Tom Cruise Cut His "Digger" Prosthetic Prep From 6 Hours to Under 1, Using a Chalkboard and a Stopwatch

Tom Cruise is unrecognizable in his new film“Digger,”where he plays a fictional oil tycoon under gray hair, a fat suit, and full facial prosthetics. The look didn’t come easy. The first application took six hours, and Cruise decided that was a problem worth solving. Working with his makeup artist, he set up a chalkboard listing every individual prosthetic piece, then timed each application with a stopwatch, session after session, until the entire process dropped to under one hour. That’s a roughly eighty percent cut in prep time, done the old-fashioned way: repetition and records.

Physical discomfort came with the transformation too. Cruise told Travis and Jason Kelce on the“New Heights”podcast that the prosthetics made him sweat and the added weight took a toll on his knees. Still, his takeaway was about mindset as much as method.“If you say no you can’t do it, you’ll never get there,”he said, which sums up why he’s the guy who turns a makeup chair into a pit stop challenge.

“Digger”arrives in theaters on October 2, and the transformation is likely to be a talking point all on its own. So here’s our question for you: what’s the longest you’ve ever waited or worked for a result you really wanted? Drop it in the comments.