Tom Cruise was willing to disappear beneath prosthetics for Digger. He was less willing to spend six hours every morning getting into them.
The 64-year-old actor says the first complete makeup application for his transformation into Digger Rockwell took roughly six hours. With a 12-hour shooting day, time needed to remove the makeup afterward and sleep still to fit into a 24-hour schedule, Cruise quickly decided the routine was not sustainable, according to Page Six.
His solution was unusually literal. Cruise put the individual pieces of the transformation on a board, assigned someone to work a stopwatch and began timing each stage of the application. The makeup team then practiced the sequence repeatedly until a process that had consumed most of a morning could be completed in under an hour.
The finished transformation hardly looks abbreviated. Cruise appears with facial prosthetics, thinning gray hair and a much heavier frame as the eccentric Digger Rockwell in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new film. Once shooting began, however, the shortened application time gave way to another problem, performing for hours while trapped underneath all of it.
Cruise Turned the Makeup Chair Into a Timed Drill
Cruise explained the process during the Sept. 18 episode of New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce. The first full application took six hours. Cruise immediately began doing the math around a 24-hour day.
Cruise said he brought in a board and listed each individual piece that had to be applied. Someone stood nearby with a stopwatch while every step was timed separately. He then challenged the team to get the total below one hour.
The artists initially told him it was not possible, but Cruise proposed cutting the time down incrementally. Each component was timed, practiced and drilled repeatedly until the entire system became more efficient.
By the end, Cruise said, they had reached the target without the artists simply rushing through their work. The Hollywood Reporter reported that the process eventually dropped from six hours to less than one.
The Faster Routine Did Not Make the Prosthetics Comfortable
Cruise described wearing extra weight around his body along with facial prosthetics and cowboy boots. Even sitting became different because of the added material around his legs and thighs, while the additional weight put more pressure on his knees.
Heat became one of the biggest problems. Cruise said he was sweating underneath the prosthetics during the movie’s long takes and worried about the makeup breaking down while he performed.
The production developed a system around that problem. Cruise described calls of “Digger up” when he needed to perform and “Digger down” between takes, when cooling equipment could be brought in around him.
He preferred staying close to the set instead of retreating to his trailer, so the cooling setup allowed him to remain with Iñárritu, the cast and crew while preparing for the next take.
The physical demands became particularly obvious during one of the film’s most ambitious scenes. Cruise performs a roughly 10-minute monologue in a single take while wearing the complete Digger transformation.
Two Oscar-Winning Artists Built Digger’s Transformation
Oscar winner Alessandro Bertolazzi serves as Digger‘s makeup and hair designer. Bertolazzi previously won the Academy Award for his work on Suicide Squad. Oscar-winning prosthetic makeup designer Kazu Hiro handled the film’s prosthetic work. Hiro won Academy Awards for transforming Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and for his work on Bombshell.
The official Warner Bros. site describes Digger as an original Iñárritu film about the world’s most powerful man racing to prove he can save humanity before a disaster he unleashed destroys everything.
Cruise stars alongside Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons. Iñárritu directed from a screenplay he wrote with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman.
The movie was shot entirely in VistaVision with Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Warner Bros. will release Digger in theaters and IMAX across North America on Oct. 2, with the international rollout beginning Sept. 30.