Tom Cruise's Big Year: 1983

At 21, Cruise even managed to outdo the early success his predecessors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson found a decade or so prior.

RYAN UYTDEWILLIGEN

FEB 3, 2023

Tom Cruise just had a great year. His long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick earned the most money out of any movie in 2022. December saw him casually jump out of a plane in a viral video to thank his audience for coming to the theatre while touting the grandiosity of the two-parter Mission: Impossible currently underway. Paul Newman gleefully ends their 1986 Scorsese pool drama The Color of Money by announcing “I’m back.” Tom Cruise likely entered 2023 by saying the exact same thing.

The actor has gone through ups and downs, appearing in award-winning megahits and scornful flops in a more than five-decade span. But entering this year on such a high note bares a great significance beyond freedom from the constraints of couch jumping, Scientology spouting, and a mixed resume for nearly seventeen years. It’s been officially 40 since 1983; the year of Tom Cruise.

The charming and charismatic superstar has more than proved his appeal by talentedly shaping his movie career ever since. Best Picture winner Rain Man, beloved legal drama A Few Good Men, and Stanley Kubrick’s risqué swan song Eyes Wide Shut shade in his colorful resume. He’s proved his smarts by delaying Maverick for nearly three years until the pandemic had quieted and people could return to the big screen C the place our television-ignoring icon has ensured his works have continually been displayed.

In 1983, Cruise was just a fresh-faced 21-year-old with two credits under his belt. He pops up for a few lines and laughs in the sappy Brooke Shields romance Endless Love and aggressively supports an impressive ensemble of actors-turned-cadets in Taps, which includes Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. Those were both released in 1981. 1982 would see no film with Cruise’s name on it.

1983, however, still stands as Cruise’s busiest year. He has had multiple moments where he’s starred in two movies in the same year C most recently and forgettable 2017 with The Mummy and American Made. 1983 saw that number doubled; four distinct and important films came out and cemented Tom Cruise as an up-and-comer to take notice of. An undeniable force that was surely going to take Hollywood by storm.

Eager for any chance to get in front of the camera as a leading man, Cruise landed the part of Woody, a virginity-obsessed teen in the Curtis Hanson comedy Losin’ It. A Canadian-produced sex story made to capitalize on Porky’s success; the film follows four boys in 1965, eager to party across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. The twist is that they’re joined by a divorcee looking for freedom C played by Shelley Long one year before Cheers came along. The title, of course, refers to the overarching goal of what each boy wishes to do with their virginity.

Low-budget and non-union, Losin’ It was primarily filmed in Calexico, California, in October and November of 1981 where townspeople were called up to be extras and help the fledgling production along. Just about every actor that came up through the early-1980s has a teen sex comedy on their resume. After the explosion of Animal House in 1978, cheap stories with gross-out gags, racial stereotypes, and breasts on display were “in vogue” and required “affable” young men to go on ill-fated hunts for booze, drugs, and pleasure.

Cruise said he took the job because of friend and co-star Jackie Earle Haley of Bad News Bears fame. Shockingly young and purposefully dorky, the Cruise we’ve come to love does not register here. It was his next role, the smallest of ’83, that showcased just what Cruise could do. Ushered into a legendary cattle call that also included Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Mickey Rourke to name a very few, Cruise auditioned for nearly every part but earned the role of Steve Randall in Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s coming of age novel, The Outsiders.

Following a group of Oklahoma greasers struggling through school, poverty, and a rivalry with the Socs, Cruise’s role is minimal, while dialogue is almost nil. A car-loving pal to the main crew, his presence is certainly felt. Your eye is drawn to his high energy as he makes the most of his character, leaping around, grinning, cackling, and howling throughout. A memorable moment comes when he grasps a sickening amount of chocolate cake and stuffs his face C a move Cruise said he later regretted once realizing just how many takes he’d have to do. Little did he know (or perhaps this was the masterplan all along), this would be the final time Cruise would play a supporting role until 1999’s Magnolia.

Shooting in Tulsa from March to May 1982, the young leads bonded like a pack of eager wolves ready to conquer Hollywood. Pranks were constant. Coppola grew tired of their antics but encouraged his actors to sink their teeth into their roles. An eager Cruise hoping to prove himself took that instruction a little more literally than his co-stars. To add to the homely roughness of his character, Cruise volunteered to have the cap from a front tooth removed that had been chipped from playing hockey. During the infamous rumble scene, Cruise was hit in the jaw and needed further dental work to fix his mouth.

During a break from shooting, Cruise was invited to another legendary battleground where he auditioned against rival actors like Tom Hanks and John Cusack for a coveted role C that of Joel Goodsen in Risky Business. We all know how that turned out, and Cruise began developing the character for Paul Brickman’s dark comedy on the set of The Outsiders. In fact, Cruise had roughly one month between shoots and was instructed to tone himself and then pack on twenty pounds to give him a more youthful “baby fat” look.

For the second time in less than a year, Cruise would play a teen hellbent on losing his virginity. Things would, of course, work out very differently for both the actor and the character in Risky Business. Often misunderstood and lumped into the same frivolous category as Losin’ It, the film is a dark look at capitalism, lit up by neon and overshadowed by an improvised dance featuring Bob Segar, Ray-Bans, and underpants.

