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The first trailer for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s hotly anticipated new film Digger has been released, giving audiences a first look at Tom Cruise’s most transformative and least recognisable role since Tropic Thunder.
Crusie plays Digger Rockwell, “the most powerful man in the world” who’s grey, balding, potbellied, and speaks with a thick southern accent. His company may have triggered a trillion-dollar ecological disaster and as per the film’s logline, he “embarks on a frantic mission to prove that he is humanity’s saviour before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything”.
He also spends a lot of time tending to a sickly cat.
From the look of the trailer and the satirical tone, there’s a Dr. Strangelove feel to Digger, which also includes John Goodman as the ailing US president who seems trigger-happy when it comes to launching missiles and who doses off at inopportune moments.
Where, oh where did they did find the inspiration?
Other supporting cast members include Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde and Sandra Hüller.
The film is co-written and directed by Iñárritu, who previously directed films like Babel, 21 Grams and the Oscar winning movies Birdman and The Revenant.
Digger is Iñárritu’s first English-language movie since The Revenant and will be one of the fall’s most talked-about films, as well as the start of an almighty Oscar campaign for Cruise.
The 64-year-old actor, who has been nominated four times for an Academy Award – as an actor for 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, 1996’s Jerry Maguire and 1999’s Magnolia, and as a producer for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick – has never won a competitive Oscar.
Last year, Cruise was awarded an Honorary Oscar – by none other than Iñárritu, who said at the time: “This may be his first Oscar, but from what I have seen and experienced, this will not be the last.”
We were told…
Considering the Academy loves a physically transformative performance and the use of distracting prosthetics (from Nicole Kidman’s fake nose in The Hours to Gary Oldman’s transformation as Churchill in Darkest Hour), we’d say there’s a fair chance that the Oscar voters will by won over.
Ahead of the trailer’s launch, Cruise spoke to press and fans at an event the Warner Bros launch in Los Angeles, saying that Digger was unlike any project he had worked on before.
“I have never had something that could challenge me in this way and neither had Alejandro when we went in, ever,” he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “When you see this film, it’s totally original.”
Digger is scheduled to open in theaters on 2 October 2026.
