Tom Cruise’s “Digger Make-Up” Meme Is Already Getting Out of Control

Tom Cruise is no stranger to using prosthetics to change his on-screen appearance – we all have Les Grossman burned into our brains forever – and he will be doing so again for Digger, his upcoming black comedy from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. In the past few days, X posts have been piling up announcing “First official look at Tom Cruise’s make-up in Digger,” but the bold statement has turned out to be another internet meme that has very quickly gone wild.

Getting a first clear look at Cruise’s latest guise is something that many fans are interested in, so a post promising just that is going to attract plenty of clicks. However, anyone going down the rabbit hole is not going to find what they are looking for and is instead being treated to screen-grabs of everything from Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to the masks of Cruise’s own Mission: Impossible movies, the rapidly decaying body from the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the cadaverous preacher from Poltergeist II.

This kind of misinformation in the form of a joke is not uncommon on social media platforms, especially when actual images of Cruise’s reclusive Texan energy tycoon from Digger are scarce. This time around, some of the images have actually caught users off guard. Even images of one of the creatures from Guillermo del Toro’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark saw someone comment that it would “take a while to get used to the idea that Tom Cruise is under that make-up.” It won’t, because he isn’t.

Tom Cruise’s Digger Is One of His Most Unexpected Movies

Digger is one of those movies that comes out of nowhere and instantly grabs attention for its completely unexpected nature. The satirical black comedy casts Cruise as the titular Digger Rockwell, who ignores a warning, triggers a global catastrophe, and then has to dig himself back out of it. To play him, Cruise buried himself in old-age make-up, a prosthetic nose, a fake pot belly, a comb-over and a thick Southern drawl — it is not hard to see why comparisons to his Tropic Thunder character have already surfaced. Digger is a movie that will clearly not be relying on Cruise’s ever-youthful face to draw in audiences.

A first teaser trailer for the movie dropped a few months ago, revealing only distant shots of Cruise and giving away nothing about his facial appearance. In the last couple of days, a new career-spanning Tom Cruise retrospective trailer included 30 seconds of new Digger footage at the end of it. This new look revealed a little more than the teaser but ultimately held back on a full reveal, opting to have the character’s face mostly hidden under a cowboy hat. The full reveal is now set to come with the movie’s official trailer, which is expected to arrive in mid-July.

Of course, Warner Bros. is not going to be complaining about the huge wave of attention the fake make-up reveal posts are bringing to the movie. It is free advertising, after all, and these days that is something that no studio wants to turn down. If these posts alert more potential cinemagoers to the film’s October 2 release, that can only help Digger avoid becoming a box-office dud.

This is not the first time the internet has allowed a meme of this type to run away with itself. When Lee Cronin’s The Mummy was released in April, a similar viral meme picked up on a post that noted Brendan Fraser was not the star of this version of the classic monster movie. That meme saw many users copying the statement but changing the movie, resulting in posts claiming Fraser “does not appear in James Cameron’s next Avatar movie,” “does not appear in The Hunt for Gollum,” and “does not appear in Avengers: Doomsday.“

Digger’s Viral Posts Have Created Some Laughs

There are some people who argue that misinformation online can be a big issue, especially considering how many misleading social media posts can be created using very convincing AI, but this one is pretty harmless in the main. Yes, it can be a little tedious for those who genuinely do want to see Cruise’s latest character in all his glory. On the flip side, there are many who are getting plenty of laughs out of just how bizarre and elaborate some of the movies being used in the meme posts have become.

Whether Digger can keep itself in the public consciousness for the next three months is a bit of a big ask, but you can never count out another equally attention-catching viral trick coming along before the film’s eventual release on October 2, 2026. Who would you add into the mix as Cruise’s prosthetic-heavy Digger replacement?

(Featured image: Warner Bros.)

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