Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise Creator On Exploring The Movie Star’s Personal & Professional Lives

Vice TV and The Nacelle Company’s Icons Unearthed series steps away from film and TV franchises for the first time with Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise. Instead of exploring well-known properties like Star Wars, The Simpsons, and Marvel, Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise charts the rise of one of the world’s biggest movie stars. Starting with Cruise’s origins in movies like Taps and The Outsider, the series aims to highlight a different aspect of Cruise’s life in each of its six episodes, which have titles like “The Stuntman”,“The Producer”, and “The Mentor”.

Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise marks the 10th season of the series, which was created by The Nacelle Company founder Brian Volk-Weiss. Volk-Weiss has directed every season of the series, from the first Star Wars-focused series to Icons Unearthed: Spider-Man. He also led the charge on The Nacelle Company’s other well-known series like The Toys That Made Us and The Movies That Made Us.

Screen Rant interviewed Volk-Weiss about finally getting to dive into Cruise’s life and work for his series (Volk-Weiss revealed his desire to cover Cruise during a 2022 interview with Screen Rant about Icons Unearthed: Star Wars). Volk-Weiss detailed the tricky task of choosing which of Cruise’s projects to focus on over the season’s 6 episodes and revealed the movie that inspired his interest in the subject. Plus, Volk-Weiss shared his account of meeting Cruise for the first time.