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My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise

The action star has gone to great lengths to avoid the press for more than a decade. But maybe our writer could track him down anyway?

Credit... Illustration by Kelsey Dake

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By Caity Weaver

• Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 31, 2023

In an interview with Playboy in 2012, Tom Cruise described Katie Holmes as “an extraordinary person” with a “wonderful” clothing line, and someone for whom he was fond of “doing things like creating romantic dinners” — behavior that, he confided, “she enjoys.” It would prove to be his last major interview with a reporter to date. Despite what may be recalled through the penumbra of memory, this sudden silence was not directly preceded by either of Cruise’s infamous appearances on television: not by his NBC’s “Today” show interview (in which he labeled host Matt Lauer both “glib” and “Matt — MattMattMattMatt”), nor even by his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (in which he reverse-catapulted himself onto Winfrey’s fawn-colored couch multiple times in a demonstration of his enthusiasm for Holmes). Those incidents occurred seven years earlier, in 2005; Cruise emerged from the hex of public bewilderment unscathed. In fact, Cruise gave no indication that the interview, pegged to the musical-comedy bomb “Rock of Ages,” was intended to serve as a farewell address to journalists. At the time he sat for it, another life milestone was hurtling toward him: The month after the article was published, Holmes filed for divorce.

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In the decade since, the amount of verified information we have gleaned about Cruise’s real life could fit on a single flashcard, though it’s unclear why anyone would need to memorize it, since the details mainly consist of anecdotal trifles shared by other celebrities in interviews of their own: From James Corden, we know Cruise once asked to land a helicopter in James Corden’s yard . From Brooke Shields, we know Brooke Shields no longer receives the (by all accounts delectable) white chocolate coconut Bundt cake that Cruise famously sends to many beloved stars each holiday season. From Kyra Sedgwick, we know that there was a panic button under a fireplace mantle in one of Cruise’s homes . (She pressed it out of curiosity, summoning the police.) From Matt Damon, we know that during production of the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie, Cruise had “a safety guy” replaced because he deemed a proposed stunt (in which Cruise scampers over the Burj Khalifa) “too dangerous.” Tom Cruise, Kate Hudson informs us, loves skydiving.

These facts sketch a portrait of a daredevil with a finite budget for cakes, but hardly a recluse. Cruise’s spurning of interviews makes him unique among his cohort — A-list, pathologically charismatic, wrest-butts-into-seats-type movie stars — whose success, it has long been assumed, derives from their ability to appear likable to mortals. They demonstrate this skill, traditionally, by exhibiting their personality in interviews. Every time Cruise turns down an interview request (through his representative, Cruise declined to be interviewed for this article), he makes a bet that just his being Tom Cruise, offering no further details about what that might entail, is enticement enough for people to watch his movies. Lately, more often than not, he has been right.

To see this clearly, perhaps it’s helpful to contrast Cruise’s career with that of Brad Pitt, his co-star in “Interview With the Vampire” (1994) and fellow member of a declining species: Hollywood leading men. Pitt has continued appearing in the kind of films (thrillers, comedies, romances, psychodramas, historical epics, etc.) that he and Cruise starred in throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In the past decade, audiences could find Pitt endeavoring to disappear into roles ranging from abolitionist to astronaut. In the same period, Cruise has starred solely in action films, which have depicted him fighting aliens, terrorists, fellow spies, a mummy and sundry other enemies of the United States. Rather than vanishing into roles, Cruise remakes them in his image. So fully has he melded his offscreen persona with that of the skydiving, cliff-jumping, motorcycle-parachuting pilots he portrays, these characters become mere receptacles of Tom Cruiseness. Cruise’s films tend to perform better than Pitt’s at the box office; his most recent endeavor, “Top Gun: Maverick,” outearned Pitt’s latest by about $1.4 billion. This summer, Tom Cruise will run, drive and jump at top speeds in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” and Brad Pitt will star in nothing.

Cruise still takes part in promotional junkets and convivial late-night-talk-show chats, but his refusal to participate in the sort of in-depth journalistic interviews that (in theory, anyway) reveal some aspect of his true self has coincided, somewhat paradoxically, with an incredible surge in his commitment to infusing cinematic fantasies with reality. For unknown reasons it could be interesting to explore in an interview, reality has become very important to Cruise, who reveres it as a force more powerful than magic. It is vital to Cruise that the audience of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” have the opportunity to witness not a C.G.I. production of a feat, or even a seasoned stunt performer executing a dangerous act, but real footage of him, Tom Cruise, the 61-year-old father of three from Syracuse, N.Y., riding a motorcycle off a cliff.

This fetish for reality has become a keystone of Cruise’s persona, to the extent that many of his public appearances now take place in flying vehicles. Rather than accept an MTV Movie & TV Award in person in May, Cruise filmed his acceptance speech from the cockpit of a fighter aircraft as he piloted it through clouds, politely shouting, “I love entertaining you!” over the engine’s roar. Delivering “a special message from the set of @MissionImpossible” to his followers on Instagram, Cruise screamed while dangling backward off the side of an aircraft, “It truly is the honor of a lifetime!”

But reality does not exist only in movies. What is missing from Cruise’s fervid documentation of ultrarisky, inconceivably expensive, meticulously planned real-life events are any details about the parts of his real life that do not involve, for example, filming stunts for “Mission: Impossible” movies. My own mission, then, was simple: I was to travel to the ends of the Earth to see if it was possible to locate the terrestrial Cruise, out of context — to catch a glimpse, to politely shout one question at him, or at least to ascertain one new piece of intelligence about his current existence — in order to reintegrate him into our shared reality.

Having lately made an effort to scrutinize any article that cast Tom Cruise as its subject, one of the few things that I can say for certain he has done since 2021, besides film two “Mission: Impossible” movies, is order chicken tikka masala from a restaurant in Birmingham, England, and then “as soon as he had finished” (per a tweet from the restaurant ) order the exact same chicken tikka masala “all over again.”

These days, Tom Cruise is hardly ever photographed in any situation other than shooting and promoting his films. (He was filming in Birmingham.) The paucity of paparazzi photos of the apparently chicken-loving actor can be at least partly attributed to his spending much time removed from America’s twin celebrity-entertainment control rooms: New York (where his ex-wife, Holmes, lives with their daughter) and Los Angeles (where, in 2015 and 2016, he reportedly sold multiple homes for a combined total just over $50 million). Years of speculation that Cruise lives or was planning to live in a penthouse apartment a five-minute walk from the “spiritual headquarters” of the Church of Scientology, of which he is a big fan, in Clearwater, Fla., appear never to have been realized, apart from an unsourced assertion published in The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, which mentioned that the audition process for co-stars in Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick” “involved flying down to Cruise’s home in Clearwater. ”

To learn more about the possible activities of Tom Cruise, I turned to the person who, after Cruise himself, his family, his friends, his employees, his co-workers and anyone who has ever met — or, at least, interacted with — him, knows him best: a Brazilian woman who is quite possibly his most dedicated fan in the world. She spoke to me on two conditions: first, that I grant her anonymity; second, that I not identify by name, or characterize too specifically, the publicly available online repository of Cruise-related information she has maintained for over 20 years. Her concerns are both practical and legal: Practically, she isn’t sure if the operation, which may or may not play host to more than 132,000 images of Cruise, could withstand a large influx of traffic; legally, she did not wish to invite the scrutiny and possible copyright claims the attention might draw.

She started the operation when she was 18. Today she is in her early 40s and works as a librarian. More than two decades into the endeavor, a nostalgic melancholy permeates the fan’s reflections. Ten years ago, she said, she was often the first to widely disseminate the latest images of Cruise. Now, because of the superabundance of photo-sharing social media accounts, she must settle for merely having the most complete repository. New additions trickle in sporadically. She’s partial to the theory that paparazzi rarely capture photographs of Cruise in part because he is a real-life “master of disguise,” whom people fail to recognize on the street. Despite years of remote observation, of scrutinizing nearly every single image captured of the man, even she could not say definitively where Cruise lives. She did observe, however, that he appears to spend “most of the time” in Britain.

In fact, there is a strange rumor that Cruise bought a home in a tiny town called Biggin Hill, on the farthest fringes of London — the site of a small private airport that he has been known to use when filming in the region. The legend appears to trace back to an article published in the British tabloid The Sun in July 2021 about the actor’s 59th-birthday celebration. An anonymous source declared that Cruise had “only recently moved to” a house in Biggin Hill (average home price: £590,000), “which feels like it’s practically in the countryside.” The claim would accrue scant new details as it was repeated in British papers numerous times over the following year, apart from one: that Cruise’s residence “is set in 140 acres of stunning rural parkland,” inside a posh gated community near the airport.

Cruise, who has filmed parts of the three most recent installments of “Mission: Impossible” in Britain, has never publicly commented on the rumors. He did, however, confirm that he spends “a lot of time in Britain” in an exceedingly rare interview that appeared, inexplicably, in the September 2022 issue of Derbyshire Life magazine. “I guess I am an Anglophile,” Cruise told Derbyshire Life. “I love being in Britain because everyone is pleasant and will give you a nod or say hello without crowding you too much.” Elsewhere in the interview, Cruise expressed additional enthusiasm for auxiliary British topics, including politeness (“Being friendly doesn’t cost a bean, and I enjoy it”) and Derbyshire, which is, for the record, actually a considerable distance from Biggin Hill (“Wow! Derbyshire — what a fantastic place!”).

To determine if anyone who did not work in the British newspaper or chicken-tikka-masala industries had ever encountered Cruise on English soil, I sifted through Facebook posts, typing any permutation of “saw Tom Cruise” I could think of into the search bars of neighborhood groups for all of the Hobbit-ily named localities surrounding Biggin Hill (“Orpington”; “West Wickham”). I joined groups like “Westerham and Biggin Hill News friends Community fun views gossip” and pored over hundreds of responses to posts like “Think I just saw Tom Cruise driving down jail lane that’s impossible.” The flashes of Cruise that winked from the replies were tantalizing — “I’ve seen him blue Ferrari…jail lane…”; “Lives up Cudham drives blue Ferrari” — but there was no way to tell who was reporting accurate details about the comings and goings of Tom Cruise, who was mistaken and who was merely lying for fun. The only way to find out was to do what Cruise himself would do: grab onto the nearest plane and go, for real.

Next to the Biggin Hill Airport, there is a pocket-size hotel built to serve the crews and engineers of the private planes that fly in and out. The hotel, its website boasts, offers “great views towards London” — something just about any place on Earth could offer with the right window arrangement, assuming it was not already in London. The description of the property’s sleek teal-and-toffee-colored restaurant turned out to be even more specifically accurate: The view of the runway at Biggin Hill Airport was without parallel. At the bar, I pulled up a leather stool and ordered (not in these exact words) the worst Shirley Temple of my life, which cost $11. My fellow patrons had long since familiarized themselves with the contours of the small dinner menu; they had been stranded at Biggin Hill for some time, because the private jet of the billionaire for whom they were working had received — you hate to hear this — an estimated $10 million worth of hail damage. I asked a maintenance technician if he thought Tom Cruise really did have a house in Biggin Hill. He replied with unflinching confidence: “I know he does.”