Risky Business tells the story of a teen left home alone. He listens to loud music, raids the liquor cabinet, and makes use of the freedom allotted to him. Then things take a turn when he enlists the services of a call girl. Stolen glass eggs and wrecked porches lead Cruise’s character to run a brothel out of his parent’s home.

Bold and certainly riskier than most recall (staircase sex, anyone?), the young star makes the most out of his first starring role, combining innocent eyes with a mischievous grin. Cruise is far more grounded here. More of a real, fleshed-out person. A relatable teen. Yet, his undeniable spark is ignited here, setting him apart from what could have been a more run-of-the-mill lead.

Paid $75,000 for the role (compare that to $100 million for Maverick), the director was unsure about Cruise’s casting, having only seen him as an unhinged gunman in Taps. Co-star Curtis Armstrong noted Cruise had a far too casual demeanour about him and was frequently late to set C yet, it was difficult not to like him. That charm led him to go from low-budget supporting parts to being offered leading roles in a span of one year.

From there, Cruise went into his second starring role, that of Stefen Djordjevic in All the Right Moves, which began production at the very start of 1983. With Craig T. Nelson as his coach and Lea Thompson as his love interest, Cruise plays a working-class football player in a Pennsylvania steel town looking to make an exit with a scholarship. A more serious, perhaps subdued character C the physicality of an athlete demanded more of Cruise’s body than his acting chops, though he utilizes the role to showcase that his humor and grandiosity can be turned on and off at a moment’s notice.

Plunked into a local high school where filming occurred, students recognized Cruise from his singular significant role to date, Taps. Girls gushed. It was clear with more movies C he’d command a legion of fans. He was already flexing a muscle with producers when it came to demands. When Thompson panicked over her required nude scenes, it was Cruise who convinced the team to drop one and offer to go nude alongside her during their love scene. While not nearly the same amount of skin is shown, what this move did was showcase Cruise’s confidence in all kinds of ways, and at such a young age and early stage of his career.

With four films completed, there wasn’t a moment after March of that year where a screen wasn’t playing a Tom Cruise picture. The Outsiders hit screens that month, raking in $33 million and launching the fascination of “The Brat Pack.” While more or less an honorary member, Cruise was lumped in throughout much of the righties with a group of young actors like Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, and Andrew McCarthy, who appeared in primarily John Hughes films. Cruise would go on to prove himself as anything but a flash-in-the-pan teen heartthrob, but the status certainly helped craft an identity early on.

Losin’ It had tested in a South Carolina theatre in August of ’82 but wasn’t officially released until April. Barely making over a million bucks, the film became a forgotten flop that simply served as a piece of proof that Cruise was once a struggling actor, hungry for work.

Risky Business was clearly the breakout role Cruise needed; the film grossed double what The Outsiders did when it hit theatres that August. Both audiences and critics pointed to Cruise’s naturalistic, high-energy performance as the central reason why the film resonated. Much was made of the living room dance sequence, which people celebrated as a star-making moment.

By the time All the Right Movies was released in October, Cruise-mania had begun. Critics dismissed the football drama as a formulaic and over-the-top teen drama that was nothing more than the male equivalent of Flashdance. Reviews didn’t matter. The film was a success for one reason only; audiences wanted to see more Tom Cruise.

The actor finished out the legendary year with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture C Comedy or Musical thanks to his work in Risky Business. Unusually young and relatively unknown for such a high-profile award, it was the perfect pat on the pack as he entered Hollywood stardom. He would lose to Michael Caine but gain so much more from that exposure.

From there, Cruise was eager to prove his diversity and signed onto the Ridley Scott fantasy epic Legend. For it, he moved to England in March of 1984. Clad in an elaborate ponytail and donning a bizarre unplaceable accent, Cruise found himself in a miserable state. Whisked away from the movie epicentre of the world, spending hours in the make-up chair, and enduring setbacks like set-destroying fires for more than ten months, the actor worried about where his career was heading.

Cruise-hungry fans devoured his 1983 output and anxiously awaited his next projects. Delays made 1984 an empty year for the actor while the final arrival of Legend in 1985 proved to be a major critical and commercial disappointment. Perhaps anyone else would have worried 1983 was a fluke. Maybe another movie star would have accepted they had already hit his high point. Not Cruise. What it did was introduce Cruise in a variety of different ways. He could be a supporting player that stole scenes. He could be silly. He could be sexy. He could carry a film with energy and charm. The clout and fandom he earned from 1983 carried him for the next few years and excused flops and missteps. He believed in himself and remained confident of what he had already done.

Never again would we see such a diverse year for the actor in terms of range and reception. Few can even compare with a debut year like that; contemporaries like Sean Penn, River Phoenix, and Johnny Depp made a splash C but not nearly on the same finger-snap level. At 21, Cruise even managed to outdo the early success his predecessors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson found a decade or so prior. Rarely did anything after this year rival his work in terms of sex appeal and pure vulnerability. It was the year he had to prove himself. The year he developed his acting chops and staked a claim on the Hollywood map. Without those four films, each leading to one another - simply put - we would have never of had Tom Cruise.

Without 1983 culminating in the production of Legend, Cruise would never have met Ridley’s brother, Tony Scott, who would be instrumental in convincing him to get behind the wheel of a fighter jet. But that is another story in the Cruise saga, which clearly, is far from climaxing yet.

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