Whenever a popular book series meets the big screen, a certain amount of obligatory grumbling amongst readers is only natural in terms of casting their beloved characters. However, there’s been quite a bit of noise made about the selection of Tom Cruise for the role of Jack Reacher in One Shot. It would be an understatement to mention that Jack Reacher, as a fictional character, is a very large man. And a bulky, intimidating one at that. In fact, Reacher just happens to be a ex-military cop-turned-drifter who starts poking around in a case that turns out to be much more than he’d planned. While I personally am not a Tom Cruise fan, I won’t deny that he’s a talented actor in the right role. Here, Cruise is definitely not the man for the job, and I don’t mean to pick on his size, but Reacher’s stature (6’5″, 250 pounds, 50-inch chest) is an integral part of how he operates within author Lee Child’s books. Cruise, however, has stated in an interview in December’s issue of Empire that he believes otherwise and that Child agrees that Cruise was the correct choice for the role:

There are casting calls so controversial that they look likely to reduce the internet to a smoking wasteland of charred avatars and ashen memes. Michael Keaton as Batman, Daniel Craig as Bond, The Last Airbender… that kind of thing. It’s fair to say that the choice of Tom Cruise to play Lee Child’s towering do-gooder Jack Reacher in One Shot has smoke pouring out of the web again.

With the movie currently filming in Pittsburgh, Empire tracked the man down to ask about the farrago. “Firstly, I’m very sensitive to it,” Cruise explained, revealing that Child came to watch his readings. “This is Lee’s book and Lee’s character. Him giving me his blessing is what made me do it. If he hadn’t then I wouldn’t have done it.”

And what of the discrepancy in height – Cruise giving away more than a few inches to the clock-brained legend? “Lee told me that the reason he wrote him that size (6′ 5″) is because that was just one element to his character, and that opened the door to me playing him.”

As Cruise himself is quick to point out, he’s no stranger to controversial casting. His pick to play Lestat in Neil Jordan’s Interview With The Vampire may have been pre-trolling, but it still caused a stink with fans of Anne Rice’s novel – and, briefly, with the writer herself.

No-one should doubt the actor’s commitment to the role, though. “Reacher is such a great character,” he enthused. “He doesn’t have a cell phone, he doesn’t have email. He’s off the grid. He pays for things in cash. People look at things through the prism of the colours of their life, but Jack Reacher does things the way we want to sometimes. In that sense he’s sort of a Dirty Harry, a James Bond, a Josey Wales.”

[From Empire]

Honestly? Child is probably just flattered that a (former) A-list movie star wanted to star in a movie based on his books. The sketchy part of Cruise playing this role is that the books consistently and repeatedly draw attention to Reacher’s intimidating physicality, and I’m certainly not the only one who’s noticed this discrepancy:

Cruise and Child are right of course in that changes can and often should be made when adapting a novel for the screen, and Reacher’s size does act at times as a metaphor for an imposing and unstoppable force. What Cruise lacks in size he more than makes up for with persistence, drive, and his undisputed title as the best movie runner of all time.

And if Reacher’s size was simply one more characteristic of his person none of this would matter. But it’s not. Reacher’s physical nature, his size and presence, affects how he reacts to people and more importantly, how they react to him. Scenarios happen (or don’t) strictly due to his appearance and abilities.

[From Film School Rejects]

Meanwhile, there’s also a Facebook page called “Tom Cruise is not Jack Reacher” and a petition for the figurative cause as well. Poor Tom — all he wanted was to entrench himself within a well-worn franchise with the potential to carry him through Hollywood for another decade (give or take), and now the mean kids are picking on him. All of this riffraff after he did so much to impress the younguns on the Rock of Ages set and even rocked out on a balcony to prove his cred.

The thing is, Tom has always been very sensitive about his height and consistently goes to great lengths to make himself appear several inches taller than his 5’7″ frame would permit. For crying out loud, even his rock star character had massive lifts built into his boots just for the hell of it. So why on Xenu’s great earth would he sign himself up for such ridicule by playing a character whose height is so very important, vital even, to the story being told? Many of us already can’t take him seriously in the Mission: Impossible 4 – Ghost Protocol trailer, so I don’t understand why he signed himself for even more in-depth discussions of his height. That is, unless he just doesn’t care about what people say; but quite obviously, Tom is “very sensitive” to any and all scrutiny.

So yes, Tom Cruise is eight ten inches shorter than the brick sh-thouse that he’s been hired to play onscreen in One Shot. And for that reason, he most certainly requested that wife Katie Holmes to wear flats to get frisky on the Philadelphia set with him. Nice lifts Tom, but this time, they’re not going to get the job done.

Incidentally, here’s a new poster for MI4 that does away with some of that pesky Xenu fog. Tom looks nearly as tall as the Burj Khalifa!

Photos courtesy of Fame & Empire