Tom Cruise loves running. Like, more than Brad Pitt loves eating and more than Sean Bean loves dying. So when it came time to get some advice for The Running Man, Glen Powell knew he had to get Cruise on the phone. As it turns out, Cruise also digs prosthetics, so of course he had some tips on makeup work for when Powell was suiting up for Chad Powers.
It’s expected that Powell will be darting a lot in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, and it’s probably safe to say almost no other actor has put more miles into the movies than Cruise. But he is also hyper-aware that he’s going to be on massive screens, so making it look good is important. As Powell told Empire, “It’s not like Tom was FaceTiming me on the treadmill, or anything like that. But there are basic instructions that he would give, just to make sure it looks powerful and propulsive, and that you’re actually fast.” For what it’s worth, it’s been reported that Cruise has hit 17 mph!
Ahead of the release of Hulu’s Chad Powers, Chad Powell told The Hollywood Reporter that that production also necessitated some classic Tom Cruise wisdom, as the megastar somehow added flesh to his Tropic Thunder character, Les Grossman, who is covered in makeup. “Tom was extremely helpful in helping to not go down the wrong path in terms of the prosthetics. He was, as is with a lot in my life, he was my first call…where I was like, OK, you know, very early on we were breaking the show, I was like, ‘OK, how do you actually get away with this?’…I definitely always use him as a resource. He’s kind of played every character in the book. So on the prosthetics, he really kind of pointed us in the right direction to make sure he was really gonna work. Because if you don’t buy the fact that the world believes that this is a real human, the whole experiment falls apart. So yeah, we thank TC for that.”
It’s pretty awesome that Tom Cruise has taken Glen Powell under his wing, championing and supporting him any chance he gets. But Powell knows his role, too, and he insists that there are no plans for him to replace his mentor in the Top Gun series. As for the status of that, Christopher McQuarrie said back in June that he has just the right story for a third movie.
