How TGI Fridays Helped Tom Cruise In An Iconic Movie Role

As America's greatest living movie star, Tom Cruise's career has gone through several phases over the years. Today he's an elder-statesman action hero, in films like "Top Gun: Maverick" and the latter-day "Mission: Impossible" movies. In the late 1990s, he subverted his leading-man persona in auteur-driven films like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" (for which he was shamefully robbed of an Oscar). The late '80s and early '90s marked his pivot to serious dramatic acting with "Born on the Fourth of July" and "A Few Good Men." But throughout most of the '80s, Tom Cruise played an uncommonly charismatic heartthrob in popcorn flicks like "Risky Business," "Top Gun," and "Cocktail" — a film known today for introducing the world to "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys. Cruise prepared for his iconic role as a bartender by training with a real one from TGI Fridays.

For his role as Brian Flanagan, the hotshot bartender from New York City who goes off to ply his trade in Jamaica, Cruise trained with John Bandy, a bartender who worked for TGI Fridays, back in the days when the chain was most famous for being a bar and not the fast casual dining spot. The script was semi-autobiographical, written by bartender Heywood Gould, based on his own novel. This meant Cruise, as well as his co-star Bryan Brown, had to learn some of the tricks of the trade, including "flair" bartending. Although Bandy insisted he got the "Cocktail" gig himself — unrelated to TGI Fridays — the chain's founder, Alan Stillman, claimed "Tom Cruise played me!" for the movie, during an interview with New City Reader (via Edible Geography).

If you're Gen Z, you might be wondering why a chain restaurant whose jalapeño poppers now line every frozen food aisle in America (Just one of the restaurant dishes worth buying at the store) was ever a big deal in the world of mixology. But, believe it or not, the bar scene as we know it may never have existed without TGI Fridays. The first location was opened in 1965 by Alan Stillman as a place where young singles could mingle. Previously, bars and saloons were seen as a man's domain, while single women mostly attended private cocktail parties. But the birth control pill, which hit the market five years earlier, and the burgeoning second wave of feminism ushered in a new era — one which Stillman found himself in the perfect position to capitalize upon.

Of course, it would all be moot if the drinks weren't any good. Luckily, mixology was something Stillman took very seriously. Bartenders at TGI Fridays were trained rigorously, expected to memorize a menu with several hundred different drink options, and execute every item to perfection. Accordingly, they received better-than-average pay for a bartender, and enjoyed no small amount of prestige among the fairer sex. This was the milieu depicted, however idealized, in "Cocktail," and although TGI Fridays hit a rough patch when it filed for bankruptcy, it played a major role in establishing modern bar culture. We'll happily raise a Sex on the Beach (the cocktail popularized by "Cocktail"), and drink to that.