Tom Cruise recently said that he can be very intense on set, but his “Digger” co-star, Australia’s Sophie Wilde, doesn’t agree.
In an interview earlier this month, the Hollywood star said: “I expect a lot and I’m upfront about it. It’s like: ‘The rumours are true. And do you want this?’ I’m like, ‘Trust me, the rumours are true. I’ll be here before you. What experience do you want?’”
But speaking to Rolling Stone AU/NZ, Sydney-born Wilde, who has a lot of screen time with Cruise in the new Alejandro González Iñárritu film, thinks that is an unfair assessment.
“He’s the greatest scene partner in the world,” she said. “I think his intensity comes from his passion for the work, but I never felt an intensity being his co-star at all. If anything, I found him to be overwhelmingly supportive. We’d do a take, and he’d just start cheering afterwards. And I think as a young actor, that means the world, when your co-star is your biggest champion.
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“I think he’s being too hard on himself when he says that. I didn’t get that at all from him.”
Wilde, who scored an AACTA Award from local horror hit, “Talk to Me,” stars alongside Cruise, as well as a stacked cast that includes plenty of Oscar winners and or nominees, including John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons.
The 28-year-old actor said she made sure to take it all in.
“I think there’s this one memory that altered my brain chemistry,” she said. “I’d done a scene with Tom, he’d done a take, and I didn’t feel like I’d done a really good job. And I was like, ‘Oh, sorry, Tom, I don’t think that was a great take.’ And he just turned to me, and he goes, ‘Sophie, there’s no such thing as bad takes. We’re just exploring, and we’re playing.’
“And Alejandro overheard, and he came over, and he was like, ‘Yeah, we’re just working it out.’
“I think it’s really easy to get trapped in the idea of getting things right, or being good. And I think that’s antithetical to performance, and what performance is actually all about, which is exploring and playing and having fun. And I feel like this film is very fun.”
Digger is in Australian cinemas from today.