We Know More About Why Tom Cruise Wasn't In "Ford v Ferrari"

In 2020, filmmaker Joseph Kosinski offered details about a planned film that was never made: one that would have told the story of Ford’s victory over Ferrari at 24 Hours of Le Mans. This would probably have looked and felt very different from the cinematic version of those events that we did get: director James Mangold’s 2019 Ford v Ferrari.

What’s also notable was the casting of Kosinski’s project, which would have reunited Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt years after they starred in 1994’s Interview With the Vampire. Since then, Kosinski has gotten to make a movie set in the automotive world: F1, starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris. And on the press tour for that film, Pitt revealed more about the unmade Ford/Ferrari project — including an insight as to why it never came to fruition.

Given Cruise’s penchant for doing his own stunts, the answer isn’t all that surprising. “What it came down to is that we both wanted to drive, and he wanted to play Shelby, and I wanted to play Ken Miles,” Pitt told The National‘s William Mullany. “And when Tom realised that Carroll Shelby would not be driving much in the movie, it didn’t come through.”

In the same interview, Pitt also complimented the version of Ford v Ferrari that does exist. He told The National that the proposed version that he and Cruise would have started in “was about 10 years before the guys who actually made it — and made it a great movie.”

Inside the Cruise/Pitt “Ford v Ferrari” That Might Have Been

We might have had a very different story of Ford’s Le Mans triumph

As plenty of coverage of F1 has demonstrated, this film’s two leads did get plenty of opportunities to do their own driving. The Athletic’s Madeline Coleman chronicled the process by which Pitt and Idris learned to drive convincingly for the film, and the group of experts who passed along their knowledge to the two actors. As Coleman reports, this included Lewis Hamilton giving Pitt a primer on the best way to brake while racing.