In a brief, informal exchange with a Mexican reporter at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Tom Cruise offered not a plot tease but a culinary anecdote. He recalled sharing a tamal with the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, its salsa so fiercely picante that the Mexican filmmaker himself could not handle it. “Pregúntale cuando le veas,” Cruise said with a grin, urging the journalist to verify the story. The moment, small and unscripted, captured the unlikely intimacy at the heart of Digger, a film that pairs Hollywood’s most enduring action star with a director known for unflinching existential drama.

When the first full trailer dropped on Monday, audiences saw the result of that bond: a nearly unrecognisable Cruise, buried under facial prosthetics, a prominent belly, and a thinning comb-over, playing Digger Rockwell, an eccentric oil magnate whose company triggers an ecological catastrophe. The footage, described by US entertainment press as a “fever dream wrapped in political satire,” shows Rockwell cradling a sickly cat, berating employees, and eventually being strong-armed by a US president—played by John Goodman—into fixing the $18 trillion disaster he set in motion. Iñárritu, speaking via video from a London sound-mixing studio, called the character “the most charismatic catastrophe you’ve ever seen,” and framed the film as a comedy sourced from tragedy.

Viewed from Mexico City, the project marks a homecoming of sorts for Iñárritu, his first English-language feature since 2015’s The Revenant, and a reunion with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Mexican media noted that Cruise’s fascination with the director dates back to a pre-Cannes screening of Amores perros a quarter-century ago. “I thought, ‘What the hell? This guy!’,” Cruise told assembled international press, describing the shock of that debut. The collaboration, seven years in the making, involved Iñárritu reading the entire script aloud to Cruise over several days—a ritual of trust that the actor likened to standing “on the edge of a cliff” together.

Fan reaction across social media platforms was immediate and global. Comments aggregated by British and US outlets ranged from stunned admiration—“I actually didn’t recognize him”—to predictions that the role could finally secure Cruise a competitive acting Oscar, a prize that has eluded him through three nominations and an honorary statuette. The actor’s physical relinquishment of his trademark intensity, trading sprinting across rooftops for the laboured breath of a man in a fat suit, was read by many as a deliberate bid for critical re-evaluation. European critics, meanwhile, pointed to Iñárritu’s track record of directing actors to Academy Awards, notably Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, as a promising omen.

The trailer closes on a note of apocalyptic absurdity, with Rockwell dancing with a shovel as ice shelves collapse and nuclear alerts flash. Iñárritu’s parting words to the Burbank audience, delivered with a provocateur’s timing, linger: “Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves, because Mother Nature loves bastards.” It is a line that, like the film itself, refuses to separate the grotesque from the comic, and leaves Cruise’s billionaire anti-hero stranded somewhere between delusion and damnation.