Tom Cruise is not a man who’s easy to forget. He’s one of the biggest stars Hollywood has ever seen. A man whose contributions to cinema range from some of the most jaw-dropping action spectacles ever pulled off (see: the Mission: Impossible movies, Top Gun and its sequel, and many more) to arresting character dramas that made him a megastar in the first place (from A Few Good Men, to Rain Man, to Jerry Maguire). And yet, during production of his latest film Digger, Cruise’s co-star Riz Ahmed found himself lost in the larger-than-life character that the star has worked up with director Alejandro G. Iñárritu: a certain Digger Rockwell.
“I kind of forgot about Tom. Because Tom was Digger, and he became Digger, and he stayed in Digger,” Ahmed tells Empire of Digger, in which he plays scientist Ganesh. “Whatever people say about method acting, whether you try or not, lines blur between yourself and a character. They have to. That’s the process, right?” While he’s keeping schtum on any further details about Ganesh, or how he crosses paths with Digger Rockwell – a brash oil tycoon who unleashes ecological catastrophe, and is charged with making it right – Ahmed has much to say on his experience shooting with Cruise. Or, more accurately, with Digger. “I joked, at the end of it all we had a wrap dinner, I was like, ‘It’s really good to meet you, but I wish my pal Digger was here’,” he says. “It was that kind of feeling. We’d joke around like, ‘Man, I’ve heard Tom Cruise is meant to be on set somewhere.’”
It’s a move that Cruise himself has described as a “leap into the unknown” – and Ahmed was thrilled to join him in the freefall. “Honestly, I think it was quite liberating for him as well, to be able to lose himself, lose that globally recognised face into a character. I could see that allowing him to be open, in a different way,” he says. That’s Digger Rockwell: nothing is done by halves.
Read Empire’s world-exclusive Digger cover story – speaking to Tom Cruise, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed and more – in the October 2026 issue, on sale Thursday August 27. Pre-order a copy online here. Digger comes to UK cinemas from October 2.
