Hollywood star Tom Cruise had a memorable red carpet interaction at the Los Angeles premiere of Digger after he noticed reporter Courtney Echerd on the carpet.
Courtney, a 30-year-old digital media professional who is an Osteosarcoma Hemipelvectomy amputee, shared a video of the moment on social media and said it was an evening she “will never forget.”
The interaction happened at the Los Angeles premiere of Digger, the new dark comedy from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu . Tom plays Digger Rockwell, an eccentric billionaire oil tycoon whose actions lead to a global catastrophe. The film also stars Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons and Emma D’Arcy.
“Tom Cruise was so kind to truly every news outlet and fan at the Digger premiere,” Courtney wrote on Instagram, alongside a clip of their exchange. She also posted the video on TikTok, where she added the caption: “pov: tom cruise notices your rare amputation and is gagged”. It has been described as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.”
Talking about the film’s decade long development, Alejandro recently said, “This film started 10 years ago with Sabina Berman and I writing the screenplay in 2017. The strange thing about developing a narrative that exists so much in the present, is that reality kept overtaking our fictionalized version of it. Reality that, every day these past nine years, has been surpassing fiction, leaving us behind, forcing us to adjust, making us feel that the ground beneath our feet, like the permafrost, was about to collapse. We learned that reality gives us events, but it’s imagination that allows us to recognize ourselves in them. Somewhere between the two, this movie began.”