In the same venue, a man so young he might have been a teenager, who at one time worked inside the airport, revealed to me that Cruise had a parking spot there, though it was unclear if he meant for a car or a helicopter. Most of the good people of Biggin Hill, when grilled about Cruise’s living arrangements, seemed genuinely to have no idea what I was talking about. These were the two camps into which, without fail, every respondent fell: Either they had never so much as heard the rumor that Cruise walked among them, or they were 100 percent certain that he did.

Upon reaching Keston Park, the only gated community in the area matching The Sun’s description, I discovered two things: first, that there appeared to be an illegally locked gate obstructing public access to the footpath that cuts through the neighborhood — whether the gate is impenetrable is a matter of ongoing dispute among the Bromley borough council, myself and many other aspiring path-takers who have submitted complaints about the locked gate to the borough website — and, second, that the biggest movie star in the world did not live there. That was evident through holes that carpenter bees had bored into the barbed-wire-topped fences protecting Keston Park from the wider world. The stately houses faced one another too directly. Their trees could drop acorns into another’s gardens. There was nowhere to conveniently land a helicopter.

Oh, well. These were Keston Park’s problems — not mine and probably not Tom Cruise’s. Tom Cruise, as he and I both now knew, was most likely secretly living at another estate I had turned up in my research — one that was even closer to the airport.

The distance between any two points within the general environs of Biggin Hill is insignificant by car, which is probably why I was unable to persuade any taxi driver to transport me between them. It is less insignificant by foot, and even longer, though much more scenic, if one attempts to traverse it by way of the aforementioned footpaths. These meandering trails tended to be spectacularly beautiful, bursting with a vernal lushness that was nearly pornographic. House-high frozen fountains of eensy white hawthorn blossoms shaded dusty walkways. Wild roses as pink as Country Time lemonade exploded from leafy hedges. Fragile sapphire speedwells, fat purple clover tops and buttercups strewn like gold confetti — these were merely the things it was impossible not to step on. The fluorescent green of the meadows recalled the grasses of another royal province — Super Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. Poppies and toadflax sprang out obscenely from stone walls. Tom Cruise would be crazy not to live here , I thought as I stroked the soft, sun-warmed mane of a little white donkey. Let’s all live here .

Except, upon my arrival at the end of an idyllic woodland stroll, I discovered that Cruise did not live there either. There was, in the front yard of this residence, a garden gnome lugging buckets on a yoke, which didn’t seem like Cruise’s style, and the gnome was overturned, lying on its side — definitely not his style. I righted the gnome and ambled on, in search of another public footpath that would, I hoped, lead me to where Cruise actually lived. Instead, I accidentally wandered into what (I learned through being yelled this information) was not a public right of way but a field privately owned by a woman who berated me until I ran into traffic on a nearby road.

That night, with half my allotted exploratory mission time used up, I lay awake in the hotel built for the flight attendants of billionaires’ jets, miserable and panicked at my failure to do anything but incur thousands of dollars in expenses for airfare and one Shirley Temple. Surely this wasn’t all for naught; surely some meaning could possibly be derived from an interaction between a movie star and a magazine journalist — even a brief one, even one in which the movie star had already said (through his publicist) he did not wish to participate, even one in which the star was not present, since some understanding of some dimension of his life could doubtless be gleaned through a study of his surroundings. But what if Cruise has been so successful in removing himself from our world that I would never find any trace of him? What if Cruise had evanesced into a high-octane mist of pure entertainment? Did I have time to just go to every single house in England and check if Cruise was home? How big was this nation? Why was the sun rising now, in the middle of the night? What time was it?! Had I accidentally not gone to sleep all night?

I had one more idea.

On my first day in town, I had stopped at a pub for lunch. I was told that there was a funeral going on and that there was an hour wait for food, but that if I ordered something simple like a sandwich, the wait would be less, so I ordered a sandwich, which actually took 90 minutes to arrive and was so, no offense, disgusting-tasting that I turned around and asked a middle-aged man sitting at the picnic table behind mine if he would like half a sandwich (no) and if it always took so long to receive a sandwich at this pub (unclear) and if it was true that Tom Cruise really lived nearby. “He’s here,” the man said to me.

“Do you know?” I asked. “Or are you guessing?”

“He’s definitely around here, that’s for sure,” he said. “I know where he is.”

At first, with the cagey pride of one who knows the favored hovering spot of an actual ghost, who acts as self-appointed doorman of the thin place between worlds, the man made a show of not telling me where. But then, on his way out, he materialized at my elbow and proffered three “clues” (his word).

“It’s within two miles of the airport,” he said. “Look for the biggest house. And I mean — ” his voice dropped to a whisper, “ — the biggest .”

“It’s a very famous house,” he said. “The anti-establishment of slavery started there.”

I was aware of this property from my earlier research. It was a colossal butter-colored manor once owned by a prime minister, William Pitt the Younger. I had eliminated it from contention as a possible Cruise residence because it was sold in 2018 (£8.5 million) to a used-car magnate who, at least judging by an article from 2020 that I read in Car Dealer magazine, appeared to be quite comfortably ensconced in it. But it was only a few miles away. On foot, the journey could be completed in just over an hour.

How, exactly, I ended up on the edge of that woman’s privately owned field again, I have no idea. The expedition to that point had seemed to take me through brand-new areas. All of a sudden, I noticed that the path had dissipated into dense forest. This is just like what happened yesterday, when I trespassed in that woman’s field, I thought, then looked up and spotted her house in the distance.

I panicked. I frightened a badger — likewise, babe! — and bolted through the forest as quickly as I could in a new, randomly chosen direction. This deposited me into a vast, previously unencountered field. On all previous paths, vigorously growing cow parsley had stood on slender stems, about shin high. Here, upright hordes of it grazed my shoulders, while fallen comrades entangled my ankles. Needles of true panic pricked my nape under sweaty hair. Statistically speaking, I assured myself, it was unlikely I would be trapped in this field so long that I would die there.

Although — wouldn’t it serve that woman right if I did die in this field, so close to her own, where I was not allowed? “That would teach her a lesson,” I said into the audio recorder I had brought in case I encountered Tom Cruise. Have to “find some way to notify her,” I explained. (Of my death.) Hopefully she would see my picture in a — newspaper! That would be another good thing about dying out here, I told the recorder. It would “serve” the editor who recklessly assigned me this article — who had irresponsibly approved my travel budget — “right.” It would probably ruin his life, or at least his work life. God, would he be fired? Certainly, at the very least, he would get in trouble. You should never have sent her to a small English town . Would our boss tell him not to blame himself? Hopefully not — I am dead because of him! I didn’t want to die, of course — but if it did happen, at least I would die doing what I loved: making people feel bad and be in trouble deservedly. I had yet to clearly develop a mental image of my widowed husband’s second wife when I realized that I had stumbled, midfield, upon a dirt path leading into a neighborhood. I ran down it — in, I was shocked to discover, the exact direction of the used-car dealer’s palatial estate.

The public footpath alongside the property — which, if a man drinking outside a pub at 2 p.m. is to be believed, is inhabited by Tom Cruise — looked like the aisle down which a fairy princess would glide at her wedding. Actually, no, even nicer: It was like the flower-strewn tunnel of light she would pass through following her death (from being viciously yelled at for walking in a private field BY ACCIDENT) on her journey to eternity. It wound beneath protective arches of graceful branches trailing heaps of white and pink blossoms. A gentle, constant wind rippled the flowers just enough to allow dappled sunlight to illuminate a trail through their lovely shade. So vast were the grounds, so lush the foliage, that the home itself was not visible from any vantage point. I listened for the distant throaty cry of a blue Ferrari, but heard only bird song.

The recorded owner of the estate made no response to my later attempts to contact him, to ask if, perchance, Tom Cruise (possibly in elaborate disguise) could be living in his house. Even if Cruise has no connection to the residence, this absolute lack of response serves to further obscure his existence. Not only is it impossible to determine where he lives — it isn’t even possible to determine where he does not live. The distance between Cruise and the average human remains unshrinkable. At a time when social media renders movie stars ever-present in the public field of vision — accessible to some extent through whatever scrupulously vetted personal information they share, but also broadly trackable via webs of celebrity-watching accounts that widely disseminate photos and rumors — Cruise has distinguished himself by becoming a comet. When, between protracted absences, his inscrutable orbit brings him back into Earth’s visible realm, he briefly commands the simultaneous attention of all its peoples: “Thank you to the people of Abu Dhabi,” read a June post on his Instagram account, alongside a photo of him greeting a crowd at a “Dead Reckoning Part One” premiere. (Also appreciated and acknowledged by their servant-sovereign for their attendance at other “Dead Reckoning Part One” premieres: “the people” of Rome; “everyone” in Seoul.)

At the conclusion of this promotional cycle, after Cruise has thanked everyone for allowing him to create world-class summer cinema, he will almost certainly disappear, not to be heard from again until next year, at which point his re-emergence will proclaim the arrival of “Dead Reckoning Part Two.” This vanishing, while perhaps rooted in avoidance of a press corps that asks questions he doesn’t want to answer, is massaged into something like a sacrificial duty to audiences. In disappearing the moment his work is through — always, like Santa Claus, with the promise of return — Cruise retains the mystique that so many Hollywood stars have lost this century. He goes away so that audiences may experience the thrill of his reappearance, and delight in the promise of movie magic he heralds.

Of course, it is possible that Tom Cruise does not even know that the gargantuan house in the quiet English village exists. But if we assume, perhaps foolishly, that he does live there, I did ascertain one new detail about his reality: He was in the process of having the long private driveway that weaves through the woods and stretches to the unseen manor beyond redone. It looks awesome.

Caity Weaver is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about going on a package trip for youngish people.

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the plane from which Tom Cruise accepted an MTV Movie & TV Award. It was a fighter aircraft, not a fighter jet.

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It was an intimate cocktail party. Tom Cruise wore a cheerful smile so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to test it. “For someone who’s just been fired, you look very happy,” I said. “Sumner Redstone figured you would be angry by the press release.”

“I’m not really fire-able, if that’s even a word,” Cruise replied, his smile intact. “Besides, prods from CEOs never anger me.”

’Top Gun: Maverick’ From Cannes To Theaters – Deadline’s Complete Coverage

The media briefly fed on the studio press release, but as it turned out, Redstone and Paramount went into retreat mode within a week. Paramount’s long-standing deal with Cruise’s production company had elapsed a month earlier, but the CEO forgot to check his facts before issuing his statement, so Cruise looked smart in ignoring the Hollywood rhetoric (details below).

