever. I’m paraphrasing, [but that’s the idea].
And he really took care of people. This is obviously in the doc, but we interviewed Jay Mohr [for the] Jerry McGuire episode. Tom Cruise is doing a scene with Jay, it’s Jay’s scene, and Tom is just standing there so they could do the scene together. All Tom has to do is just stand there and do nothing, [but] while Jay is saying his lines, Tom Cruise, under the frame of the camera, is [making hand motions], telling him where to stand so he looks his best.
Everybody had stories like that. They were like, “Is it nice that the biggest celebrity on Earth is there at 4:30 in the morning and you feel like you also need to be there at 4:30? No, that’s stressful.” But he was prepared, he was organized, he did his research, and he wanted to do a lot of takes. I didn’t hear anything about him being an a**hole. A couple of people were like, “He did his Scientology thing on his own time, and we knew he was doing it, [but] he never was pushing it on anybody.” A couple of people went out of their way to tell us that.
And we got very frank stuff. We interviewed the first AD of Top Gun: Maverick—it was all Tom. Tom was there at every meeting. He was there at every rehearsal. He was the one who came up with the schedule for how many flights they could do a day. He was the guy liaising with the military. That was the other thing that came up frequently.
Imagine you’re a mid-level executive at the Navy, and you answer the phone and it’s like, “Hey, this is Tom Cruise. Nice to meet you. We’re trying to shoot on the leeward side of the base six months from now, and they’re saying that because of this other thing going on that day, we can’t shoot on the leeward side. Is it possible for us to come maybe two hours early and shoot what we need to shoot? We’ll be out of there by the time the parade practice is going.” This is Tom Cruise. This is literally Tom Cruise calling about minutiae that, if I’m being honest, if I were producing a movie, I don’t know if I would be making the call about.
Volk-Weiss Shares An Unforgettable Tom Cruise Interaction
It Involves Volk-Weiss, Dane Cook, And Dax Shepherd
You said you met him once?
Brian Volk-Weiss: Not to brag about my resume, but I did produce the classic Jessica Simpson film Employee of the Month. The last day of filming, we’re saying goodbye, [and] I’m with Dane Cook, who I used to manage. It’s me and Dane, and we’re driving to the airport together. We’re saying goodbye to Dax Shepherd, and Dax says something like, “So what are you guys up to?” Dane was like, “We’ve got to get back today because I’m doing the Tonight Show tomorrow.” Somehow it came up who the guests were, and it was like, “Tom Cruise is the other guest.”
Dax goes, “If you can get away with it, try not to shake his hand.” We’re like, “What?” Dax was always deadpan—I would bet you everything I owned [that] he was joking. He was like, “Yeah. When you shake his hand, the only way I can describe it is, it’s like he’s trying to tear it off of your shoulder.” We all thought he was full of s***. Another weird Dax Shepherd joke.
I remember this like it was 10 minutes ago. We walked into the green room, and the way the green room works is there’s a huge room for everybody, and then the dressing rooms are connected to it. Dane walks in—and you have to remember that Dane Cook is the biggest comedian in the world at this time—and Tom Cruise is standing right there. He sees Dane and is like, “Oh my God. Dane Cook. I’m obsessed. I have so many questions.” [Tom] runs up to him and—I seriously thought about turning around and walking out—it looked like he was trying to tear his arm off of his shoulder.
Then, [to me], he’s like, “Hi, I’m Tom,” and you’re literally sitting there going up and down while he is shaking your hand. It was the weirdest thing ever. If he wasn’t famous, I [still] would’ve been telling this story forever. It would have been my weird handshake guy story.
And true to his part, he asked Dane a billion questions. By the end of it, I was starting to say to myself, “I think Tom Cruise is thinking of trying standup comedy.” He was asking so many questions. “How do you do this? How do you do that? How do you know when to wrap up?” He had so many logistical questions. Dane kept saying, “Oh, that’s a good question, actually. I never thought about that,” and was walking him through it. Even if he wasn’t famous, I never would’ve forgotten the interaction.
About Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise is a lot of things – movie star, producer, stuntman, an unstoppable force who never gets tired. From his breakout role in Risky Business with his unforgettable slide and famous grin, to saving the movie business with Top Gun: Maverick, Tom has pushed himself and those around him to make the best movie possible. After rising to superstardom in the high-flying Top Gun, Tom focused on working with top directors. With his carefully chosen roles he tested himself as an actor, in search of an elusive Oscar. From there he moved on to producing his own successful franchise built on doing his own stunts. But after a few public false steps he nearly lost it all. His unshakable commitment to excellence and willingness to put his body on the line quickly lands him back on top, and a return to the skies would take him farther than ever before.