Long before he was jumping off cliffs on motorcycles or hanging off the side of the world’s tallest building, Tom Cruise had a much darker goal as a little kid. He wanted to kill Adolf Hitler.
That sounds strange out of nowhere, but it came up naturally when Cruise was doing press for his 2008 film ‘Valkyrie.’ In it, he played Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the real German officer who came within minutes of assassinating the Nazi dictator in July 1944.
Tom Cruise Reveals Childhood Wish to Kill Adolf Hitler
When Cruise was asked why the role meant so much to him, he traced it back to when he was a small boy watching old black and white footage of the war. “As a little kid, when I was four years old, I remember I saw these war documentaries, like World At War,” Cruise told Movies. “I remember thinking about Hitler, why didn’t somebody just kill that guy?“
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By his own telling, this wasn’t some violent daydream. It was more like a child’s simple sense of right and wrong, a four-year-old learning about the scale of the Holocaust for the first time and landing on the only answer that made sense to him. In another interview for the film, he said it even more plainly. “I always wanted to kill Hitler; I hated him. As a child studying history and looking at documents, I wondered, why didn’t someone try and stop it?“
Tom Cruise Says Every Kid Wanted Hitler Dead
Talking to Maclean’s around the same time, Cruise said this wasn’t just his own thing, but something he thought most kids felt once they learned about the Holocaust. “As a kid growing up, I think all of us wanted to kill Hitler, why didn’t someone just pop him?” he said.
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The irony is that someone did kill Hitler. Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, nine months after Stauffenberg’s bomb failed to do the job. Cruise didn’t avoid that piece of history when he talked about why the project drew him in. Beyond his own childhood anger at a dictator who died 17 years before he was even born, Cruise said he was drawn to stories about resisting impossible odds, and to the comfort of knowing Stauffenberg’s plot proved that “it wasn’t everyone who was evil in Germany” during the Third Reich. He has also talked more generally about disliking authoritarian figures, describing his interest in Valkyrie as part of a lifelong dislike of “tyrants.”
‘Valkyrie’ Faced Backlash in Germany Over Tom Cruise Casting
However, that didn’t keep the film out of trouble. ‘Valkyrie‘ ran into pushback in Germany long before filming even started. Stauffenberg’s own son, Berthold, spoke out publicly against Cruise playing his father. He told a German newspaper that the actor “should keep his hands off my father,” and suggested Cruise instead “climb a mountain or go surfing in the Caribbean.”
Part of the tension came from Cruise being a well-known member of the Church of Scientology, a group German authorities have long been wary of. That complicated both the film’s location permits and how it was later marketed in the country. German officials initially refused to let the production film at the Bendlerblock, the actual site where Stauffenberg was executed, before finally agreeing.
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By the time the film came out in Germany, distributors had quietly toned down Cruise’s role in local ads, putting more focus on director Bryan Singer instead.
Still, through all the behind-the-scenes tension, Cruise’s reason for wanting the part has stayed the same in every interview. A childhood introduction to one of the darkest periods in modern history, worked through the only way a four-year-old could, by wishing, hard and simply, that someone had stopped it before it ever began.
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