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The incident took place 15 years ago, but I was reminded of it this week as Cruise was again winning some important battles on his latest, much delayed, movie. Top Gun: Maverick would be destined to “own” Memorial Day weekend with a guaranteed, much extended theatrical run pre-streaming. In addition, two further Mission: Impossible sequels were positioned for lavish takeoffs.

With the New York Times christening him “The Last Movie Star,” Cruise’s four-day opening in North America may reach $100 million in 4,732 locations and perhaps hit $200 million internationally.

So that cheerful smile was still implanted on Cruise’s youthful 59-year-old face last week as he skillfully leveraged his simultaneous publicity blast-offs, one from the zealously self-protective Cannes Film Festival, the other from the British Royal Family. This was an historic PR coup: With war jitters raging, the startling image of eight fighter jets streaming red, white and blue across the Euro sky seemed at once defiant and disturbing.

Cruise’s promotional perils over the years have been matched by the physical stunts that he has orchestrated in defining his past films; his death-defying mountain climbs in M:I – 2 likely worried his studio and insurance carriers more than his feats on Top Gun: Maverick . All represented well-calculated adventures in Cruise Control, designed to nurture his continuum of pre-ordained tentpoles.

Also reflected in Cruise’s pursuit of peril has been his idiosyncratic choice of roles, both starring and supporting: Tropic Thunder, Magnolia, Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man , etc. “His filmmaking friends understand that Cruise gets more excited about playing assholes than heroes,” says a director who has worked with him but doesn’t want to be quoted. “No other star has the guts to satirize both studio chiefs and porn freaks.”

Once he has signed on, Cruise is dauntless about seeing them through, he adds.

On Rain Man , Cruise remained committed to a challenging script even though filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Sidney Pollack and Martin Brest had all committed then backed out. Barry Levinson finally directed the award-winning film, in which Cruise played the younger brother of a severely autistic Dustin Hoffman, linked together on an emotional cross-country journey. In Jerry Maguire , Cruise was cast as a ruthless hustler who was unrelentingly chasing the big bucks, but Cruise turned him into an empathetic figure.

There were also failed ventures, such as Cocktail, Vanilla Sky or The Mummy .

A decade ago, when Cruise and his long-term manager Paula Wagner took control of United Artists, they had the option of pursuing the tentpole route or a more demanding slate. They took the latter path, marshalling a political thriller titled Lions For Lambs . with Robert Redford directing Cruise and Meryl Streep. The ill-fated project ran into a recession, a writers’ strike and financing setbacks for MGM, UA’s parent company. After a succession of disappointments, Cruise seemed grateful to return to the Mission franchise.

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What will be his future scenario? The Top Gun: Maverick launch demonstrated anew his skill at commanding the younger movie audience — the Mission films alone have totaled $3.6 billion in global box office. But the present challenges are real: The army of teenagers who liked Top Gun are pushing 50 now, a difficult demo to conquer.

Surveys indicate that more than half of the 45-and-over crowd haven’t been to a movie in over a year compared with 20% of the 18-24 demo. Cruise’s battle to gain a 45-day-plus window for theatrical release thus will likely prove pivotal — the older audience waits for reviews and word-of-mouth.

So will Cruise ever, in fact, be “fired”? There were conflicting reports 15 years ago over what precipitated Sumner Redstone’s outburst. One of his top aides confided to me that his boss had become grumpy about first-dollar gross deals in general. Why should select stars have major paydays before the studio had recouped?

I finally asked Redstone directly two or three weeks later, when we were dining at Dan Tana’s restaurant. “Why did you aim your rant at Cruise?” I asked. “Under his deal he took no money up front. Not even scale?”

“I understand all that,” the CEO snapped. “I’m closing a new deal with him next week. Same terms.”

“Good. Then you’re biting the bullet, right?”

Redstone grunted. “He is still overpaid. And I can still fire him.”

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“If you think, you’re dead.” That’s one of Tom Cruise’s more memorable lines from “Top Gun,” a cautionary reminder that when your engine flames out or an enemy pilot locks you in their sights, hesitation means death. Inadvertently, the line also suggests the best way to enjoy Tony Scott’s immortal 1986 blockbuster: Best not to think too long or hard about the dumb plot, the threadbare romance, the fetishization of U.S. military might or the de rigueur plausibility issues. The key is to succumb, like Cruise’s high-flying Maverick himself, to a world of unchecked instinct and pure sensation, to savor the movie’s symphony of screaming jets and booming Giorgio Moroder, not to mention all those lovingly photographed torsos and tighty-whities.

Jets still scream and muscles still gleam in the ridiculous and often ridiculously entertaining “Top Gun: Maverick,” though in several respects, the movie evinces — and rewards — an unusual investment of brainpower. I’d go further and say that it offers its own decisive reversal of Maverick’s dubious logic: It has plenty on its mind, and it’s gloriously alive.

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A lot of consideration and calculation have clearly gone into this long-aborning blockbuster sequel, insofar as Cruise (one of the producers) and his collaborators have taken such clear pains to maintain continuity with the events, if not the style, of the first film. That’s no small thing, more than 30 years after the fiery young Maverick lost Goose, made peace with Iceman and rode off into the annals of fictional U.S. Navy history. And rather than let bygones be bygones, the director Joseph Kosinski and a trio of screenwriters (Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Cruise’s favorite auteur-wingman, Christopher McQuarrie) have resurrected those threads of rivalry, tragedy and triumph and spun them into uncharted realms of male-weepie grandiosity.

Some of this continuity is a matter of basic story sense, rooted in a shrewd understanding of franchise mechanics and an equally savvy appeal to ’80s nostalgia. But it also has something to do with the 59-year-old Cruise’s close stewardship of his own superhuman image, a commitment that speaks to his talent as well as his monomania. And with the arguable exception of “Mission: Impossible’s” Ethan Hunt, few Cruise characters have felt as aligned with that monomania as Maverick. From the moment he entered the frame in ’86, sporting flippant aviator shades and riding a Kawasaki motorcycle, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell announced himself as a signature Cruise creation — a precision-tooled amalgam of underwear-dancing sex symbol (just three years after “Risky Business”) and the envelope-pushing, heights-scaling action star he would become.

These days, the need for speed still persists for both Cruise and Maverick, even if the latter does more flying than running. But for all the barriers he’s broken and all the miles he’s logged in his career as a Navy test pilot, Maverick occupies a state of self-willed professional stasis. Unwilling to be promoted into desk-job irrelevancy, he is a captain by rank and a rebel by nature. The opening sequence finds him playing Icarus with one of the Navy’s shiny new toys, thumbing his nose in the process at the first of the movie’s two glowering authoritarians. (They’re played by Ed Harris and Jon Hamm.) Old habits die hard, but so do the ghosts of the past, and Maverick, for all his reckless abandon in the cockpit, will soon find himself breaking his own rules by thinking more carefully, and tactically, than he’s ever had to do before.

Called back to the elite Navy training school where he flew planes, defied orders and irritated his peers with distinction, Maverick is charged with preparing the program’s best and brightest for a stealth attack on a far-flung uranium enrichment plant owned by some conveniently unidentified NATO-threatening entity. As impossible missions go, it makes the Death Star trench attack look like a grocery run — a tough assignment for Maverick’s 12 brilliant but still-untested pilots, played by actors including Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez and a terrific Glen Powell as a smug, know-it-all Iceman type. And then there’s the hotheaded Rooster (Miles Teller, sullen as only he can be), whose candidacy is complicated by the fact that his late father was Maverick’s wingman and best friend, Goose (the great Anthony Edwards, seen here in brief shards of footage from the first “Top Gun”). Talk about chickens coming home to roost.

Rooster’s background is a ludicrous contrivance. It’s also the perfect setup for the kind of rich, thorny cross-generational soap opera that — as much as its aspect-ratio-fluctuating flight sequences and its climactic surge of Lady Gaga — is this movie’s reason for being. Those planes may be powered by fuel, but “Top Gun: Maverick” runs on pure, unfiltered dad energy. Try not to smile whenever Cruise’s Maverick flashes a mischievous avuncular grin beneath his helmet and chases his young charges in F/A-18s all over the Mojave Desert, teaching them new moves while wasting no chance to reassert his own superiority. Back on the ground, Maverick and Rooster’s surrogate daddy-son tensions flare into the open, exacerbated by guilt, resentment and their recognition of their shared stubbornness.

The drama might have taken on an intriguingly Oedipal edge if the filmmakers had thought to bring back, say, Meg Ryan as Carole, Goose’s wife and Rooster’s mother. But here, with the exception of Monica Barbaro as one of Maverick’s most gifted proteges, women are few and far between, and even the more prominent ones get mostly perfunctory treatment. With no sign of Kelly McGillis as the Navy instructor who once took Maverick’s breath away, it falls to another flame, Penny (a lovely, underused Jennifer Connelly), to mix a few drinks, provide a flicker of romantic distraction and snuff out the first film’s lingering homoerotic vibes. Not that there are many such whiffs here, and more’s the pity: Kosinski, who previously directed Cruise in the shiny, empty science-fiction drama “Oblivion,” is a skilled craftsman with none of Scott’s horned-up filmmaking energy. (He does salute the original with an opening blast of “Danger Zone” and a rousing game of football in the surf, though the latter is more team-building than steam-building exercise.)

Scott’s admirers may miss that disreputable edge, the unrepentantly vulgar sensibility that made the original “Top Gun” a dreamy, voluptuous hoot. There’s some compensation in Kosinski’s fight and flight sequences, full of face-melting ascents, whiplash-inducing loop-de-loops and other airborne stunts that prove considerably more transporting and immersive than what the first “Top Gun” was able to accomplish. That’s only to be expected, given the more sophisticated hardware involved. Like any proper commercial for the military-industrial complex, “Top Gun: Maverick” teases the latest cutting-edge advances in aeronautics and defense technology, a field that has evolved roughly in step with an ever more digitally subsumed movie industry.

At the same time, thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense. But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon. The original was a risky, relatively low-budget underdog that somehow became a perfectly imperfect movie for its moment, soaring on the wings of its dreamy eroticism and recruitment-commercial aesthetics, a mega-hit soundtrack and an incandescent star. It ushered in a new era of decadence for its producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and for the many gung-ho American blockbusters they would keep cranking out.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is a longer, costlier and appreciably weightier affair, and its expanded emotional scope and heightened production values (including a score by the original film’s composer, Harold Faltermeyer) give it a classy, elegiac sheen; it’s like a hot summer diversion in prestige-dinosaur drag, or vice versa. As a rare big-budget Hollywood movie about men and women who fly without capes, it has a lot riding on it. Once set for a summer 2020 release but delayed almost two years by the pandemic, it arrives bearing the hopes and dreams of a tentatively resurgent industry that could use a non-Marvel theatrical hit. And as such, everything about its story — from the intergenerational conflict to the high stakes of Maverick’s mission to the rusted-out F-14s collecting dust at the periphery of the action — carries an unmistakable subtext. Is this movie one of the last gasps of a dying Hollywood empire? Or is its emotionally stirring, viscerally gripping and proudly old-fashioned storytelling the latest adrenaline shot that the industry so desperately needs?

