Tom Cruise's Best Non-Action Movies, Definitively Ranked

Consider the impressively varied catalogue of performances Cruise gave us before rededicating himself to the art of big-budget spectacle.Everett Collection; GQThe most impressive aspect of Tom Cruise’s mid-career pivot to high-flying action-movie juggernaut is that, beforehand, he rarely depended so much on his physical prowess. Yes, Cruise did plenty of action or action-adjacent movies before his post-Y2K reset, but he was also the rare star capable of opening almost any type of movie by the sheer force of his presence. It may have flummoxed audiences across America, but Eyes Wide Shut was number one at the box office—in the middle of the summer, no less! It’s worth remembering, then, the impressively varied catalogue of performances he gave us in dramas, comedies, and thrillers before rededicating himself to the art of big-budget spectacle. It’s not that we don’t love Cruise in Action Mode; just consider all the other high-wires he used to walk.His new movie Digger brings back this more actorly version of Cruise while still maintaining some of his daredevil energy. It’s not a performance for the faint of heart. Indeed, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s climate-crisis satire has polarized critics, so much so that in marketing the movie Warner Bros. has opted to emphasize reviews both good and bad. Some executives and awards season pundits may have imagined it as an Oscar play, but what Cruise does in the film is more genuinely risky and weird than your average Academy bait.Now that audiences are being reminded of his expansive range, we’ve decided to rank Cruise’s 10-best non-action performances. But first, in keeping with his rigorous work ethic, a note on methodology. Not only are the entire Mission: Impossible and Top Gun sagas eliminated, but so too are other Cruise performances for including too much running (Minority Report), shooting (Collateral), hilariously fatal pummeling (Edge of Tomorrow), or resisting alien invasions (War of the Worlds). No big vehicles, either! In these movies, Cruise himself is the spectacle. On those terms, which are his most rewarding missions?10. Digger (2026)Warner Bros / Everett CollectionIn theaters barely a week, Digger’s darkly comic take on climate disaster has been called many things: overly didactic, in much the same way as Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up; a mournful warning about the ruined world in our future; and just another floaty-camera indulgence from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a filmmaker who raised eyebrows when it was revealed that he would steward Cruise’s first non-action performance in years.The interesting thing about Cruise’s work as Digger Rockwell, an elderly billionaire responsible for wrecking the world, is that it substantiates each take. As with his extended cameo in the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder, Cruise seems to find the heavy prosthetics freeing, lending him a kind of desiccated-cowboy physicality that’s a lot of fun to watch in tandem with his brash and overbearing down-home accent. Unlike Tropic Thunder, the gimmick somehow doesn’t wear thin as it goes along. If anything, Cruise’s performance opens up, even as the obstinate Digger digs in his heels. That willingness to serve the movie’s slippery material may ultimately cost him some awards buzz, but it’s genuinely unpredictable and multi-planed work from Cruise, even as the film around him crumbles.9. Interview with the Vampire (1994)INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, Kirsten Dunst, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, 1994, (c) Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett CollectionWarner Bros / Everett CollectionIt was both a casting coup and a pre-internet PR crisis: Cruise, many people protested, was all wrong for the role of Anne Rice’s vampire creation Lestat. Among the doubters? Rice herself, who was won over after seeing the film and even placed a glowing advertisement in the trades publicly recanting her skepticism. The movie itself is surprisingly lifeless, given that it’s directed by the talented Neil Jordan. Cruise, in the unusual position of supporting cast, is spectacularly chilly and even bitchy as the unrepentant creature of the night. It’s telling, I think, that despite all the movie’s costumes, visual effects, and lushly appointed production design, the moment that I mostly closely associate with Interview with the Vampire is Cruise’s final scene, which he spends lamenting what a wet blanket Brad Pitt’s character is: a convincing character moment, a movie-capping punchline, and a winking reassertion of his own star power all at once.8. Risky Business (1983)Warner Bros / Everett CollectionIn retrospect, it sounds so Reagan-era teen comedy that it could be parody: an enterprising teenager gets mixed up with a prostitute and briefly turns his suburban home into a brothel to make some quick cash. But in contrast with the more immediately lovable Ferris Bueller’s Day Off from a few years later, Cruise is a convincing conduit for teenage schemes that go awry and ultimately, unexpectedly right, and his precocious charm feels more believable than Matthew Broderick’s. You should want to punch Joel Goodson in the face; instead, you’re rooting for him to make his way through.7. The Color of Money (1986)Buena Vista Pictures / Everett CollectionThere’s no shortage of movies where Cruise plays a callow young expert at some skill of questionable utility who eventually learns to straighten up his act. Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money may have been considered a Marty-for-hire picture 40 years ago (and, even now, by Scorsese himself). But boy, does it absolutely school other practitioners of the Cruise Formula, and not just because he doesn't allow his movie to double as a recruitment video. It’s also because it boasts a luxury even Jerry Bruckheimer couldn’t afford: Paul Newman, reprising a role from a quarter-century earlier, which frees up Cruise to be both realer and goofier than other incarnations of his young hot-shot prototype, most famously in a scene where he showboats through a crooning of “Werewolves of London.” Apologies to Top Gun, but this is the 1986 Cruise movie I can watch over and over.6. A Few Good Men (1992)Columbia Pictures / Everett CollectionOn the other hand, here’s a film that slots Cruise into a more mainstream, borderline self-important redemption arc—it’s written by Aaron Sorkin, for God’s sake. But there are two crucial mitigating factors that make A Few Good Men a career highlight rather than mere Oscar-bait retread. For one, it’s directed by Rob Reiner, in the final stretch of an unbeatable genre-hopping seven-movie run, who knows how to hand Sorkin’s showboating dialogue off to the actors and help them turn it into a classic Hollywood melodrama. Cruise, in turns out, was born to deliver wise-ass Sorkinisms. It’s might be the most classic Hollywood of Cruise’s films, with a fullness of expression that you’re not really getting from either Top Gun movie.5. