Tom Cruise 'Very Sensitive' To Jack Reacher Criticism

He's a larger than life star, but will that be enough to silence critics?

Casting Tom Cruise in an action flick is as close to a sure thing as a studio can get (never mind "Knight and Day"), but when the "Mission: Impossible" star was announced as the man who will play Jack Reacher in the big screen adaptation of Lee Child's novel "One Shot," outsized howls came from the book's fans. Their complaint? Reacher is described as a mountain of a man at six foot five inches. Cruise, on the account, doesn't quite measure up. And he's not immune to the criticism.

"Firstly, I'm very sensitive to it," Cruise tells Empire Magazine in their latest issue. The author, he says, watched him audition and gave him the thumbs up. "This is Lee's book and Lee's character. Him giving me his blessing is what made me do it. If he hadn't then I wouldn't have done it."

The star, who next features in this winter's fourth chapter of the "Mission: Impossible" series, insists that he's a huge fan of the character, and understands what it takes to play him.

"People look at things through the prism of the colors of their life, but Jack Reacher does things the way we want to sometimes," he says. "In that sense he's sort of a Dirty Harry, a James Bond, a Josey Wales."

Cruise has a number of films on the horizon. Along with "Impossible," he'll feature in the big screen adaptation of the Broadway musical "Rock of Ages" and will film "Oblivion," a sci-fi film co-starring Jessica Chastain.

For more, click over to Empire.