It’s hard to consider any of this apart from Cruise, whose attention-grabbing actions during an earlier phase of the pandemic — shooting a video of himself going to see “Tenet” in a packed London theater , verbally lashing members of his “Mission: Impossible” crew for flouting COVID-19 protocols — suggest a man who’s placed the weight of an entire troubled industry on his own shoulders. His endless search for the perfect action vehicle has sometimes felt like a quest for some elusive fountain of Hollywood youth, and it’s led to gratifying highs ( “Edge of Tomorrow” ) and inexplicable lows ( “The Mummy” ). Like Maverick, to whom someone wise once said, “Son, your ego is writing checks that your body can’t cash,” Cruise just won’t quit, won’t give up, won’t listen to anyone who tells him no. As a sometime fan of Cruise’s egomania, at least when he’s dangling from a helicopter or literally running to catch a plane, I’m not really complaining.

And so there’s some irony and maybe even a hint of self-awareness in the fact that while Cruise owns just about every moment of this movie, another star winds up stealing it. As Iceman, Maverick’s old adversary turned wingman, mentor and ally, Val Kilmer haunts “Top Gun: Maverick” from its earliest moments but enters it surprisingly late, anchoring a perfectly timed, beautifully played scene that kicks the movie into emotional overdrive. Watching Ice as he greets and counsels Maverick, you may find yourself thinking about the actor playing him, about the recent toll on his health and the rickety trajectory of his own post-’80s and ’90s career, subjects that were illuminated by the recent documentary “Val.” In one fictional moment, he gives us something unmistakably, irreducibly real, partly by puncturing the fantasy of human invincibility that his co-star has never stopped trying to sell.

‘Top Gun: Maverick’

Rated: PG-13, for sequences of intense action, and some strong language Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes Playing: Starts May 27 in general release

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Actor Tom Cruise is the star of several box-office hits, including Risky Business , A Few Good Men , The Firm , Jerry Maguire , and the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Who Is Tom Cruise?

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, better known as Tom Cruise, was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, to Mary and Thomas Mapother. Cruise's mother was an amateur actress and schoolteacher, and his father was an electrical engineer. His family moved around a great deal when Cruise was a child to accommodate his father's career.

Cruise's parents divorced when he was 11, and the children moved with their mother to Louisville, Kentucky, and then to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, after she remarried. Like his mother and three sisters, Cruise suffered from dyslexia, which made academic success difficult for him. He excelled in athletics, however, and considered pursuing a career in professional wrestling until a knee injury sidelined him during high school.

At age 14, Cruise enrolled in a Franciscan seminary with thoughts of becoming a priest, but he left after a year. When he was 16, a teacher encouraged him to participate in the school's production of the musical Guys and Dolls . After Cruise won the lead of Nathan Detroit, he found himself surprisingly at home on the stage, and a career was born.

'Taps,' 'The Outsiders'

Cruise set a 10-year deadline for himself in which to build an acting career. He left school and moved to New York City, struggling through audition after audition before landing an appearance in 1981's Endless Love , starring Brooke Shields. Around this same time, he snagged a small role in the military school drama Taps (1981), co-starring Sean Penn .

His role in Taps was upgraded after director Harold Becker saw Cruise's potential, and his performance caught the attention of a number of critics and filmmakers. In 1983, Cruise appeared in Francis Ford Coppola 's The Outsiders , which also starred Emilio Estevez , Matt Dillon and Rob Lowe —all prominent members of a group of young actors the entertainment press dubbed the "Brat Pack." The film was not well received, but it allowed Cruise to work with an acclaimed director on a high-profile project.

'Risky Business'

His next film, Risky Business (1983), grossed $65 million. It also made Cruise a highly recognizable actor — thanks in no small part to a memorable scene of the young star dancing in his underwear.

In 1986, after a two-year hiatus, the budding actor released the big-budget fantasy film Legend , which did poorly at the box office. That same year, however, Cruise's A-list status was confirmed with the release of Top Gun , which co-starred Kelly McGillis, Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan . The testosterone-fueled action-romance, set against the backdrop of an elite naval flight school, became the highest-grossing film of 1986.

'The Color of Money,' 'Rain Man' and 'Born on the Fourth of July'

Cruise followed the tremendous success of Top Gun with a string of both critically acclaimed and commercially successful films. He first starred in The Color of Money (1986) with co-star Paul Newman , and then went on to work with Dustin Hoffman on Rain Man (1988). Cruise's next role, as Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic in the biopic Born on the Fourth of July (1989), earned him an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe for Best Actor.

'A Few Good Men,' 'The Firm' and 'Interview with a Vampire'

In 1992, Cruise proved once more that he could hold his own opposite a screen legend when he co-starred with Jack Nicholson in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men . The film grossed more than $15 million its first weekend and earned Cruise a Golden Globe nomination. He continued to demonstrate his success as a leading man with The Firm (1993) and Interview with a Vampire (1994), which co-starred Brad Pitt.

'Mission: Impossible,' 'Jerry McGuire'

Next, Cruise hit the big screen with two huge hits—the $64 million blockbuster Mission: Impossible (1996), which the star also produced, and the highly acclaimed Jerry McGuire (1996), directed by Cameron Crowe. For the latter, Cruise earned a second Academy Award nomination and Golden Globe for Best Actor.

'Eyes Wide Shut,' 'Magnolia'

Cruise and then-wife Kidman spent much of 1997 and 1998 in England shooting Eyes Wide Shut , an erotic thriller that would be director Stanley Kubrick 's final film. The movie came out in the summer of 1999 to mixed reviews, but that year Cruise enjoyed greater success with the release of Magnolia . His performance as a self-confident sex guru in the ensemble film earned him another Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

'Vanilla Sky,' 'The Last Samurai'

Cruise then starred in the long-awaited smash hit Mission: Impossible 2 in 2000, alongside Anthony Hopkins , Thandie Newton and Ving Rhames. In 2002, he starred in Vanilla Sky , his second collaboration with Crowe, as well as Steven Spielberg 's Minority Report . The following year, Cruise traveled to Australia to shoot the $100 million war epic The Last Samurai, which earned him another Golden Globe nomination.

'War of the Worlds'

Cruise proved he remained a top draw by starring in the Spielberg-directed remake of the science-fiction classic War of the Worlds (2005), which grossed more than $230 million at the box office.

His next effort, Mission: Impossible 3 (2006), also scored well with audiences. However, Cruise was faced with a professional setback in August when Paramount Pictures ended its 14-year relationship with the actor. The company's chairman cited Cruise's erratic behavior and controversial views as the reason for the split, though industry experts noted that Paramount more likely ended the partnership over Cruise's high earnings from the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Cruise quickly rebounded and on November 2, 2006, he announced his new partnership with film executive Paula Wagner and the United Artists film studio. Their first production as a team, the political drama Lions for Lambs (2007), proved a commercial disappointment despite a strong cast that included Meryl Streep and Robert Redford .

'Tropic Thunder'

Taking a break from weighty material, Cruise delighted audiences with his performance in the comedy Tropic Thunder (2008). Despite his relatively small role in a movie that featured Robert Downey Jr. and Ben Stiller , Cruise stood out by obscuring his trademark good looks to play a balding, obese movie studio executive.

'Valkyrie,' 'Rock of Ages'

In December 2008, Cruise released his second project through United Artists. The film, Valkyrie , was a World War II drama about a plot to assassinate German leader Adolf Hitler . Cruise starred as a German army officer who became involved in the conspiracy.

Cruise returned to one of his most popular franchises in 2011 with Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol . Breaking into new territory, he then starred in the 2012 musical Rock of Ages . Although Cruise received some positive reviews for his performance as a rock star, the movie failed to attract much of an audience.

'Jack Reacher,' 'Edge of Tomorrow'

Returning to his mainstream action roots, Cruise starred in the 2012 crime drama Jack Reacher , based on a book by Lee Child. He then headlined a pair of science-fiction adventures, Oblivion (2013) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014). Showing no signs of slowing down, the veteran actor in 2015 delivered his usual high-energy performance for the fifth installment of his blockbuster franchise, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation .

Latest Movies and Familiar Franchises

In 2016, Cruise reprised the role of Jack Reacher for Never Go Back . He then headlined a reboot of The Mummy (2017), which performed respectably at the box office but was savaged by critics, before earning better reviews later that year for the crime thriller American Made .

2018 brought a return to familiar territory for Cruise, who starred in Mission Impossible —Fallout that summer. Prior to its release, he tweeted a photo to mark day 1 of production on the long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick , scheduled for a June 2020 release.

Scientology and Personal Life

Cruise married actress Mimi Rogers in 1987. It was through Rogers that the actor became a student of Scientology, the religion founded by writer L. Ron Hubbard. Cruise credited the church with curing his dyslexia, and he soon became one of its leading proponents. However, while his spiritual life flourished, his marriage to Rogers ended in 1990. That same year, Cruise made the racecar drama Days of Thunder alongside Kidman. Though the movie was unpopular among critics and fans alike, the two lead actors had real chemistry. On Christmas Eve 1990, after a brief courtship, Cruise and Kidman married in Telluride, Colorado.

Divorce from Kidman

For much of the 1990s, Cruise and Kidman found themselves fiercely defending the happiness and legitimacy of their marriage. They filed two different lawsuits against tabloid publications for stories they considered libelous. In each case, the couple received a published retraction and apology, along with a large monetary settlement which they donated to charity. The couple has two children, Isabella and Connor.

On February 5, 2001, Cruise and Kidman announced their separation after 11 years of marriage. The couple cited the difficulties involved with two acting careers and the amount of time spent apart while working. Following the divorce, Cruise briefly dated his Vanilla Sky co-star Penelope Cruz , followed by a much-publicized relationship with actress Katie Holmes. A month after his ties to Holmes became public, Cruise professed his love for the actress in a now-famous appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, during which he jumped on Winfrey's sofa, shouting "Yes!"

Marriage to Katie Holmes

In June 2005, after a two-month courtship, Cruise proposed to Holmes in a restaurant at the top of the Eiffel tower. In October, they announced that they were expecting their first child together. The hasty proposal and surprise pregnancy quickly became tabloid gossip. But Cruise made even bigger headlines that year as an outspoken advocate for Scientology. He openly criticized former co-star Brooke Shields for using anti-depressants during her recovery from postpartum depression. He also denounced psychiatry and modern medicine, claiming Scientology held the key to true healing. Cruise's statements led to a heated argument with news anchor Matt Lauer on The Today Show in June 2005, for which Cruise later apologized.

