Here's What The Days of Thunder Cast Are Doing Now
36 years after the original Tony Scott film, Days of Thunder 2 is on its way.
Tom Cruise’s Cole Trickle is back in the driving seat, and Anne Hathaway is joining the fray as a team owner and engineer. Looks like “rubbin’” is about to be “racin’” all over again.
Just last week, Paramount confirmed a long-running rumour that a sequel to Days of Thunder was in the works by releasing an official image of Cruise and Hathaway together, in matching blue jeans, in front of a bright green NASCAR racecar. This news means that Cruise is about to return to more earthbound vehicles after the aerial antics of Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. The death (and age-defying) actor has been the defining star of the last four decades, but what about the rest of the movie’s cast of legendary character actors and fledgling Hollywood greats?
In the list below, we’ll look at the many famous faces that appeared alongside Cruise in Days of Thunder almost 40 years ago, and see what they’ve been up to since and where they’re at in their careers now.
Tom Cruise
You know where this guy’s been, right?
Cruise came into Days of Thunder on the back of Top Gun and has yet to look in his rearview mirror since. As perhaps the biggest star of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, his career peaks included movies like A Few Good Men and Jerry Maguire and collaborations with great directors like Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.
Cruise’s last 15 years have been all about the action, with his various turns as Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible franchise only seeming to get crazier with each passing movie. He hit another high with the release of Top Gun: Maverick, and now he’s gearing up to do the same with Thunder 2.
Before that, let’s see if he can get that elusive Oscar with Digger next year.
Nicole Kidman
From TV, movies, or iconic AMC adverts, Nicole Kidman has been just as unavoidable as Cruise since her breakout role as Dr Lewicki in Days of Thunder. Kidman was still in her curly-haired, Aussie-accent days when she played that part, but she’s since gone on to become one of the most prolific stars of her generation.
If we were to list her movies and shows from the last 10 years alone, we’d likely be here all day, so let’s just say she married Cruise right after Thunder, starred with him in Eyes Wide Shut, then divorced him after that. She won an Oscar for The Hours and has been nominated four other times, including for the smash hit Moulin Rouge!, and also won two Emmys for Big Little Lies.
Her ‘90s cult favourite Practical Magic is currently enjoying the sequel treatment, just maybe don’t expect a cameo from her in Days of Thunder 2.
Robert Duvall
Robert Duvall was already a bona fide GOATed actor when he came on board to add a big touch of class to Days of Thunder as Cole’s mentor, Harry Hogge. His most legendary roles will always be Bill Hagen in The Godfather movies and Lieutenant Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, but they are merely the high points of a legendary character actor career.
Post-Thunder, Duvall continued to play Harry Hogge-type roles in movies like Sling Blade, Gone in Sixty Seconds and The Road, all the way up to The Pale Blue Eye in 2024 — which turned out to be both his 145th credit overall and his last one before passing away earlier this year.
John C. Reilly
For fans of Boogie or Talladega Nights, seeing John C. Reilly pop up in Cole’s pit team in Thunder is a major Leo pointing meme moment. In fact, the energy he brought to Buck Bretherton, his 4th role ever, is basically the energy he’d continue to bring to his performances for the next 40 years, and we are yet to get bored of it.
You can see it in all of his great comedies (Walk Hard, Step Brothers) and even in his more offbeat ones, like The Lobster or Cyrus or his iconic Dr Steven Brule in the Tim and Eric show.
Randy Quaid
If you know Randy Quaid from anything post-Thunder, it will be for playing Russell Casse, the boozy but heroic crop-dusting veteran in Independence Day.
As those roles suggest, Quaid’s talents have always been best suited to over-the-top comedic roles, none more famous than Kingpin and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation — but Quaid has not been a stranger to dramatic work. Since Thunder, he’s played the sceptical employer at the start of Brokeback Mountain and King Carlos the IV in Goya’s Ghosts.
He is very much still with us, and still working, and will turn 76 this year.
Cary Elwes
If you play the lead role in a movie like The Princess Bride, you will always be known for that part. Cary Elwes has, for better and worse, had to live with that, but it hasn’t stopped him from taking on a wide variety of other roles — including a wide range of slimy villain parts, including Russ Wheeler in Days of Thunder.
One of his best was the corporate storm chaser Dr Jonas Miller in Twister, but you’ll also recognise him as one of the men in the original Saw, a role he later reprised in Saw 3D, and for playing Mayor Kline in Stranger Things and Denlinger in the last two Mission: Impossible movies.
Fred Thompson
Fred Thompson only appears in a handful of scenes in Days of Thunder, but he comes in so hot as NASCAR president “Big John” that he ends up being one of the stars of the movie.
Thompson has had a habit of doing this, which is probably one of the reasons why he was also a successful politician, serving as a Senator of Tennessee in the 1990s and even going up for the Republican nomination in 2008.
Movie-wise, you can spot him playing authority figures in a bunch of stone-cold classics, like Die Hard 2, The Hunt for Red October and Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear.
Margo Martindale
For viewers of a certain vintage, Margo Martindale will probably be lodged in your memory thanks to a running gag in BoJack Horseman, but she really has been a beloved character actress for 40 years now.
She appears in Thunder as Donna, the track timekeeper during Cole’s practice runs — which was, funnily enough, her first-ever movie role. She now has over 140 credits to her name, including Emmy-winning turns in Justified (she plays Mags) and The Americans (as Claudia).
More recently, she played Ranger Liz in Cocaine Bear. Don’t be surprised if she pops up again in Thunder 2.
