There really is no press tour like a Tom Cruise press tour – which is why there have not really been any Tom Cruise press tours for a very long time indeed. We’re now at the stage of this one where even the interviewers have been forced on to the interview circuit to defend their interviews.
Anyway: Cruise. The guy has one child with ex-wife Katie Holmes who dropped his surname as soon as she was legally allowed, and two Scientologist children widely reported to be effectively estranged from their mother, Nicole Kidman. The divorces from Kidman and Holmes were clearly deeply strange and traumatic events for both women, and have remained shrouded in unusually watertight and presumably contractual secrecy. Yet you can currently find Tom Cruise promoting his latest movie not being asked about any of this stuff, or indeed any of his other extensive “stuff” – as always – but instead doing things like giving Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast a lecture on the benefits of VistaVision. Hate to say it, but a woman could never.
At some level, you have to admire the mad image-industrial complex that labours to keep “the last movie star” from having to talk about the things all the other movie stars are required to lay on the line in order to promote their wares. Only a few weeks ago, Kidman was on the cover of Vogue being required to pick over her two marriages in what was otherwise the most saccharine of interviews.
Meanwhile, the world is obliged on pain of death to regard the 64-year-old Tom Cruise as ageless (and probably deathless). A few years ago, his Top Gun co-star Kelly McGillis – 62 at the time – explained why she had not been approached to return for the sequel, Top Gun Maverick. “I’m old and I’m fat, and I look age-appropriate for what my age is,” she replied with deadly affectlessness, “and that is not what that whole scene is about.”
Cruise, in contrast, has chosen to cover this month’s GQ magazine with his shirt flung open, pulling down the waistband of his jeans – a choice we’d probably have to describe as wholly mesmerising rather than directly appealing. Hand on heart, Tom Cruise feels like someone you’d like to have sex with about as much as you’d like him to explain VistaVision to you. Wait, what am I talking about? Let me adjust: I strongly suspect most women would rather have 87 hours’ worth of defensive questions about image grain and aspect ratio lined up just in case.
Even less enticing is the sheer guffawing prickliness with which Cruise responds to GQ’s question about what it meant to recently turn 64. “It means I’m 64.” Okaaaaay. Does it change anything about the way you think about anything, the interviewer, Zach Baron, wonders with desperate vagueness. “It’s just like, No!” scoffs Cruise. “Zach’s like, Does it change anything? When you’re looking at this, does it, like … Man, I’m just saying: it doesn’t at all. What changes things is I love seeing people do well.”
Even Cruise’s yesteryear PR anecdotes have been written over in the service of making him seem like Hollywood’s apex benefactor. Back in the day, Tom always used to explain how he struggled with reading scripts because he was dyslexic. These days, the story has changed to reflect his unique position in, and contribution to, the cinematic culture. On the Kelces’ podcast, he took the time to explain how he makes writers and directors read their scripts out loud to him: “I don’t read the scripts. I have them read it to me. I have them read it to me because I don’t want my ideas to invade it yet. I want to understand what is their communication. They’ve been working on it. They have things that are just there. So they come to me, and I just sit there, and I’m like, I want you to read it to me.”
As mentioned, perhaps the most meta element of this press tour is that the GQ interviewer now feels he has to get himself out there on the circuit to do interviews about his strange interview. He wasn’t instructed not to ask about Scientology, Baron told the Washington Post, but just decided not to do it because it has been done before. Then again, you sense that even if Baron had asked, he could have been re-hit with an answer like “What changes things is I love seeing people do well”. The good news for those who ordered this word salad is that there are an entire 10 days to go before Digger, the film Cruise is promoting, finally makes landfall. Expect plenty more to be served up by then.
Perhaps most ironically, a report from a Bafta event where Cruise was interviewed this week describes the audience as “otherwise low-key”, until Tom launched into a six-minute monologue about the primacy of human art over AI. “What you put attention on, you give life,” he freestyled. “People wanna see real things.” As he had it: “There is nothing like human.”
And yet, is he anything like human? More and more, the real-life Tom Cruise feels like something sprung from the pages of fiction. He’s a sort of Peter Pan’s shadow who leads a largely disconnected existence from the Cruise of the screen – the only Cruise that makes sense. Strange that for decades now, one of the most obviously bizarre people in public life has still been allowed – required, really – to be routinely hailed as his medium’s one remaining superstar. Perhaps that and his medium’s steady decline are not altogether unconnected.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist. Her new book is What a Time to Be Alive! To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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