Credit: Far Out / Bernard Gotfryd / Library of Congress / Sony Pictures Releasing
Tue 4 August 2026 18:15, UK
Tom Cruise has been a big deal for a long time, and he’s been such a big deal for such a long time that Robert Duvall turned down one of modern cinema’s most iconic movies to work with him.
Even though he’d been in the business for longer than the A-lister had been alive, that’s the kind of respect that Cruise has commanded from his peers, no matter how old they are. Look at Morgan Freeman; he revealed himself to be a massive fanboy when they collaborated on Oblivion.
Still, missing out on the chance to play a major role in a critical, commercial, and awards season smash that seized the zeitgeist and became an indelible part of the cultural lexicon in favour of making an entertaining-if-formulaic genre film was certainly a choice, not that Duvall was lacking in legendary credits.
By that point, he’s already starred in the first two Godfather flicks, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bullitt, True Grit, M*A*S*H, The Conversation, Network, Apocalypse Now, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to name a few, so it’s not as if the Academy Award winner was short on a seminal title or two in his back catalogue.
However, none of those movies won the ‘Big Five’ at the Oscars, and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs did, becoming the third and so far final feature to do so. It gave the world Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, and had things turned out differently, the part could have been Duvall’s.
In reality, it was an either/or situation, with the star revealing that, if he wasn’t interested in playing the cannibalistic criminal mastermind, the door was always open for him to play Jack Crawford instead, a part ultimately filled by Scott Glenn. However, Cruise has a power of his own, and it was too strong to resist.
“They offered me one part, and then the other, and I said, ‘I’d rather work with Tom Cruise than wait around for these people to make up their minds,’” he explained. At one stage, he had a meeting to discuss Lecter, and then another shortly afterwards about Crawford, and he didn’t appreciate it.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“That was a strange move for a director to do,” Duvall noted. “So I’m just as glad I did the Cruise thing.” The Cruise thing was Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder, which gave him yet another opportunity to ply his trade as a wizened sage and mentor figure, with the film proving to be a hit among cinemagoers.
That said, it was no Silence of the Lambs, and with Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro, and Sean Connery all turning their nose up at playing Lecter, too, one of the industry’s most iconic villains of all time became a nightmare to cast until Hopkins made it his own.
