Being John Malkovich was nearly Being Tom Cruise

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Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) is an endlessly fascinating film, seeing a puppeteer (John Cusack) transported inside the mind of the eponymous actor.

But if you had to make a list of Hollywood actors whose innermost thoughts it would be interesting to get a glimpse of, strangely affable Scientologist Tom Cruise would surely be near the top.

Malkovich initially had reservations about doing the movie, telling Rolling Stone: "I never thought anybody would be goofy enough to actually film [the script], but I hadn't met Spike.

“And when they asked me to do it, I was slightly worried. Not at all about the tone or content, but the feeling of, if you do a film where your name is not above the title but in the title, then you may have some serious narcissistic tendencies which would require looking at."

He instead suggested they use another household name.

"Why not Being Tom Cruise?" Malkovich asked Kaufman, but the screenwriter insisted on using John.

Ultimately the film worked great with Malkovich, but what a tantalising prospect Being Tom Cruise would have been - and this was around the time Cruise was still making good, artful films like Magnolia (also released in 1999) so he might just have agreed to take part.

Well-received though BJM was, Malkovich has doubts about its legacy. He explained to Rolling Stone, coining the vibrant sentence “Your life becomes a blowjob” in the process:

“[Kaufman] said: either the movie’s a bomb and it’s got … my name in the title, so I’m f*cked that way; or it does well and I’m just forever associated with this character.

“But [the legacy] for me, not so much. I mean, in modern culture… [Long pause] It’s kind of like if you get a bl*wjob from the wrong person, then your life becomes a bl*wjob. So Being John Malkovich always has to be referred to in some allegedly clever or ironic or snarky way.”

Earlier in the month, Charlie Kaufman explained the depressing reason he hasn’t made more films.