Tom Cruise wanted to play Watchmen’s Rorschach; Zack Snyder whispered, “No”

It’s a given, in this day and age, that the streets are extended gutters, and the gutters are full of blood, and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. But did we also know that there are some pretty interesting Hollywood what-ifs floating in that river of blood, particularly surrounding Zack Snyder’s 2009 Watchman movie?

Appearing on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Snyder cleared the record on some ancient Watchmen casting rumors. Horowitz brought up some names that were rumored for the film long ago, including Keanu Reeves for Dr. Manhattan and Tom Cruise for Ozymandias, but that wasn’t the whole story. “I wanted Cruise for Ozymandias, he wanted to play Rorschach,” said Snyder.

Let’s pause for a moment and consider 2009 Tom Cruise playing Rorschach. Around that time, and as hard as it may be to imagine now, Cruise’s career was in a bit of a tailspin. Sure, the cameo in Tropic Thunder earned some modest praise—but also accusations of anti-semitism because that movie was a lightning rod for controversy. Lion For Lambs, Valkyrie, Mission: Impossible III, and Knight And Day on the horizon were all feeling the burn of Cruise’s couch-jumping relationship with Katie Holmes and the Matt Lauer interview where he called psychiatry a pseudoscience, criticizing Brooke Shields for using medication to treat postpartum depression. That’s the Cruise that wanted to play Rorschach, the guy who’s constantly covered in “human bean juice” and bashing child predators to death with a meat cleaver. While that does sound like Cruise, we think he’d probably be a better fit for sad Captain Metropolis, who faces his own diminishing influence while in the throes of a mid-life crisis. But God doesn’t make the world this way, Zack Snyder does.

Snyder acknowledges that Cruise “obviously could’ve done” the role, but Jackie Earle Haley, who gives one of the film’s best performances, had already been cast. “I certainly would’ve considered Tom, in retrospect, if I hadn’t had Jackie.”

Ironically enough, in 2009, Snyder told The L.A. Times that Cruise couldn’t be the guy for the role because audiences were too familiar with him and his fame.

“I think if you have a Tom Cruise, someone of that stature of fame, it makes it harder to present this other world and keep the viewer right there in it,” the director said at the time, perhaps forgetting that he had a conversation with Cruise about the role.