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It looks like Tom Cruise has learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Well, okay, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning wasn’t a bomb, but it did end(?) the franchise on a down note. Now he’s taking the end of that franchise to go in a completely different direction, joining Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu for the satire Digger. The first trailer for the long-awaited movie has just dropped, featuring Cruise as blustery Southern-fried oil baron Digger Rockwell, a character that both resonates with his past performances and is totally new.
At a Digger event with Cruise on the Warner Bros. lot attended by Den of Geek correspondent Tara Bennett, the actor discussed the creation of Digger Rockwell. “If you start to feel the musicality of the character, it has a rhythm, and it’s not a rhythm like anything else,” he muses. “So the behavior of a character, the movement of a character, these are things that as we’re looking at the makeup side, as you’re developing, you got to go, is this our tone? Is it drama? Is it comedy? Is it too much? You’re dialing it in.”
Those questions about the movie’s tone are only intensified by Digger‘s first trailer. But we might find some answers by looking back at an earlier satire that also laughed at a crisis, Stanley Kubrick‘s satirical classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
In the trailer for Digger, we see how the titular character’s operation has unleashed an environmental disaster, one that merits the attention of world leaders, including the President of the United States (John Goodman). With the help of his friends and advisors, played by familiar faces such as Sandra Hüller and Riz Ahmed, Digger seeks to either fix the problem he created or control the public perception of the issue. Also, he must care for his beloved cat, who appears in the form of a charmingly ragged puppet.
Such a mixture of tones cannot help but recall Dr. Strangelove, the 1964 hit adaptation of the novel Red Alert by Peter George. Doctor Strangelove is a farce about a Cold War flub that pushes the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. In the face of such devastation, the famously cold Kubrick amps up the wacky comedy. Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott play military hawks General Jack D. Ripper and General Buck Turgidson, while Peter Sellers portrays three different characters: the officious RAF officer Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, the milquetoast President Merkin Muffley, and the titular Dr. Strangelove, a mad scientist and former Nazi.
For his part, Cruise has made his own memorable characters, a point he reflected upon at the Digger event, where he noted the similarities and differences between Digger Rockwell and other icons he’s portrayed.
“Like anything, there’s not one rhythm or comedy-fits-all, as we know. I mean, if you look at the difference between a Risky Business to a Jerry McGuire to a Les Grossman [of Tropic Thunder], Edge of Tomorrow, it has its own musicality. It has its own vision,” Cruise explains.
Kubrick made Strangelove at the height of the Cold War, when the possibility of nuclear annihilation was real. Yet, the Looney Tunes sense of humor was only heightened by those tensions, making the comedy sharper and allowing the audience to laugh at such absurdly high stakes.
Digger seems poised to do the same with our current situation. Although the trailer features shots of fighter jets and talk of a nuclear arms race, pointing to threats that have not actually receded since 1964, it focuses more on the devastating effect our energy systems have on the environment. Moreover, Digger reminds us that our economic system allows oligarchs to operate unilaterally, despite their reckless behavior and utter lack of expertise. We see the real-life cost of such structures every day on the news.
For Cruise, those high stakes are part of the excitement. He reveals, “There’s nothing better than to physically and metaphorically stand on the edge of a cliff and go, ‘Let’s do this. And I trust you and whatever we’re going to do, I know this is going to be a hell of an experience and let’s come together and let’s do it. Let’s all do it.’ I have never had something that could challenge me in this way and neither has Alejandro when we went in, ever. And when you see this film, it’s totally original.”
As anyone who has seen his movies Birdman or The Revenant knows, Iñárritu has no problem being original. What is surprising is the level of playfulness that the filmmaker puts into Digger. He seems to shoot every scene at an extreme angle, on sets with gaudy colors, with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki going as dramatic as possible and actors devouring every bit of scenery.
“The director sets the frame and the lenses and the lighting. It’s really my favorite thing,” explains Cruise. “Alejandro, he shows me, ‘I want you to look like this;’ And it wasn’t like he said, ‘This is the kind of character.’ So, I’m thinking, ‘This guy’s got fucking balls,’ and I’m like, ‘I can’t wait. Let’s go.’”
Clearly, Cruise is more than happy to oblige Iñárritu’s plans for a bigger movie. Gone is the open-heartedness that made Ethan Hunt such a compelling hero. In its place is a jauntiness that allows Doctor Strangelove to be such an enduring classic. Will Cruise and Iñárritu do the same with Digger? Or is that mission just too impossible?
Digger debuts in theaters on October 2, 2026.
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