Tom Cruise’s eccentric oil tycoon character Digger Rockwell is described as “the most powerful man in the world” – but is he powerful enough to win the star his first acting Oscar?

The buzz about Digger has built since Warner Bros released the first trailer, which gave away little about the plot of the satirical black comedy but showed Cruise looking almost unrecognisable, with a pot belly, thinning white hair and Southern accent.

It reached fever pitch this week when the Hollywood heavyweight joined co-stars and the film’s director Alejandro G Inarritu at the star-studded London premiere, where guests included the Prince and Princess of Wales.

“This character, as you can see, he’s just totally outrageous,” Cruise, who donned facial prosthetics and a padded body suit for his role, told Reuters at the event.

“He’s the kind of character that says things that some people think, some people can’t imagine thinking. I’ve ‌never read a character like it; I’ve never read a film like this.”

While Cruise has played everything from a cocktail-slinging barman to a vampire, war veteran, lawyer, sports agent and fighter pilot throughout a 46-year Hollywood career, the role of Digger marks a departure from the action-packed flicks where he has built a reputation for death-defying stunts.

The dramatic turn has prompted speculation that it could be the first film to earn the 64-year-old an Academy Award.

Warner Bros is said to be going all out to promote Digger, which opens in Australia on October 1, with Cruise appearing on podcasts and TV talk shows to spruik the film, as well as doing a rare sit-down feature interview with GQ magazine.

An early “retrospective” teaser for the movie – which sees Digger embark on a mission to save the world after the failure of one of his rigs triggers an ecological catastrophe – featured clips from Cruise’s previous films, including Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Risky Business, Rain Man, Jerry Maguire and A Few Good Men.

“My man is coming for the Oscar,” one fan commented on the YouTube trailer.

“He’s still the world’s greatest movie star,” wrote another.

They may not be alone in that view, but although Cruise received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement last year, an acting gong has continued to elude him.

He has been nominated for a best-actor Oscar twice, for Vietnam movie Born on the Fourth of July (1990) and sports comedy-drama Jerry Maguire (1997), losing, respectively, to Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot) and Australian Geoffrey Rush (Shine).

His last acting nomination was back in 2000, for a best-supporting-actor award for Magnolia. However, 2023’s Top Gun: Maverick, on which he was a producer, scored a nod for best picture.

Some awards watchers made early predictions that Digger, which is helmed by multiple Oscar winner Inarritu (The Revenant, Birdman), will get him over the line, but the wildly divergent first reactions from critics are now causing doubts.

“Depending on which screening you walked out of, ‘Digger’ is either the bravest swing of Cruise’s late career or a miscalculation,” wrote Variety’s Clayton Davis.

“Cruise’s most significant Oscar contender in years is a movie that asks audiences to take a position, and that’s a much riskier way to campaign for a statue.”

 

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For some critics, the over-the-top, audacious nature of Digger is too much. One described it as “a self-indulgent miscalculation from end to end”, while another noted it was “hard to do satire when the absurdity is so prominent in reality”.

Awards site Gold Derby reported on Wednesday that while Cruise was still in its top-five leaderboard of best-actor contenders, his odds had fallen since the reviews started coming out this week.

The Digger star dropped to fourth spot – behind John Malkovich (Wild Horse Nine), Andrew Scott (Elsinore) and Matt Damon (The Odyssey) – with the website giving him a 58 per cent change of securing an Oscar nomination.

Among critics with a more positive take on the film was IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, who called it “a brave and gorgeous art film that will not score with mainstream audiences but will play best for the Academy, especially crafts and actors”.

Cruise’s co-star Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) also gave a glowing endorsement of his performance in an interview at the London premiere, saying: “It feels like all the things that he has learned in 46 years of acting have come into this character.”

It’s worth noting that a number of Hollywood stars have won Oscars for roles that saw them undergo remarkable physical transformations, including Gary Oldman, for his turn as Winston Churchill in 2017’s The Darkest Hour, and Charlize Theron as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s Monster.

Cruise’s ex-wife, Aussie Nicole Kidman, famously wore a prosthetic nose for her Oscar-winning performance as writer Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002). Award presenter Denzel Washington even jokingly announced her name with the words: “By a nose”.