Tom Cruise wants to make a movie about his Tropic Thunder character Les Grossman

He and Christopher McQuarrie are having "very serious conversations about it"

Hitting cinemas 17 years ago, Ben Stiller's war comedy unleashed one of the the most unhinged cameos in recent memory, with Mission: Impossible icon Cruise flexing a pair of werewolf-hairy hands and a verbal volcanicity as balding studio executive Les.

During his appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie revealed that he Cruise are keen to bring this character back for a standalone project.

"The conversations we've had about Les Grossman are so f*****g funny. [Cruise and I are] talking about it, we're having very serious conversations about it, and how best to do it. It ultimately comes down to what that character is," he told host Josh Horowitz.

"We don't even think about the structure, we play with scenes.

"Just to be sitting at a breakfast table, not talking about the movie we're making for a minute, is such decompression. And just riffing with Tom playing Les Grossman at the table, it was one of the real joys of making this movie. It was all the stuff we were doing, planning the future while slugging out the present."

Previously, Tropic Thunder director and star Stiller recounted how Cruise came to be involved with the film on the Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend podcast.

"He wanted to have big, thick forearms that were hairy and he wanted to dance," he said.

"It's a strange set of circumstances the way this happened. We had done this little short for the MTV Movie Awards where I played a stuntman. And we had met a couple of times over the years before that. But then we had a great time doing that together and had stayed in touch since then.

"I had had this idea for the movie for a long time and I had been working on it with Justin Theroux... and we finally had the script and I had talked to Tom about it," continued Stiller.

"Originally I wanted Tom to play my part. But I was too nervous to ask him to do it, because he's Tom Cruise, he has other stuff to do. Eventually, I sent him the script and he was like, 'This is great, I'd love to be a part of this.' I was like, 'Well maybe you could play, there's like an agent role.' He said, 'You don't have a studio exec in the movie...'

"This was like 2.5 months before we started shooting and Justin and I were like, 'Well Tom would like to be in the movie and he had this idea of playing a studio exec'. And so we went back and came up with Les Grossman. And it changed the plot of the whole movie but made it so much better."