Cruise gets to play a bad guy

It had to happen. Tom Cruise has fallen out of Hollywood’s good graces and joined the ranks of the industry’s unsavoury characters.

He’s gone grey and grizzled. That blinding, boyish grin, his trademark the last two decades, now is reserved for moments of morbidly twisted humour.

Cruise has transformed from hitmaker to hitman in Collateral. It’s his first turn as an all-around bad guy, a contract killer who hijacks a taxi and forces the driver (Jamie Foxx) to ferry him from hit to hit on a one-night spree across Los Angeles.

It’s a major sea change when an era’s biggest leading man turns to the dark side after playing the action hero, the dashing romancer and the crusader for justice.

But the 42-year-old Cruise shrugs it off as just another make-believe soul that grabbed him.

“I really dug the story and dug the character,” Cruise said in Los Angeles. “I look for characters that I feel are going to be challenging. This is definitely right out there. A very, very complex character, playing this anti-social personality.”

Though he has earned three Academy Award nominations, Cruise has yet to rise to the level of peers such as Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington and Sean Penn as serious actors.

Collateral is a reminder that Cruise has more depth and willingness to go to dark places than his heroic turns would imply. But, as Cruise points out, it’s not like everyone he’s played before is a candidate for sainthood.

“If you look at it, I really play a lot of different kinds of characters,” Cruise said, and he chooses them for their creative appeal, not to fit the mould of his public image.

In Collateral, Cruise does make it work, bolstered by a tremendous foil in Foxx’s frantic cabbie, plus nice support from Jada Pinkett Smith as a prosecutor and Mark Ruffalo as a cop on his trail.

Cruise’s killer Vincent, with salt-and-pepper hair and scruffy beard, stalks the night with absolute bravado and amorality. He’s a perversely likeable villain.

Collateral director Michael Mann said: “I hadn’t seen Tom do anything like this character. So it presented itself as a great opportunity to have Tom play it, and it’s such a complex character in his incarnation of him.”

No stranger to gunplay in movies, Cruise had to learn a whole new style of handling firearms, training with live rounds on a police firing range for the first time. Mann had him repeat the art of assembling a gun and snapping off rounds until the weapons became another appendage of his body and the action became second nature, Cruise said.

Cruise is also thinking ahead to his personal future after his three-year relationship with Penelope Cruz, his co-star in Vanilla Sky, ended early this year.

“I’m looking,” Cruise said with a hearty laugh. “Nothing official, nothing official. ... I really am the kind of guy who’s going to get married again. But if I meet a girl, I’m not going to marry her next week. But I really do love relationships, but nothing, nothing official.”