In 2006, Cruise and Holmes welcomed daughter Suri into the world. That year, they were married in an Italian castle, with celebrities Will Smith , Jada Pinkett Smith , Jennifer Lopez and Victoria and David Beckham among those in attendance. However, the storybook romance wouldn't last, and in June 2012, the couple announced their separation.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1962
• Birth date: July 3, 1962
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: Syracuse
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Actor Tom Cruise is the star of several box-office hits, including 'Risky Business,' 'A Few Good Men,' 'The Firm,' 'Jerry Maguire' and the 'Mission: Impossible' franchise.
• Astrological Sign: Cancer

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Tom Cruise Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/actors/tom-cruise
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 26, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

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“Pretty Baby,” a two-part documentary about the intense highs and lows of American icon Brooke Shields , brought the house down with its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday. 

The doc explores the appalling sexualization of Shields beginning at age 9, the top-tier modeling and acting career that followed, and the urgent conversations she inspires around what society expects of women.

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An interesting mix of taking heads from her life populate the doc to offer insights. Childhood friend Laura Linney, Lionel Richie, Ali Wentworth, and security czar Gavin de Becker all pop up. Drew Barrymore, sitting cross-legged and barefoot on a stool, corroborated the confusion and difficulties that come with child stardom. A particularly cringey moment came during a section on “Blue Lagoon,” the landmark movie about virile teenagers in love on a deserted island. Director Randal Kleiser, the doc alleges, actively built a narrative in the press that Shields was coming of age sexually in real time with her character.

“They wanted to make it a reality show,” Shields said. “They wanted to sell my sexual awakening.”

Perhaps, the work suggests, this is why Shields broke her white-hot career streak to attend Princeton University. 

“Brooke insisted on getting agency over her mind, over her career, over her future. I found it remarkable and very contemporary in so many ways,” Wilson told the audience. 

After marrying now-husband Chris Henchy, Shields struggled with conception. After many attempts, she delivered daughter Rowan and immediately slipped into an unknown and extreme depression. In 2005, she authored the book “Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression.”

At the same time Shields was promoting the book, Tom Cruise was making the rounds for his Steven Spielberg-directed action film “War of the Worlds.” Cruise, the most famous member of the therapy and prescription drug averse Church of Scientology, publicly went after Shields for promoting antidepressants. He went as far as calling her “dangerous.”

In the doc, Shields reflected on the incident as “ridiculous.”

During one scene of the documentary, the camera zooms in on the headline “What Tom Cruise Doesn’t Know About Estrogen,” from a New York Times op-ed she wrote in response to Cruise. The Eccles applauded in delight, and did so again after actor Judd Nelson quotes his friend Shields at the time: “Tom Cruise should stick to fighting aliens.”

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• Born July 3 , 1962 · Syracuse, New York, USA
• Birth name Thomas Cruise Mapother IV
• Height 5′ 7″ (1.70 m)
• In 1976, if you had told fourteen-year-old Franciscan seminary student Thomas Cruise Mapother IV that one day in the not too distant future he would be Tom Cruise, one of the top 100 movie stars of all time, he would have probably grinned and told you that his ambition was to join the priesthood. Nonetheless, this sensitive, deeply religious youngster who was born in 1962 in Syracuse, New York, was destined to become one of the highest paid and most sought after actors in screen history. Tom is the only son (among four children) of nomadic parents, Mary Lee (Pfeiffer), a special education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer. His parents were both from Louisville, Kentucky, and he has German, Irish, and English ancestry. Young Tom spent his boyhood always on the move, and by the time he was 14 he had attended 15 different schools in the U.S. and Canada. He finally settled in Glen Ridge, New Jersey with his mother and her new husband. While in high school, Tom wanted to become a priest but pretty soon he developed an interest in acting and abandoned his plans of becoming a priest, dropped out of school, and at age 18 headed for New York and a possible acting career. The next 15 years of his life are the stuff of legends. He made his film debut with a small part in Endless Love (1981) and from the outset exhibited an undeniable box office appeal to both male and female audiences. With handsome movie star looks and a charismatic smile, within 5 years Tom Cruise was starring in some of the top-grossing films of the 1980s including Top Gun (1986) ; The Color of Money (1986) , Rain Man (1988) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) . By the 1990s he was one of the highest-paid actors in the world earning an average 15 million dollars a picture in such blockbuster hits as Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) , Mission: Impossible (1996) and Jerry Maguire (1996) , for which he received an Academy Award Nomination for best actor. Tom Cruise's biggest franchise, Mission Impossible, has also earned a total of 3 billion dollars worldwide. Tom Cruise has also shown lots of interest in producing, with his biggest producer credits being the Mission Impossible franchise. In 1990 he renounced his devout Catholic beliefs and embraced The Church of Scientology claiming that Scientology teachings had cured him of the dyslexia that had plagued him all of his life. A kind and thoughtful man well known for his compassion and generosity, Tom Cruise is one of the best liked members of the movie community. He was married to actress Nicole Kidman until 2001. Thomas Cruise Mapother IV has indeed come a long way from the lonely wanderings of his youth to become one of the biggest movie stars ever. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Tom McDonough, Grant failor
• Spouses Katie Holmes (November 18, 2006 - August 20, 2012) (divorced, 1 child) Nicole Kidman (December 24, 1990 - August 8, 2001) (divorced, 2 children) Mimi Rogers (May 9, 1987 - February 4, 1990) (divorced)
• Children Isabella Jane Cruise Suri Cruise Connor Cruise
• Parents Thomas Mapother III Mary Lee Pfeiffer
• Relatives William Mapother (Cousin) Amy Mapother (Cousin) Katherine Mapother (Cousin) Lee Anne De Vette (Sibling)
• Often plays romantic leading men with an edge
• Often plays characters caught up in extraordinary circumstances
• Frequently plays intelligent yet laidback and likeable characters
• Beaming smile and intense eye contact
• Boundless off-stage energy
• His acting idol is Paul Newman . Much to the delight of Cruise, they became good friends during work on The Color of Money (1986) . Newman got him into racing, and Cruise ultimately raced on his team.
• Stopped to help a hit and run victim and paid her hospital bills. The victim was aspiring Brazilian actress Heloisa Vinhas (1996).
• Insists on performing many of his own stunts in his films, including climbing the exterior of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, during the filming of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) , and driving during the car chases in Jack Reacher (2012) .
• Cruise earned roughly $75 million for Mission: Impossible II (2000) . He did this by turning down any upfront salary, for instead taking a back-end deal that landed him 30% of the film's gross for both his producing and acting duties.
• He did not stay for the remainder of the 2002 Academy Awards after opening them because it was his turn to look after his and ex-wife Nicole Kidman 's children. He reportedly left the Kodak Theatre by a back door after opening proceedings and dashed home to watch the rest of the event on television with his kids Connor and Isabella.
• The thing about filmmaking is I give it everything, that's why I work so hard. I always tell young actors to take charge. It's not that hard. Sign your own checks, be responsible.
• [to Jay Leno regarding his topless Vanity Fair cover shoot] I don't drink but I had a beer that night and they only did one setup like that. I'm a cheap date. What can I say?
• [on Eyes Wide Shut (1999) ] We knew from the beginning the level of commitment needed. We felt honored to work with Stanley Kubrick . We were going to do what it took to do this picture, whatever time, because I felt - and Nic [ Nicole Kidman ] did, too - that this was going to be a really special time for us. We knew it would be difficult. But I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn't done this.
• I have cooked turkeys in my day but when Mom's around I let her do it.
• I was 18 when I saw Akira Kurosawa 's Seven Samurai (1954) . After about 30 seconds, I realized that this was not just a cultural thing, it was universal. Years later, I read Bushido. It talked about many things that I strive for in my own life: loyalty, compassion, responsibility, the idea of looking back on your life and taking responsibility for everything you've ever done. I'm fascinated by the samurai and the samurai code - it's one of the main reasons I wanted to make The Last Samurai (2003) .
• Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two (2025) - $13,000,000 + % of back end
• Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) - $13,000,000 + % of back end
• Top Gun: Maverick (2022) - $13,000,000 + % of back end
• The Mummy (2017) - $13,000,000 + % of gross
• Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) - $12,500,000 + % of back end

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April 18, 2024

Current Issue

Persistence of Mission

August 2, 2023

Paramount Pictures/Skydance

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One , 2023

At the end of August 2020, Tom Cruise was on a mission to prove it was safe to go back to the movies. Donning a black mask over his nose and mouth, the actor sped off to see Christopher Nolan’s Tenet as it opened in London. Such was the confusion of that summer in the film industry that even as Tenet debuted, Access Hollywood , the entertainment news TV show, pronounced the title of Nolan’s film “ten-AY,” to rhyme with bidet . “Back to the movies,” Cruise said as he entered the theater by himself, very low-key. A hundred and fifty minutes later, exiting up the stairs, he quietly answered “I loved it” to someone in the audience who asked what he thought. A perfectly timed stealth mission: Cruise swooped in and out. Theatrical film exhibition would not die on his watch.

But as watchers of his Mission: Impossible movies know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Four months later, on the set of Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One , then called simply Mission: Impossible 7 , Cruise was caught on tape berating his crew for violating Covid protocols. “We are not shutting this fucking movie down!” he yelled. “If I see you do it again, you’re fucking gone…. No apologies. You can tell it to the people that are losing their fucking homes because our industry is shut down.” The recording was leaked to a British tabloid; quickly social media pointed out that the old Tom Cruise, the one notorious for manic rants during which he did things like mansplain Brooke Shields’s postpartum depression on The Today Show , was back. 

Production on the new Mission: Impossible movie had been halted three times before Cruise’s outburst, while the release of his Top Gun sequel, Top Gun: Maverick , completed in 2019, had been postponed again and again. He was on edge, but as it turned out there was nothing to worry about. In a career that has been defined by the greatest luck and hardest work, these delays worked to his advantage. Finally released last summer, Maverick was an enormous hit. It has made $1.5 billion to date, and is credited— largely credited, as they say—with saving Hollywood from ruin.

Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One , also delayed about two years, came out this summer and nearly performed the same feat as Top Gun: Maverick did. It raked it in at the box office after a full year of non–Tom Cruise movies like The Flash tanked—bad movies that are part of bad cycles that have gotten worse, and which no longer make money. The new M:I movie emerges into what is arguably a more perilous time for Hollywood than the pandemic, with studios threatening to use artificial intelligence to replace writers and actors, whose unions have called strikes. This potential new digital blight is coupled with the cheapness of the studio bosses in the streaming era, who goosed their studios’ stock value during the pandemic and prefer to cut costs rather than share the wealth.   

