Tom Cruise hides his handsome features under some truly unbelievable makeup in Tropic Thunder. "He said, 'I want really big hands playing this guy.' I said, 'Really? Big hands? He had these hands made. Then I said it’d be really cool if he was bald too, and so then we did this makeup test and he started dancing in the makeup test," recalled Stiller. "He said, 'It’d be interesting if this guys danced.' He just had these ideas and I was like, 'This is funny and weird.' I was loving it. I love watching him do this. He started dancing in the makeup test and then we went back and wrote up this idea that he danced in the movie and I liked it a lot and thought he could do it in the end credits too. I asked him if he’d be up for dancing in the end credits and he said, 'Yeah, let’s do it.'"
As for Stiller's character, the writer/director/producer/actor describes him as an action movie star with a fading career who needs a hit. "He’s not the most intelligent guy, but he’s not stupid," Said Stiller. "What’s going on with him is that he’s one of these guys who’s been sort of protected from reality. He’s been living in this cocoon and he’s the action guy who’s on the down swing. He’s tried to do this movie that was going to get him some credibility and it just backfires on him—the Simple Jack movie. He really needs this movie to work. When the director says he’s going to be out in the jungle filming and they’re going to be hidden cameras, he really needs to believe this is happening for his career. That’s really his motivation and he really believes this movie is happening. He needs this movie to work. I think there’s a sort of desperation for him. I think there’s also a little bit of a metaphor for being caught up in your own movie and your life all the time and taking yourself too seriously."
Stiller says he's always enjoyed humor that pokes fun at the behind the scenes happenings in Hollywood and at the egos of actors. "Obviously it can be a little insular sometimes because if you’re in the business you can find that stuff funny," offered Stiller. "For me, I always knew this stuff was funny. To me I just wanted to figure out a way to hopefully justify making it on the scale we were making it and it could reach out to a broad audience. I love that kind of humor and I think actors like to make fun of themselves and the business because it’s so ridiculous. There’s so many people who take themselves so seriously, myself included. We all have moments where you read a quote or an interview or you’ll see yourself saying something in a interview where you’re on TV 10 years ago and you’re like, 'What was I thinking?' Because it’s just a trial and error process and I think some people get caught up in it. Sometimes you sound silly, sometimes you take yourself too seriously. It’s hard to navigate through this world—the bulls--t of it all."
Tropic Thunder earned an R rating for pervasive language including sexual references, violent content and drug material, and Stiller says they never tried for a PG-13 rating. This film was meant to be rated R from the get-go. "We knew we were satirizing these war movies and the opening scene was like, 'Get your motherf--king a-- in this f--king chopper now,' and I knew I didn’t want to lose those jokes right off the bat because of PG-13. It felt like we’d be short-changing the satire of the war movies. Those movies have all that language in them. So we were strapped with that R rating right from the beginning because if you have two f--ks in a movie that’s it."
