‘Something Borrowed’ Star Colin Egglesfield Worried Filmmakers Because He Was a Tom Cruise Lookalike

Something Borrowed star Colin Egglesfield was the perfect match for the role of Dex with one oddly concerning quality – he looked a lot like actor Tom Cruise. And while looking like Cruise wouldn’t normally be a bad thing, director Luke Greenfield worried that the audience might wonder why Cruise was in a rom-com. Thankfully, it didn’t become an issue. But Egglesfield wasn’t a total lock for the role. He and Greenfield shared what happened during his audition that ensured he landed the part of Dex.

‘Something Borrowed’ Colin Egglesfield looked too much like Tom Cruise?

Greenfield recalled why he was a little concerned about casting Egglesfield. “He’s literally a Tom Cruise lookalike,” he told E! in 2021.

“And so that was one of the things that we were, I guess, concerned about,” he continued. “Like, ‘Are people going to think this is just Tom Cruise playing this role?’ He was the real find.” Egglesfield not only had to capture the audience’s hearts, but he also had to do so while cheating on fiancée – with her best friend.

“You feel what he’s going through,” Greenfield said. “So the audience hopefully is not, ‘This guy’s a f**king cheater. I hate this guy.'” 

Egglesfield is fully aware of the Tom Cruise comparison. “He’s someone whose career I aspire to, to have a lot of the roles that he’s had,” he told MTV in 2011 about Cruise. “Daniel Day-Lewis is another actor I hold in really high esteem.”

How did Luke Greenfield help Colin Egglesfield during his audition for ‘Something Borrowed’?

Egglesfield recalled that Greenfield helped him get in the zone during his audition. “To Luke’s credit, he came up to me and he just kinda whispered in my ear and he said, ‘Hey, do this scene the way you would do it if it were your words and you were really saying these words to the woman of your dreams who you wanted to marry,'” he said.

“And once he gave me that little piece of direction, that piece of freedom to just say it how I would say it, all I had to do was turn and look at Ginny [Goodwin] and look into her beautiful little eyes and we connected and we blew that scene out of the water,” he added.

Needless to say, Egglesfield was thrilled when he learned that he scored the role. “I remember I was sitting on my bed in Los Angeles in my apartment and I was watching SportsCenter,” he recounted. “I got a call, I think it was probably 9:30 or 10 in the morning, and it was my agent. And he said, ‘You want to go to New York and work with Kate Hudson?’ I think everyone in Brentwood heard me scream because I was, like, jumping up and down in my bed.”

Will the ‘Something Borrowed’ sequel ever be made?

While the book and script, Something Blue is ready, Egglesfield doesn’t think it will ever see the light of day on the big or small screen. He told Showbiz Cheat Sheet that 90s-type rom-coms are, unfortunately, history. The main reason? Money. “Those films that are like a $30 million film,” he said about a film like Something Borrowed. “So that’s the films in between that $10 million to $100 million range just kind of evaporated overnight because the return at the box office just isn’t what it used to be.”

“Unfortunately, it’s a dying genre,” he admitted. “Unless you turn to Lifetime and Hallmark. That’s really the only place where you’re getting to see those kinds of stories. But unfortunately, they’re just a fraction of the budget of the studio films.”