And yet nobody is going to thank Tom Cruise twice, not this year. As we wait until next summer or later for Part Two of Cruise’s multimillion dollar cliffhanger, production of which has been shut down by the Screen Actors Guild strike, mania for the binary of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Nolan’s Oppenheimer has gripped a world suddenly rich with quality non-superhero blockbuster success stories. Add to that the very unexpected smash breakout of another long-delayed movie, the right-wing action thriller Sound of Freedom , and suddenly the movies are back. They are so back it’s almost like they have returned to a time before the superhero apocalypse—that computer-generated miasma instrumental in training AI to take over—ground them into digital dust. In that era, Cruise was the last man standing. Now all of a sudden he is underperforming, despite his movie taking in more than $400 million worldwide so far.

Recently I saw the 1980 espionage thriller-comedy Hopscotch , starring Walter Matthau as a CIA agent fired for sticking to his old ways in an increasingly corporatized spy biz. Matthau was sixty when he made it, the same age as Tom Cruise when he was making Dead Reckoning . It goes without saying that these two quintessential American actor/movie stars have little in common. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is all action, his emotions hidden, his skills surprising, his loyalty to his team and their mission limitless. He is the master of every machine and gadget. We are meant to understand that he can do anything. Matthau, by contrast, chooses to do almost nothing. He shows no loyalty, wears his disgruntlement on his sleeve, and chews scenery. Always old before his time, Matthau lingers in cafés going over notes, scheming to make his bosses look dumb.

Hopscotch includes the things Mission: Impossible movies leave out. We see Matthau haggling over safe house rentals and forged passport prices, buying clothes for his disguises, walking around empty fields as he silently plans. As for gadgets, he uses a paperclip to short out the lights in a police station, the paperclip being the one device Hopscotch shares with Dead Reckoning . There, Hayley Atwell, playing a thief, uses one to free herself from handcuffs, then uses them to attach Cruise to the steering wheel of a Fiat 500, which is trapped in a tunnel where it is of course about to be hit by an oncoming train. 

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One , 2023

Cruise at sixty still does his own stunts, which appear more dangerous and extreme with each of these movies, especially since he has teamed with the director-screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, starting with the fifth in the series, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation (2015). Legitimately thrilling, their set pieces are nonstop inventive in the manner of can-you-top-this American know-how, returned to ultra-professional glory from the dirtbag daring of the Jackass movies, their natural competition (rather than The Flash ). Matthau at sixty, on the other hand, knew one real test of cinematic greatness was the ability to sit there and do nothing and still hold the screen. We cannot picture Matthau at that age or at any age learning to hold his breath for nine minutes so he could do an underwater stunt in tactical gear holding a flashlight in his mouth.

It is hard to believe that when the first Mission: Impossible movie debuted in 1996, Cruise had already been a movie star for thirteen years. When Brian De Palma’s film version of the TV series came out with Cruise and Jon Voight, the actors from the original 1960s show complained. The movie was nihilistic, there were double agents in it, it wasn’t patriotic. These were strange objections from the stars of a series that featured extrajudicial assassinations, unofficial regime change, and state-sanctioned kidnappings.

In fact, the movie, post–cold war, kept the best parts of the show: the lifelike masks characters use to impersonate each other, allowing actors to play two parts with the same face, and the idea that espionage was a series of short or long cons more like theater acting and stage magic than diplomacy by other means.  

De Palma also linked the franchise to cinema history in a way Cruise and McQuarrie have maintained, bringing the mise-en-scene and the mood all the way back through Hitchcock to German Expressionism via the silent crime and spy movies Fritz Lang made in the 1920s, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler and Spione . Right away, in the first scene of De Palma’s film, a tense interrogation is deconstructed before our eyes as the walls of the set are moved aside or flattened to reveal an empty warehouse—the soundstage itself—while the actors peel off their faces, revealing nothing beneath them but the faces of other actors.

As in Hopscotch , but not in the TV series, the enemy in the Mission: Impossible movies is within. It is always a competing government spy agency that is stopping Cruise and his team from accomplishing the mission they have chosen to accept. Beneath the deep state is a deeper state still. Fittingly, as on the TV show, the news of these missions comes from a tape recorder that self-destructs, as if Cruise has found a stray Nagra on the set that instead of being used to record dialogue has been rigged to emit some smoke before the editor cuts away from it and the theme music starts to play. That music, by Lalo Schifrin, is the prime intellectual property in this series of films, in itself a reason to keep making them, and in its dot-dash intensity a spur to make them good.

Cruise’s employers are always disavowing him in these movies. He returns to work like Charlie Brown coming back to kick the nuclear football while Lucy holds it for him again. Dead Reckoning , despite its setbacks, has the lucky perspicacity to appear to be seeing into the future. The overarching conspiracy here has to do with a killer AI set to take over the world’s entire OS, forever blurring the line between reality and illusion, truth and lie. More than ever, the M:I films are about the nature of the film industry itself, and the way stories are told by actors—actors who seem to act as writers, writing the movie as they go along.

Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise on the set of Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One

The AI, therefore, can take over spy systems and imitate a familiar voice (Simon Pegg’s), then say into Cruise’s earpiece, “Go left! No, go right! No, go left!” as he chases an assassin, in imitation of the directions in a screenplay or those given by a director on set. Of course the AI paints him into a corner—it exists to ruin his performance. In Dead Reckoning , both Cruise and the entire US surveillance apparatus have to go fully analog to fight their AI enemy, a narrative turn that both reaffirms the movie’s dedication to filming real stunts in front of the camera and presciently combats the studio bosses’ insistence on a new filmmaking world of computer-generated screenplays and performances along with special effects.

One of the most admirable lines in the movie comes after Atwell’s character asks Cruise and his team why they are willing to help her, since they don’t even know her. “What difference does that make?” he asks, a fading echo of Hawksian professionalism and humanism in this globalized landscape, part of this film series’ (and Cruise’s) anti-psychological approach, where backstory always struggles to be buried and forgotten, and usually is. It’s the opposite of the maudlin nonsense about family in the Fast & Furious movies.

It is hard to ignore that Cruise has looked a little tired during the extensive, international press tour for Dead Reckoning . Visibly older than when he went to see Tenet in London three years ago, he nonetheless exudes a kind of perplexed, patient bonhomie as he travels the world to sell his film, his slightly disconnected, mechanized mien and tense bearing now newly patient, an aura that envelops the entire category “movie star.” In cinemas, before the film starts, a very short clip of Cruise and McQuarrie plays in which the star-producer and writer-director thank the audience for seeing their movie in a theater, where they made it to be seen. McQuarrie, gray-haired and gray-bearded, gets to look his age; Cruise is locked in, in more ways than one.

With the temporary shutdown of Dead Reckoning, Part Two , Cruise is once again stuck in the quagmire of twenty-first-century studio filmmaking, where every crisis resolves in stasis. Will there come a time for him when that kind of entropy beats his luck and hard work? So much went wrong in making Part One . When the young British actor Nicholas Hoult, slated to play the film’s principal villain, dropped out, Cruise and McQuarrie or someone got the idea to replace him with the journeyman trouper Esai Morales. What luck that the most calm, cool, and collected character in the movie, and the best-looking and most evil, just happens to be a man for today—a pro-union Puerto Rican TV actor from Brooklyn the exact same age as Cruise. On such accidental genius the Hollywood cinema survives another year.

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More by A. S. Hamrah

February 3, 2024

Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One is in theaters now. 

A. S. Hamrah is the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018 . (January 2024)

From ‘The Lady Eve’

December 20, 1990 issue

The Current Cinema

December 11, 1975 issue

Chris Killip: Skinningrove

Photographer Chris Killip presents a group of largely unpublished pictures from the village of Skinningrove in North Yorkshire.

July 22, 2014

Nora the Perfectionist

To be a perfectionist is normally to be a pain. Nora Ephron was a picky person, who worried about all kinds of trivial things. This can make one completely unbearable. Nora actually made it attractive by mocking it in herself. Those impossibly detailed orders for lunch or a latte in…

June 27, 2012

Marville’s Vanished Paris

Charles Marville’s documentation of old Paris secures his place in the highest rank of photographic achievement.

September 17, 2013

Orson Welles at 100

Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915. To mark the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, we present here four essays from the New York Review archives.

May 6, 2015

April Films to Watch at Home

J. Hoberman’s monthly film roundup, usually a selection of what to see in theaters, now offers films that can be streamed online while readers are staying at home because of the pandemic. 

April 4, 2020

Anselm Kiefer, in Love with Loss

Over the years, Kiefer’s work, continually summoning up Bible stories, wartime legends, and mystical awarenesses, has become woozily grandiloquent. He is an extraordinary showman, however. His pictures, where model ships or women’s frocks are often placed atop images of endless fields, the sea, or forests, can have a phenomenal physical…

August 19, 2011

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23 Unsettlingly Nice Tom Cruise Stories

This post originally ran after the release of The Mummy . Because Tom Cruise has continued to be a nice guy ( unless COVID-19 protocols are being broken ), we have continued to update this post to include more unsettlingly nice stories.

First things first: We get it. There’s an awful lot of unsettling Scientology stuff ( a whole lot of stuff ) around Tom Cruise. But pay no attention to that: Cruise has a new movie out , which means it’s time for the latest round of absolutely gushing stories about Tom Cruise. They’re kind of like Prince stories — always unique and surprising, often exceedingly delightful, if you can ignore the odd feeling in the back of your spine. On a Hollywood press tour, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that Tom Cruise is a super-nice dude.

He taught Zac Efron how to ride a motorcycle. In 2010, a young Zac Efron sat down with the now-defunct Details magazine for a cover shoot. He was in his post– High School Musical phase, trying to break out of the teen-star shell. Somewhere along the line, Tom Cruise asked him if he knew how to ride a motorcycle. “You wanna learn how?” Cruise asked , inviting young Efron to his house. According to Details , Cruise “taught him how a motorcycle engine works, showed him the hangar with his dozens of pristine bikes — including the Triumphs he rode in the Mission: Impossible movies.” When Details asked him why he thought Tom Cruise would do such a nice thing, he had no idea. “I don’t know. I don’t even want to know,” he said. “It’s just so cool that he gave a shit, the fact that he cared at all. No one else did that.”

He helped Mummy co-star Jake Johnson get in shape. “Here’s a story that is very anti-Hollywood, but very Tom,” Johnson told Thrillist recently . “He wanted me to work out with him and get in shape for the movie. People have told me in the past, including New Girl , that I need to lose weight and stay in shape. But they don’t tell me how. It’s like, ‘Hey tubbo, fit into these slacks!’” Instead Tom Cruise invited Johnson to his gym (the “ Pain Cave ”). “He said, ‘You’ll be training with me and my trainers. If you want I’ll put you on a food plan with my chef. The food is great,’” Johnson recalled. When someone on Mummy set insisted that Johnson wait until after Cruise was done working out so the star could have the gym alone, Cruise was furious. “Let me make something crystal clear: I don’t care what anybody on the crew says to you, they don’t know what I’m saying to you,” Johnson remembered him saying. “And I’m saying to you that you are always welcome. I don’t care what I’m doing in there. You’re not other. You’re my castmate. Come in.”

