Someone’s Back in Cruise Control…

Amid some controversy, Tom Cruise began shooting his new Bryan Singer-directed film Valkyrie, a.k.a. Rubicon, in Germany yesterday.

Cruise plays the real-life Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, the ringleader of a foiled 1944 plot by high-ranking WWII German officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler – who then ordered his would-be assassins to face a firing squad.

The actor, it seems, cannot be cast in a film without someone having an opinion about it. Remember Anne Rice’s initial disapproval of Cruise as the vampire Lestat in Interview with the Vampire back in the ‘90s?

Stauffenberg's son, Berthold von Stauffenberg, reportedly isn’t keen on seeing Cruise stepping in his father’s shoes. “He should keep his fingers off my father,” von Stauffenberg told German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

I say don’t be glib, let him be.

Cruise has been working quietly in recent months, and if anything, he has earned the right to take risks with his career, in spite of what we may think of his personal affairs.

More often than not, he certainly has delivered and surprised us.

Up next is Nov. 9’s Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford and co-starring Redford and Meryl Streep, and then perhaps a return to America’s good graces.

Photo: People.com.