Over the years, Tom Cruise has become a name many have dreamed of sharing the screen with. Not just on the screen, the actor is also known to have slight control over things on the movie set as well. However, not every behind-the-camera incident follows Cruise warning a crew member for being careless. One such incident includes the time when Cruise helped his former Oblivion co-star leave the movie without causing any trouble.
The 2013 film Oblivion starred the action star alongside Morgan Freeman and Olga Kurylenko. However, Kurylenko’s role was initially offered to Jessica Chastain, who decided to step back after learning about the 2012 action thriller Zero Dark Thirty.
Jessica Chastain Was Set to Star Alongside Tom Cruise
Joseph Kosinski’s 2013 film Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise and Olga Kurylenko, follows a security repairman, Jack Harper, on a devastated Earth after an alien war. However, he starts questioning his reality after he finds a woman, Julia Rusakova Harper, from a downed spacecraft.
While Kurylenko joined Cruise as Julia on the screen in the movie, the role was initially offered to the Oscar-winning actress Jessica Chastain. She had even signed a contract to star alongside Cruise in the film. However, she became hesitant about Oblivion after reading Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty script.
During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the It star shared that when she got the call for the 2012 action thriller, she had already signed the contract for another movie. However, Chastain was so intrigued by the script and knew that she had to do that movie no matter what happened.
And she was also aware of how complicated it would have been to leave the contract. It was the moment the Mission Impossible star stepped in to help the 46-year-old actress quit the project without any troubles.
Tom Cruise Helped Jessica Chastain to Leave Oblivion
During the same interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jessica Chastain shared how Tom Cruise helped her to get out of her contract for Oblivion. She shared that someone from her agency reached out to the action star and explained the whole thing to him.
“Someone contacted [Cruise] from my agency and said, ‘Listen, she wants to work with you, And she would love to, but there is this other film, and it’s so important.”
The Help actress explained that Cruise understood the whole thing and told them that Chatain was allowed to walk out of the film without any contractual obligations. She expressed her gratitude toward the Top Gun star, saying that if it wasn’t for Cruise, “no studio would ever do that.”
She also said that she was able to do that movie with his support. Zero Dark Thirty went on to be a commercial and critical hit and even landed five nominations at the 85th Academy Awards, including Best Actress and Best Picture. It won the Oscar for Best Sound Editing as well.
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Source: The Hollywood Reporter
