The role written for Tom Cruise but played by Angelina Jolie: “We tried to twist and turn the story”
Seeing as he’s been doing it almost nonstop for the last decade and a half, never mind the decades beforehand, everyone knows what a Tom Cruise action movie is at this point.
The star plays a highly-trained professional placed in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse that forces him to use his wits and skills to stay one step ahead of the competition, take part in some death-defying stunts, and then emerge victorious by the time the credits come up having saved either the day or the world, sometimes both.
It’s a setup that applies to the entire Mission: Impossible franchise, the Top Gun duology, Edge of Tomorrow, Oblivion, Jack Reacher, Knight and Day, The Last Samurai, Minority Report, The Mummy and many more, so it’s easy to see why he was drawn to a project where he’d play a government agent accused of being a Russian spy who scrambles to evade the authorities and clear their name.
Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay remained largely the same from the earliest stages of development, although the title did keep getting shorter along the way. Originally touted as The Far-Reaching Philosophy of Edwin A. Salt, it eventually became Edwin A. Salt, before adopting just Salt as its final nomenclature.
Cruise entered negotiations to star in the summer of 2007, but a little over 12 months later, he was out, and Angelina Jolie was in. The most drastic revision made to the entire conceit was changing the title character’s name from Edwin to Evelyn, with director Philip Noyce admitting that one of the reasons why the intended star dropped out was that the whole thing was starting to feel very familiar.
“His main fears were that the character was too close to Ethan Hunt, being a rogue spy with extraordinary abilities,” the filmmaker told Dark Horizons. “So over many months, we tried to twist and turn the story to differentiate the character of Edwin Salt from Ethan Hunt. But, you know, he had a valid point. It was kind of returning to an offshoot of a character that he’d already played.”
Despite his misgivings about playing another all-action spy, Cruise opted to ditch Salt in favour of doing it anyway in James Mangold’s Knight and Day, which was released exactly one month before Salt in the summer of 2010. Ironically, Jolie’s star vehicle earned more money at the box office and had a sequel placed into development the following year, even if it never came to fruition in the end.
Cruise has no issues focusing all of his energy on nothing but high-powered blockbusters where he takes centre stage, but he drew the line at embodying another secret agent while still tied to Mission: Impossible. Sort of, anyway, considering he went head-to-head with the very film he was set to headline in very similar circumstances, only to end up on the losing side.