Tom Cruise approved of “Genie” jokes about him, says screenwriter Richard Curtis

“He's always been very sweet to me,” screenwriter Richard Curtis said of the "Mission: Impossible" actor.

Richard Curtis, the screenwriter for Genie, has revealed how Tom Cruise granted his wish while crafting the screenplay for the new holiday comedy.

Curtis, who also penned holiday hits like Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary, told PEOPLE that he asked the Top Gun star for permission to joke about him in the movie. "We definitely had to ask him," the screenwriter said. "I mean, we asked him through his people. I'm lucky enough to know Tom a bit. He's always been very sweet to me. And we worked on a film for a while, which didn't happen."

Genie stars Melissa McCarthy as Flora, an ancient fish-out-of-water genie who’s overjoyed by elements of contemporary life that she’s never experienced before: pizza, Spotify, shopping, and, in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Ethan Hunt himself. After a shopping spree, Flora and Bernard (Paapa Essiedu) stumble upon a movie theater in Times Square. “I have no idea what a movie is, but I would really like to see one, I think,” Flora says before attending a screening of Mission: Impossible - Fallout.

“Ooh, he’s fast. He’s very, very fast,” she says, during a sequence where Cruise leaps between London rooftops. “Don’t do the jumping! No, no, no. This mission is impossible! It’s in the title!” she exclaims.

Later in the film, Flora says “WWTCD” (what would Tom Cruise do), watches the original Top Gun, and adorns a wall with loving photos of the actor.

Curtis added that he’s happy to have finally made a project involving Cruise. "I don't know whether it's a favor to me and Melissa or whether someone in the mail room said, 'This sounds okay.' But it means that after all these years, I've at last made a Tom Cruise movie."

Curtis had also previously attempted to put a Cruise joke into the 2019 film Yesterday, which followed a musician who wakes up in a world where the Beatles never existed. “There’s a scene on the plane where Jack is looking at an iPad, and my original idea had been that some movie star’s entire career would have disappeared,” Curtis told The Huffington Post. “He was going to look at it and see that Mission: Impossible starred Jared Leto instead of Tom Cruise. That one didn’t get through.”

Genie is now streaming on Peacock.

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