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Tom Cruise may be best known for performing wild stunts in the Mission: Impossible movies, but he’s just as capable in serious, dramatic roles that require no stunts. Cruise has been nominated for Oscars for performances in movies like Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia, but I think his best dramatic work came in the legal drama A Few Good Men.
Cruise didn’t get an Oscar nomination for that film, but one actor who did was Jack Nicholson. The courtroom battle between the two acting giants is one of the most well-known moments in film history. Speaking with BFI’s Sight & Sound (via Deadline), Cruise remembered the scene, and most importantly, remembered working with Jack Nicholson. Cruise praised the veteran, saying:
He was finding his character. And you could see every movement slowed. He became more and more centred as we were going through it. You could tell from the way he’s sitting. He’s actually holding his hat quite tautly to generate power. He understands that lens.
The “You can’t handle the truth” line is the one from the scene that we all remember, but Nicholson does a great deal more in the scene where Cruise’s Lt. Kaffee grills him on the stand. Cruise compares Nicholson’s ability to handle a great monologue to the way a singer handles lyrics. He continued:
He’s a wordsmith, Nicholson. He’s like a crooner that knows how to carve up a monologue and knows how to carve up a scene. He can turn a phrase in such a unique way. And it’s not by chance. He knows what he’s doing. He has command over his body and his voice and he knows the camera.
There’s certainly no argument against that Jack Nicholson is one of the all-time greats of Hollywood. While Cruise has three Oscar nominations, Nicholson received a dozen Oscar nominations over his career, including three wins. Cruise compared Jack Nicholson to another acting great: Marlon Brando. He said…
Great actors make it look easy. They make it look effortless. When you look at Brando at the beginning of The Godfather. He knows his light. He knows the lens. When they handed him that cat. That cat was only in one take and that was the scene. That was it! Coppola handed him that cat and he did the scene.
Of course, Nicholson didn’t perform in the scene all by himself. Tom Cruise was there, and both actors were on their game to create a moment as memorable as the one in A Few Good Men. Cruise called it “lightning in a bottle” as it took a combination of work and maybe a bit of luck, to make that moment happen. He said:
It’s not just by chance. You work towards lightning in a bottle. Doing that scene was very much like that. It was music. Jack was there to play. I was there to play. When I’m acting, that’s my home. Acting is every moment new. Every take new. Even though you’ve got all these notes and you want to hit these certain beats. But it’s in a new unit of time and you have to let it fly. And when you’re working with such a great actor like that, you’re just bouncing back and forth and just really discovering it together. You see it, it’s on screen, it’s just there.
If you don’t remember just how great this scene is, check it out.
Ok, now I need to go rewatch all of A Few Good Men. It’s probably my favorite Tom Cruise performance ever, and my favorite Nicholson performance too.