He stayed in touch with the kid who dropped out of Jerry Maguire . Before Jonathan Lipnicki, there was another kid set to steal the show on the Jerry Maguire set. He spent a few weeks filming, but after a certain point, he “ran out of gas,” Cameron Crowe told Deadline , and wanted to leave the production. The role was recast — Lipnicki stepped in — but Crowe got a call from the mother of the boy who almost took the role. “Weeks later, the mother of the first kid calls the office. I got on the phone and she says, ‘Will you please tell Tom Cruise thank you for the way he has kept in touch with my son, sent him letters and gifts, and just let him know all is well?’ I thought, wow, I had no idea Tom Cruise was doing that,” he said. Crowe continued:

“She said, ‘It really helped my son. He’s over it now, he’s fine, and Tom did a beautiful job helping him transition back to his life.’ I went to Tom, later, and said, you quietly helped this kid through what could have been a terrible transition. Thank you, but why did you never tell any of us? Tom said, ‘I just didn’t want that first actor to go to the movies, look at the screen and think he’d failed. I wanted him to love movies, his entire life.’ That is the quiet way Tom Cruise conducts his professional life.”

He gave Kanye West advice on his fledgling comedy career, but declined a role in Kanye’s HBO pilot. Once upon a time, Kanye made a comedy pilot for HBO. When Vulture saw the pilot , Wyatt Cenac revealed overhearing a conversation between Kanye and Cruise: “Kanye had been trying to get Tom Cruise to be in the pilot. And he had asked him because they were friendly. And we’re shooting a scene [in the Escalade] and at one point Kanye’s like, ‘Shut the fuck up, it’s Tom Cruise,’ and because he couldn’t get out of the car, he had to take the phone call smashed between people,” Cenac said. “You can hear Tom Cruise laughing [ does a Tom Cruise laugh ] as Kanye goes, ‘Yeah, man, I’ve been working on the improv stuff, you know, all your suggestions were great.’ [ Does another Tom Cruise laugh. ] That went on for like 15 minutes. Tom Cruise never did the show and we had to hire a Tom Cruise look-alike that was like five-feet taller than Cruise.”

He’s a good sport on set. “I think there’s something very right with him in that he cares so much about the audience experience,” his Mission: Impossible co-star Simon Pegg told Jimmy Fallon. “It’s like he’s obsessive with giving people an authentic experience.” Actor-director Todd Field, who acted with Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut , said something similar of working with Cruise and Stanley Kubrick: “You’ve never seen [an actor] more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.”

He convinced the Black Eyed Peas to do a song for Knight and Day. Tom Cruise, a self-described “big fan of the Peas,” was almost done with filming Knight and Day when he, co-star Cameron Diaz, and ex-wife Katie Holmes saw them play over Super Bowl weekend. He was struck with a brilliant idea : “As we were watching, it occurred to me that this is the perfect time, so I called up Will [i.am], and he doesn’t have any time, but I asked, ‘Are you interested [in doing a song for the film]?’” They were, so they did.

He totally did not get mad at Cuba Gooding Jr.’s dad when he asked about his sexuality. During the filming of Jerry Maguire , Cuba Gooding Sr. impolitely inquired about Tom Cruise’s sexuality. “He gave Tom Cruise a hug and said, ‘I love you, man. Now seriously, are you gay or not?’” Gooding Jr. recalled , years later. “I almost fainted. And thought, Please, lord, let me disappear .” Cruise was so chill dealing with the prying parent: “Tom just laughed and said ‘No,’” his co-star reported.

He gave Kevin Pollock a $500 pen (and then a second pen). During rehearsals for A Few Good Men , Kevin Pollock noticed Tom Cruise making notes in his script with a ridiculously huge pen. At first, they joked about it. Then, Cruise convinced Pollock to try writing with it. “It’s like an angel wing floating on a cloud. It was a magical pen,” Pollock recalled to the Chive . Even Demi Moore agreed the pen was a total joy to use. When Pollock learned the pen cost $500, he was crestfallen. Later, Cruise’s assistant showed up with a gift: the luxury writing utensil itself. When Pollock admitted to his co-star that he hadn’t used the pen because he felt it deserved a special spot on his mantle, Cruise bought him a second $500 pen — one for the mantle, and one for Pollock’s pocket.

He personally arranged for Bill Hader to leave a set and get home to New York after an attempted bombing in Times Square. As Bill Hader and Tom Cruise were in Los Angeles filming promos for the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, word reached the set that a car bomb had just gone off in Times Square. Hader was a new dad at the time, concerned about his wife and infant daughter in New York. Cruise noticed Hader’s concern, and asked when he’d get to go home to check on them. Hader wasn’t due back to the city for two more days, and so, Tom Cruise took over the set and got Bill Hader home by 8 a.m. the next morning. As Hader recalled:

“He thinks for a second. ‘No,’ he says. ‘We’ll get you home tonight.’ And in that moment, Tom Cruise, as Les Grossman, in a karate gi, began to direct all my coverage,” Hader recalled. “All my footage, all my close-ups. Boom! We do three perfect takes. Boom, boom, boom. Everyone’s chest-butting each other, some people are chest-butting themselves, people are going insane.” Two days’ worth of work, Hader said, “and he got it done in 45 minutes.” Then Katie Holmes came up to him and handed him a piece of paper with his new flight information. “You’re on the red eye tonight,” she told him. “I’m like, ‘What?!’” Hader said. Because Cruise got him out of work and on a plane that night, he was able to surprise his wife and daughter by 7:45 the next morning and check in on them in person. “So that’s what it’s like to work with Tom Cruise,” Hader said.

He rescued a family from their burning sailboat. While vacationing with then-wife Nicole Kidman and their kids on their luxury yacht in 1997, Tom Cruise spotted a sailboat going up in flames. The actor sent the yacht’s skiff to rescue the people aboard — French “paper tycoon” Jacques Lejeune, 68, his wife, Bernadette, 42, daughter Eugénie, 7, and two crew members — according to People .

He helped rescue a victim of a hit-and-run, and paid her medical bills. The year before the sailboat rescue, Tom Cruise was driving down Wilshire Boulevard on a rainy night when he watched Heloisa Vinhas, a 23-year-old aspiring actress, get hit by a car. Cruise commanded someone to call for help and accompanied her to UCLA Medical Center, according to People . He even picked up the $7,000 medical bill for her broken left leg and bruised ribs when he found out she wasn’t insured. “If he’s not Superman, he can be Batman — Batman doesn’t have superpowers,” Vinhas told the mag.

He saved a pair of his littlest fans during a crowded red carpet. At Mission: Impossible ’s West End premiere, Tom Cruise spotted preteen fans Laurence Sadler, 7, and Christos “Chris” Tzanetis, 13. As he and Kidman made their way through the crowd, he eyed Sadler being pinned against a steel bar. Cruise rescued both young fans from being crushed, and called for a police officer’s help. “Every night I say good-night to him when I pass his poster in my room,” Sadler told People at the time.

He never forgets Dakota Fanning’s birthday. “He has sent me a birthday gift every year since I was 11 years old,” Fanning told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live . “I always think, Oh, when I’m 18, he’ll probably stop. Oh, 21, he’ll stop. But every year. It’s really kind.” Fanning says he usually gifts her shoes.

He bought his publicist’s daughter so many wedding gifts. Pat Kingsley and Tom Cruise had one of the closest talent-publicist relationships. They met after he’d finished work on A Few Good Men , and often talked every day. They parted ways, she later said, over a disagreement over The Last Samauri ’s press tour: He wanted to talk more openly about Scientology; she thought it wasn’t a good talking point during the press tour. But before that, she said, “We talked constantly,” telling The Hollywood Reporter that they shared 11 p.m. calls almost nightly. “He was an insomniac. I liked the fact that he was so much fun. And he was so thoughtful. He remembered birthdays, my daughter’s birthday. He came to her wedding; she was registered somewhere for the china, and he bought out everything. They’ve got things they haven’t even opened yet, and they’ve been together 15 years!”

He sends Kirsten Dunst (and Jimmy Kimmel) a cake every year. Kirsten Dunst acted with Cruise in 1994’s Interview With a Vampire . “I ran into Tom like five years ago, and now I get this cake every that’s one of the best cakes I’ve ever had. It’s from Dylan’s Bakery in Thousand Oaks,” she explained to Jimmy Kimmel in 2015. “We call it the ‘Cruise cake’ at my family’s house. We’re like, ‘Cruise cake’s here!’ And it’s gone within a day.” Kimmel agrees that the cake is good, and that he receives one regularly, too.

He gifted his lawyer a rare book of English history. When Cruise’s longtime lawyer Bert Fields turned 86, the actor got him an especially thoughtful gift. Fields received a customized Cruise cake and “an extremely rare edition of [Raphael] Holinshed’s history of England,” Fields told THR . “He knows I write about English history, and this is a fantastic prize.”

He’s maintained a friendship with Billy Wilder in the director’s last years. Cameron Crowe really wanted the legendary director to take the role of Jerry’s mentor, Dicky Fox. Crowe was inspired by The Apartment , and set a meeting with Wilder to offer him the role. When he arrived to Wilder’s office, the director started chatting about his old movies, mistaking him for a messenger. When Crowe offered him the role, he declined, finally saying yes after a long courtship.

When filming began, Wilder apologized and dropped out. Crowe told Cruise. “Cruise says, let’s go talk him into it. We drive to Billy Wilder’s office. Billy is there, and he lights up when he sees that it’s Tom Cruise. He invites us in,” Crowe recalled to Deadline . “He tells Tom these stories about Cary Grant, and Sunset Boulevard . He’s just magnificent. And I realize he is in full Hollywood director, getting-ready-to-make-another-picture-as-soon-as-possible mode, and he’s got Tom Cruise in his office. And I’m virtually invisible at this point, as that romance is happening.” Eventually, Wilder finally declined and the role was recast. Crowe told Deadline Wilder and Cruise remained friends until the director’s death. “He loved Billy Wilder and we talked about him, constantly. Tom wrote notes to Billy, and they developed a little bit of a friendship. When Billy passed away, Tom came to the memorial and really let everybody know how much he loved Billy. I think Tom got a big kick out of Wilder. How could you not?”

