10 Actors Who Gave Two WILDLY Different Performances In The Same Year

Though Tom Cruise enjoyed the mightiest box office success of his career with last year's Top Gun: Maverick, in purely artistic terms there's no topping his absolutely spectacular 1999, where he worked with two legendary auteurs on two very different movies nevertheless centered around similar themes.

In the summer of that year, Cruise starred in Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, where he played Dr. Bill Harford - a man rather ineffectually reckoning with the revelation that his wife (Nicole Kidman) considered cheating on him a year prior.

At the end of 1999, Cruise then appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling epic Magnolia, portraying motivational speaker and pick-up artist Frank T.J. Mackey, for which he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

On the face of it, Harford and Mackey are two very different sides of the same masculine coin. One a sexually neutered man struggling to find agency, the other a man who professes to be the epitome of it. The only real commonality of the two performances is that in both roles Cruise plays characters who present themselves as superficially slick and suave from the exterior, only to reveal something decidedly more fragile beneath the surface.