Two-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu premiered Digger, starring Tom Cruise, at the Royal Film Performance, the Film and Television Charity's annual gala.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu brought the world premiere of his film Digger to Leicester Square on Tuesday 22 September 2026, at the Royal Film Performance, the Film and Television Charity’s annual fundraising gala.
Iñárritu was born in Mexico City in 1963, the youngest of seven children, and was expelled from school at sixteen; he went to sea instead, working cargo boats to Europe and Africa, and watching the Kurdish director Yılmaz Güney’s Yol on those travels was, he later said, what turned him toward film. Amores Perros, Babel, Birdman and The Revenant followed, and he became the third director to win the Academy Award for Best Director in consecutive years, after John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, for Birdman in 2014 and The Revenant in 2015, remaining the only director to have won the Directors Guild of America’s award for Outstanding Directing twice running.
The Film and Television Charity has staged the Royal Film Performance seventy-two times since 1946, when it began as a wartime-delayed royal screening for King George VI, and it remains the industry’s largest single fundraising night, the money raised supporting film and television workers in hardship.
Digger, Iñárritu’s original screenplay, stars Tom Cruise alongside Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons, with senior royals in attendance and the cast on the Leicester Square carpet, and the film reached British cinemas on 2 October.