He got Cameron Crowe back into directing. After the failure of Elizabethtown , Cameron Crowe wasn’t sure about directing another movie. Then Tom Cruise took him for a drive, and the two of them ended up on the set of Knocked Up . “Mr. Cruise introduced Mr. Crowe to Mr. Apatow, who joked that he’d been stealing for years from Say Anything , the sharp-witted teen comedy that first established Mr. Crowe as a director in 1989,” the New York Times reported. “Cruise sidles up to me and goes: ‘See? Get out of your house, man, it’s fun,’” Crowe recalled to the Times . “And that’s when it felt like, yeah, it’s time to direct again.”

He released Jessica Chastain from her Oblivion contract so she could star in Zero Dark Thirty. Jessica Chastain was set to co-star with Tom Cruise in the dystopian action movie Oblivion when she got a call from Kathryn Bigelow, who wanted Chastain for Zero Dark Thirty . Before even reading the script, Chastain told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017, she agreed to star. Cruise came to Chastain’s rescue: “I was excited to do [ Oblivion ]. But when [ Zero Dark Thirty ] came my way, I realized I had to do this. And the person who made it possible for me to do this movie is Tom Cruise. Someone contacted him from my agency and said, ‘Listen, she wants to work with you. And she would love to, but there is this other film, and it’s so important.’ And he said, ‘OK, we’re going to let you out of your contract.’” Olga Kurylenko eventually signed on to Oblivion in Chastain’s place.

He always takes his kids calls, even in the middle of a scene. “There were times that I was about ready to say ‘Action; and the phone rang,” Steven Spielberg told People in 2002 about working with Tom Cruise in Minority Report . “If it was Tom’s kids, everything stopped for that. Just when he was preparing for probably the hardest scene he has in the whole movie, the phone rang. Anybody else would have looked up with anger in their eyes, but he immediately broke character and walked off and took the call.” Spielberg was impressed by his star’s attention to his kids even when it came to minor emergencies: “Connor or Isabella had stuck an eraser in their eye or something like that. It was not serious, but Dad came to the rescue. I thought it was amazing. I have been known to say, ‘I’ll call them back after the shot.’”

He bought W. Earl Brown Elton John–Billy Joel tickets after a rehearsal ran late. While shooting Vanilla Sky , a rehearsal ran late and Cruise’s scene partner W. Earl Brown ( Deadwood , Preacher ) missed an Elton John–Billy Joel concert he had tickets to in L.A. Once Tom Cruise found out, according to People , he made it up to Brown: “You didn’t give your tickets away? Why didn’t somebody tell me?” he reportedly asked. When Elton John and Billy Joel played in L.A. a few nights later, Cruise got Brown two tickets to the show, fourth-row center.

He danced to Yung Joc on BET. Technically, this isn’t a nice thing Tom Cruise did for any one person in particular, but rather one very nice thing he did for the internet as a whole. For a short period of time, the Yung Joc motorcycle dance was the most important dance you could do. And Cruise, in an appearance on BET, did the dance. He sold it, committed completely. So here you have it: Tom Cruise dancing on 106 & Park during Mission: Impossible III ’s press tour.

He helped Jennifer Connelly face her fear of flying. Turns out Tom Cruise can help someone without even knowing he’s doing it. Jennifer Connelly told Graham Norton that she suffered from a “really crippling fear of flying” for years before she filmed Top Gun: Maverick. She didn’t realize her character had a scene in the air. But even though he was unaware of her phobia, Cruise gave her a reassuring heads-up from the cockpit: “He’s like, ‘It’s going to be very graceful, very elegant, just some very elegant rolls, you know. It’s going to be nice and easy.’”

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Tom Cruise is a guy who is willing to perform incredible feats for the sake of his movies. He insists on doing his own stunts, which has resulted in Cruise free climbing buildings and jumping off cliffs. At this point, it seems the only thing Cruise hasn’t done is spacewalk, and that's potentially in the cards.There has been talk in the past about Tom Cruise filming a movie in space , but for that to happen, somebody has to be able to get him up there. On that note, Elon Musk has been linked to the production for a while and has now provided an update on its status.

The SpaceX CEO recently caught up with ET at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony and discussed a few topics with the news outlet. Eventually, he provided some thoughts on Tom Cruise's proposed space movie. The tech magnate revealed that he's spoken to the A-lister, but the latter half of his update may disappoint some people:

Tom Cruise has said he wants to do Mission: Impossible in space. We've had some discussions, but I'm not sure where his mind is at.

While Elon Musk calls it “ Mission: Impossible in space,” he’s likely conflating the actor's major franchise with the space movie idea, which as far as we know are separate projects. There have been no indications, at this point, that the Oscar nominee's plans to film a movie in space also involve the M:I franchise. Still, Musk, or somebody like him, is going to be key to a project like this. The most complex part of the whole endeavor would be figuring out how to get the Top Gun icon, any other needed actors, and all the necessary equipment, from Earth into orbit, and that's where Space X would come in. 

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We don’t know what the upcoming Tom Cruise movie set in space would be about, and it's not even clear just how many people within his inner circle are aware of that info. While the expectation is that only part of the Cruise movie would occur in space , there are a lot of unknowns here. 

Per reported details on the space movie , frequent Cruise collaborator Doug Liman is working on a script and plans to direct the project as well. Perhaps, now that Liman’s done with Road House , which he wanted a theatrical release for, he’ll have more time to dedicate to Cruise's cosmic movie.

It’s maybe not surprising that there hasn’t been a lot of movement on the actor's feature. He’s been pretty busy filming two back-to-back Mission: Impossible movies, one of which had to struggle through a global pandemic. He’s had a lot going on and probably hasn’t had the time to focus on his potential movie in outer space. His film aimed to be the first to be shot in outer space. However, a Russian production ended up winning that space race , becoming the first to shoot scenes outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. 

Generally speaking, what Tom Cruise wants, Tom Cruise gets, so it seems likely that if the actor wants to shoot a movie in space, it will happen eventually. When any of this could actually happen is still very much an open question. We know that Top Gun 3 is also in development and, if Cruise does go to work on that after finishing the (now-untitled) Mission: Impossible sequel, then his dreams of heading to space (with the help of Elon Musk) will have to wait even longer. 

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CinemaBlend’s resident theme park junkie and amateur Disney historian, Dirk began writing for CinemaBlend as a freelancer in 2015 before joining the site full-time in 2018. He has previously held positions as a Staff Writer and Games Editor, but has more recently transformed his true passion into his job as the head of the site's Theme Park section. He has previously done freelance work for various gaming and technology sites. Prior to starting his second career as a writer he worked for 12 years in sales for various companies within the consumer electronics industry. He has a degree in political science from the University of California, Davis.  Is an armchair Imagineer, Epcot Stan, Future Club 33 Member.

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Tom Cruise ship looks frightened as he movies significant Objective Difficult 8 scenes in London

TOM Cruise ship looked frightened as he shot significant Objective Difficult 8 scenes in London today.

Star Tom, 61, was seen recording the future hit near Downing Road, playing out a scene where his personality seemed recorded by the opponent.

The Hollywood flick celebrity was seen holding his hands up in abandonment while in-character as lead character, Ethan Search.

Worn a navy coat and denims, Tom talked with supervisor Christopher McQuarrie and manufacturing team inbetween scenes.

Simply a couple of weeks earlier, Tom stunned vacationers as he dashed with the city covered in blood, closing down Central London.

In special pictures from the collection, he was seen running over Westminster Bridge with military and law enforcement officer on his tail.

The Objective Difficult group have actually been recording at Surrey’s Longcross Studios along with on place considering that the start of March.

Identified to adhere to timetable whatsoever essential, at one factor Tom handed over for the whole actors and staff to be flown to established by helicopters after the M25 closed down.

Little is understood about what will certainly occur in the 8th instalment of the collection – just that it will certainly comply with on from Dead Numeration, which was launched in 2015.

Initially labelled Dead Numeration: Sequel, the brand-new movie has actually considering that gone down being thought about a 2nd component and will certainly rather pass its very own name.

Factors for this are unidentified yet rumours have actually differed from the movie entering an entirely various instructions to what was at first prepared, to the name being ditched because of Component One’s lacklustre success at package workplace.

Starring together with Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby and Simon Pegg to name a few, Dead Numeration took place to obtain 2 Oscar elections for audio and aesthetic impacts.

Nevertheless, regardless of bring in $565.8million around the world at package workplace, Dead Numeration stopped working to satisfy the essential go back to recover cost from its $291million budget plan.

Generally, taking into consideration marketing prices and so on, a movie requires to make 2.5x its budget plan in order to be thought about a monetary success.

This was prevented somewhat by the worldwide sensation of Barbenheimer (the launch day of Barbie and Oppenheimer) which came simply 2 weeks after Dead Numeration’s, triggering a decrease off in prospective sales.

Presently, the as-yet-untitled Objective Difficult 8 is set up to be launched on Might 23, 2025 after a string of pushbacks because of the pandemic and in 2015’s SAG-AFTRA strikes.

It was at first implied to be prepared for launch in August 2022, prior to being postponed to November 2022, July 2023 and June 2024.

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Suri Cruise chats with friends in NYC days before her 18th birthday

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Suri Cruise was all smiles while out and about in New York City with friends ahead of her 18th birthday.

Crusie looked the spitting image of mom Katie Holmes while spending Sunday alongside a gaggle of her girlfriends in Soho.

The teenager, whose birthday is April 18, dressed casually cool in a red sweater with white vertical stripes, a white silk skirt and brown sandals.

She kept her dark brown hair down in loose waves, pinning her front pieces back with two hair clips.

The group seemingly stopped at a couple of shops and cafes as they embraced one of NYC’s first sunny spring days.

While it’s unclear how the teen will be spending her big birthday, it likely won’t be with her famous father, Tom Cruise.

Page Six revealed last year that Suri has been estranged  from the “Mission Impossible” star for years.

While a source told us at the time that Tom has played “no part” in his daughter’s life, another Hollywood insider told us this week that the father-daughter duo haven’t seen each other since 2012.

“Katie has safeguarded Suri and she’s a devoted mom,” the source said. “This is a girl who is a private citizen. She hasn’t lived her life in public.”

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Suri has lived a low-key lifestyle with her mother in New York ever since the “Dawson’s Creek” alum filed for divorce from Tom in 2012 — allegedly due to his involvement with Scientology.

Despite being raised in the public eye — even appearing on Vanity Fair as an infant — Holmes has since shielded her daughter from the spotlight.

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“I’m very grateful to be a parent, to be her parent. She’s an incredible person. She’s my heart,” Holmes told  Glamour  magazine in 2023.

The mother of one explained that feels the need to “protect” Suri from the limelight “because she was so visible at a young age.”

Although the teen has distanced herself from her dad, she is seemingly getting into the family business.

Page Six revealed in December 2023 that Suri inherited her parents’ acting chops, starring as the lead in her high school play.

“She was amazing,” one impressed audience member said of her portrayal of Morticia Addams in “The Addams Family: A New Musical.” 

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