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)Warner Bros / Everett CollectionAt the time, some thought Cruise looked out of his depth in a Stanley Kubrick picture. But that was all acting. More accurately, it’s the horny and confused Dr. Bill Harford who’s disoriented as he wanders Manhattan in search of… well, he doesn’t seem entirely certain. Sex? Secrets? Reassurance? All the while, he keeps letting strangers know he’s a doctor, as if that confers upon him special privileges or powers. Cruise’s then-wife Nicole Kidman gets the showiest scene in the movie when she explains to Bill just how much passing desire she felt for a stranger she saw while they were on vacation. But Cruise, so often the picture of confidence on screen, must shepherd Bill through a crisis the character himself has trouble defining. It’s nuanced work, and often quite funny, proving that Cruise was plenty capable of rising to a major challenge.4. Vanilla Sky (2001)Paramount / Everett CollectionIf Eyes Wide Shut undermined Cruise’s image as a slickster and strangely presaged his increasingly chaste on-screen image, Vanilla Sky strikes up lengthy conversation with early-career Cruise. Here, by deforming and masking his beautiful face thanks to a harrowing car accident, Cameron Crowe writes a spiritual postscript to Jerry Maguire by casting Cruise in the Tom Cruise Part before letting the world fall apart all around him. Cameron Diaz, too, gives a scene-stealing Kidman-style performance behind the wheel. And though the movie is ultimately Crowe’s self-described “cover” of Abre los Ojos, it doubles as a turn-of-the-century treatise on Cruise’s place in popular culture, giving him the space to play bittersweet romance, dark comedy, and Hitchcockian paranoia.3. Rain Man (1988)United Artists / Everett CollectionFamously, Dustin Hoffman won a Best Actor Oscar for playing the autistic Raymond Babbitt, whose existence has been concealed to his smooth-operator brother Charlie (Cruise) until their father dies and leaves Raymond his fortune. Charlie and Raymond then embark on a road trip, mostly so Charlie can attempt to get his hands on the inheritance. Though the film's understanding of autism now registers as somewhat quaint, to put it kindly, it’s Cruise’s character who undergoes the more significant and demanding arc. He’s the reason Rain Man remains so entertaining and moving today despite its more questionable elements, and there’s a raw openness to Charlie’s evolution.It’s not just Hoffman who overshadowed the performance. A year later, Cruise himself would go on to score his first Oscar nomination for playing veteran-turned-activist Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. Not a bad film, and certainly not a bad performance, but it’s not nearly as emotionally grounded as Cruise’s work in Rain Man.2. Jerry Maguire (1996)TriStar Pictures / Everett CollectionFor all his good looks, and the fact that his star ascended during a boom time for romantic comedies, Tom Cruise hasn’t done a lot of them. Jerry Maguire isn’t exactly a romance, either, despite director Cameron Crowe’s typical embellishments. Cruise’s Jerry, a sports agent in crisis, marries Renée Zellweger’s Dorothy mainly so she can have health insurance and better support her son. Dorothy knows it, too. “He loves my kid,” she says. “And he sure does like me a lot.” The movie’s comic juice, meanwhile, is squeezed from Cruise’s desperate attempts to accommodate his sole client Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.). It’s exactly the kind of comedy where Cruise excels, his character never totally aware that he’s doing shtick. In fact, in some of the most spectacular scenes of Cruise Overdrive ever captured, he’s fighting for his life. And that’s what ends up making Jerry Maguire work shockingly well as a romance, too: Jerry and Cruise are both fighting for something that should be effortless.1. Magnolia (1999)New Line Cinema / Everett CollectionA seminal text in Cruise’s turn-of-the-millennium exploration of what it means to be Tom Cruise, Magnolia threatens to go too meta. We first see his Frank “T.J.” Mackey in ads and then a seminar for his “Seduce and Destroy” program, which encourages alienated young men to learn techniques for manipulating and bedding whatever women they want. Sound at all familiar? It’s only the absence of a YouTube channel that keeps Magnolia from reading as fully contemporary. Here, a movie star hawks his powers to rubes who won’t be able to harness them.This eventually gives way to a bedside breakdown when Mackey is reunited with the estranged, dying father he justifiably hates. While it’s performed with the star’s signature intensity and commitment, Frank’s trembling instability as he wavers between telling his father off and begging him to stay in this world remains startlingly moving all these years later. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson gives Cruise plenty of hilariously smarmy showboating early on; his seminar scenes alone might have been enough to garner awards attention. But watching Frank crumble—and then, by the end of the film, catch his breath along with much of the rest of the cast—is as thrilling as any action sequence.Sign up for Manual to receive useful advice on style, health, and more, six days a week.Jesse Hassenger is a contributing writer for GQ covering movies, television, and popular culture. His other work as a critic currently appears at Paste Magazine, where he is the associate film editor, as well as the A.V. Club, Decider, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, and Vulture, among others. Past publications ... Read More