I’m Tom Cruise’s Insurance Agent and I’m Going to Have a Heart Attack
When I got into the entertainment insurance industry, I thought it would be a great way to have a relatively low-stress job that would provide some interesting conversation around the dinner party table. Then Tom Cruise became my client, and I swear to everything holy in this world, this man is going to cause me to have a catastrophic cardiac event.
For those of you unfamiliar with how big-budget movies fronted by international superstars are made, it’s important to remember that hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake at any given moment. In order to safeguard any potential losses, big studios will call in insurance agents like me to provide at least a semblance of financial security in the event of something unforeseen occurring while making a flashy flick.
Most of the time, it’s no big deal! You want to make a live-action Paddington Bear movie in London with Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw? No problem, Hugh is a delightful old chap, and the most significant risk Ben presents is perhaps some mild truancy on filming days when Antiques Roadshow happens to be in town.
Of course, that all changes once Tom Cruise gets involved. I met Tom twenty-two years ago at an entertainment insurance conference in Las Vegas when he catapulted himself into the main theater at the Aria via a human cannon that had been placed across the street at the Bellaggio. He commented at the time that I seemed like the kind of person who was “Willing to travel to the edge of the earth and offer my body as a sacrifice upon the altar of storytelling.” I can assure you, I would absolutely never do that.
Initially, I was excited about working with someone as influential and passionate as Tom. He was just coming off the successes of Minority Report and The Last Samurai, and I thought my role as insurance provider would be an easy one.
That all changed the day Tom burst into my office holding a revolver to his head and asked me, “Are you willing to die for entertainment? Will you commit your body and soul to the Gods of the Blockbuster? Are you ready to travel to the stars so that you may see the very atoms that make up the consciousness of man?”
While Tom didn’t pull the trigger that day, I wish he’d turned his gun on me instead because since then, I’ve been living in an anxiety-fueled hellscape. It started with wanting to climb the Burj Khalifa for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Tom initially wanted to shoot the scene nude and without safety wires (“There are no secrets between me and my audience”). I’m sure you all remember when he attached himself to the outside of an Airbus A400M for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. What you probably don’t know is that I had to have a seven-hour FaceTime call with him prior to shooting, convincing him that trying to diffuse a live bomb later in the scene was not going to “serve the film’s creative vision.”
Just the other day, Tom came rushing into my office, talking about how he thinks Top Gun 4 should happen in space and that he wants to personally build the rocket that flies the crew there and back. He met with Taylor Sheridan last week and texted me, “Do you think we can hunt live humans (at scale) for a WWII picture Sheridan is writing?” I don’t even want to tell you about what he wanted to do after his sitdown with Chris Nolan (it may or may not have involved cloning himself 100 times to then fight a real-life Silverback Gorilla).
Listen, Tom is a visionary, and I don’t think there’s anyone in this world who loves the art of filmmaking more than he does. I love the guy, I really do. I just wish he’d start to wind down some of his more insane ideas. He’s not getting any younger, and I think he’s realized that his window for the theatrically insane is closing soon. I’d love nothing more for him to settle into the poignant historical dramas or narrative-driven thought pieces that allow him to flex his acting chops (and film exclusively on static sound stages with no stunt team).
While I pine for the day when that relaxing work becomes my norm, I’ve got to hop on the helicopter outside that’s waiting to whisk me away to a yurt at Basecamp 1 on Mount Everest where Tom wants to talk through the feasibility of filming “a solo ascent of Everest with no oxygen and then me skiing down the face of the mountain before launching a backpack mounted hang glider to personally return the Dali Lama back to Tibet.” May the Gods of the Blockbuster have mercy on my soul.