TOP GUN Producer Jerry Bruckheimer Shares How He Convinced Tom Cruise to Play Maverick
Believe it or not, Tom Cruise initially wasn’t interested in playing Maverick in director Tony Scott’s Top Gun. He was very hesitant, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer had to convince the actor to join the film. In a recent interview with Variety, he shared what he did to do that.
Cruise was always their first choice for the role of Maverick, but it wasn’t easy to get him because. He was a rising star at the time and the actor had just finished shooting Ridley Scott’s fantasy film Legend when Top Gun was offered to him.
So, what is it that sold Cruise on signing up for the film? Bruckheimer offered him his first taste of flying in a jet. The producer said:
“It wasn’t easy. We wanted Tom after we saw Risky Business and he kind of hemmed and hawed. So we arranged for him to fly with the Blue Angels at the Naval Air Facility in El Centro, California. He drove up there on his motorcycle and he had just finished a movie with Ridley Scott, Legend, and his hair was long and in a ponytail. And they took one look at him and thought, we’re going to give this hippie a ride. They took him up on an F-14 and flipped him and did all kinds of stunts to turn him around and make sure he never got back in a cockpit. But it was just the opposite. He landed and he walked over to a phone booth and called me up and said, ‘Jerry. I’m making the movie. I love it.’ He became an amazing aviator himself. He can fly just about any plane they can make.”
It’s funny that that’s what it took to get Cruise involved. When asked about the Navy’s involvement in the movie, Bruckheimer said:
“We wanted to make it real. We had to put the actors in real planes with real aviators. We needed them to hang with them and see what it was like. Initially, the admiral of the base where we shot wasn’t a fan of this. He was worried something would go wrong and that would be a black mark on his career.
“So Tom and I flew to D.C. and met with the secretary of the Navy, who at the time was John Lehman. He understood what Hollywood could do for the Navy and he gave us his home number and said, ‘if there’s anything or anyone that gets in your way, you just give me a call.’ From that moment on the floodgates opened. But you still had to deal with the navy lawyers about the weight change if you put a camera on a wing or on the cockpit. It was a negotiation process the whole way through. On the new movie, the sequel we just shot, it was completely different because after ‘Top Gun’ came out, the enlistment in the navy went up 500%. They understood that this is a great recruiting tool, so they were even more helpful and they embraced the filmmaking process with us.”
Top Gun went on to become a huge hit and is one of those classic films from the ‘80s. This year marks its 35th anniversary, and the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, is coming out this year and I can’t wait to see it!