Tom Cruise freaked out ‘Magnolia’ director after developing his own monologue

If Tom Cruise tells you, as his director, that he has a good instinct about the character you wrote for him, you let the man cook.

The iconic star revealed that his Magnolia director, Paul Thomas Anderson, did just that in the early stages of the 1999 film’s development.

“The whole monologue wasn’t there at the beginning. That wasn’t there — there was a couple sentences, and I remember I was worried,” Cruise recalled during a career retrospective discussion at the British Film Institute in London recently.

Cruise’s time on stage as the motivational speaker and seduction expert Frank T.J. Mackey sets the foundation for everything to come, so Cruise knew it had to be perfect.

“I said, ‘Look, just come over to my place, let’s do the wardrobe fitting.’ And I remember he wanted me in IZOD shirts and khakis. I was like, ‘I don’t think that’s this guy. Let me show you my instincts on this,’” he said.

So Anderson went, only to discover that Cruise had already “created that whole character.”

“I said, ‘Just sit down right here in my screening room.’ I lit it, and I had the whole music, and I basically wrote the opening monologue, my version,” Cruise continued. “I was like, ‘Let me just show you what I’m gonna do,’ and he was literally right here sitting, and I had a stage, and I had lit, and I had the big speakers, and as I was doing it, I could just see his face, he’s like, ‘What the f—?!’”

Cruise shrugged, “‘I dunno, this is Mackey to me!’”

The Top Gun star prevailed. His magnetic, menacingly charismatic Mackey is far from the kind of guy to be content leaving the house in a quarter zip and khakis. He emerges to perform his infamous “respect the c—” speech to a room full of rowdy men clad in a shimmering, brown velvet button-up and flashy leather vest, with grease-slicked hair — the embodiment of entitled late-ʼ90s machismo.

“What’s nice is, you show them, and then it evolves from there. Then every day, we were writing those monologues, and I just had a list of things…Look, I do research on things…but I just create characters like that. You just go, ‘I can do it,’ and you work on it,’” Cruise said.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

The gambit clearly worked, as Cruise was the only member of the film’s stacked ensemble cast to receive a nod at the 2000 Academy Awards. Anderson was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” was nominated for Best Original Song.

Magnolia walked away empty-handed, but lives on as some of the best work of Cruise and Anderson’s respective careers. The film topped Entertainment Weekly‘s 2022 list of Tom Cruise-starring projects ranked by grade, and came in just behind Born on the Fourth of July as containing Cruise’s all-time best screen performance.

You can watch the rest of Cruise’s interview with BFI below.

With additional reporting by Wesley Stenzel.