International man of mystery: Tom Cruise. Photo / AP
There’s more to the Mission Impossible star than his reputation suggests. We talk to Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell and more.
Tom Cruise, the last great movie star, has just turned 61 — and what a throwback he is. In a Hollywood dulled by CGI he’s the last action hero who puts his body on the line in every movie he makes. Cruise isn’t just an actor and producer, he immerses himself in everything, as one friend puts it, like a “one-man studio”.
Last summer Top Gun: Maverick made a gargantuan US$1.5 billion at the box office, and Cruise’s next epic, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, is expected to match that. After 42 years in a fickle business, he is back with a vengeance, enjoying his most successful run since that golden decade from 1986 to 1996 when he made, deep breath — Top Gun, The Color of Money, Cocktail, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, Days of Thunder, A Few Good Men, The Firm, Jerry Maguire and the first Mission: Impossible.
Yet films are only half the reason Cruise makes headlines. The other half is the mystery surrounding a star who long ago stopped giving meaningful interviews. One assumes that’s largely because of his full-throttle support for the secretive Church of Scientology. He is, reputedly, at the highest level — Operating Thetan Level 8 — but knows that many of his fans find it weird. So he keeps quiet while loudly making films too big to ignore, and posing for countless selfies at premieres.
To delve beyond the movie posters, I talked to the people who know him best: Mission: Impossible’s main cast — Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson and Simon Pegg, plus the director Chris McQuarrie, Cruise’s chief confidante for 20 years. The film is a riotous thriller with the agent Ethan Hunt saving the world. It is how a lot of fans wish James Bond still was, but we did not talk about that. The only subject? Cruise. Tom Cruise.
Shortly before cameras rolled on the new Mission: Impossible, the film’s bigwigs went to Cruise’s house for dinner. The superstar was relaxed in jeans, a blue cashmere jumper and boots. The guests were talking about the latest audacious stunt in which Cruise jumps off the Helsetkopen mountain in Norway on a motorbike. He does his own stunts, of course, and beamed when he was asked how his day had gone. “It was good,” he said. “I did 29 skydives.”
Pegg met Cruise 17 years ago when the British actor was cast as the nerdy Benji in Mission: Impossible III. The pair became firm friends and Pegg talks with baffled awe about the effort Cruise makes. Everything on set feels like his responsibility, from auditions to the final cut. Cruise even gets involved with catering. “He’s in every part of a film,” Pegg says. “Relentlessly so.” Not for nothing do the credits open by saying it’s a “Tom Cruise Production”.
Cruise obsesses in a way that no other A-lister does. Atwell, the Brit who rose to fame in 2008 in Brideshead Revisited and makes her Mission: Impossible debut this year, says Cruise even helped to pick out costumes for her. One day he chose a yellow outfit for her, explaining that it did something to her skin tone that automatically made her look tired — and for that particular scene Grace needed to look wiped out.
Is that meticulous attention to detail normal? “It’s very rare,” Atwell says. “There was a runner who told him that she wanted to be a cinematographer. He gave her a laminated guide about how to position someone in a frame, and what that told you about someone’s status in a shot, power and dynamic . . .”
So Cruise does a lot. There are reports of him even paying private medical bills for the crew. Or, as Pegg puts it: “I just don’t think anybody else can be as arsed as he can.”
Cruise is underrated as an actor despite being nominated for three acting Oscars (and should have won for Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s melodrama, in which he plays a prototype Andrew Tate). Yet in the new Mission: Impossible, action comes before acting. He hangs out of a train. He jumps off that mountain. Why not just use a stunt double? Pegg says: “With special effects you know something is artificial — it removes a degree of tension. So Tom pushes things to the limit, to the point of risking his life.” Ferguson joined the Cruise action juggernaut in 2015 on Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation as Ilsa Faust. “I have done stunts with him . . .” she says. “I have jumped off rooftops in Vienna . . .” For her debut she had to save a drowning Hunt. “There was a fall into water,” she says, “140 feet. And I did it. My stunt double was there, ready. Nobody forces you.” She did it because Cruise would do it. (Incidentally they cut Ferguson’s jump from the movie, so she literally did it for the thrill of it.)
Cruise these days is here to entertain you — but it was not always like this. Eyes Wide Shut, Minority Report and Collateral were all challenging, difficult movies, but they were made about 20 years ago.
“He doesn’t want to make movies now to punish an audience,” Atwell says. “He doesn’t want films with the message that if you do not understand this you’re not smart. I can tell when I watch some movies that the director has made it for themselves. I don’t feel involved or I think, ‘Am I stupid?’ Tom’s not a snob.”
During a script read for an earlier Mission film Cruise said of a line, “I don’t get it.” He meant the audience would not get it. The line was scrapped.
McQuarrie has directed the past three Mission: Impossible movies and produced Top Gun: Maverick. He met Cruise in 2006. “In our first meeting,” he recalls, “Tom said, unashamedly, ‘I make mass entertainment.’ " The men, who their colleagues describe as “family” or “with each other 24/7″, first worked together on Valkyrie, with Cruise starring as a Nazi who led a failed plot to kill Hitler.
McQuarrie says Cruise said they needed more money for the project and feared that would mean compromising the story — “Like ‘Tom Cruise kills Hitler!’ " — to make it commercial. Instead Cruise wanted the script to be tweaked to make it for the widest audience possible.
“There is an outsized importance placed on Oscars,” McQuarrie says. “Films that not many people are going to see. A wedge has been driven into the industry. Are you an artist or an entertainer? Tom doesn’t see them as mutually exclusive.”
In December 2020 we had a rare glimpse of the darker side of Cruise. Audio leaked of him losing his cool on the Covid-restricted set of the latest Mission: Impossible. “If I see you do it again you’re f***ing gone,” he yelled at a crew member who was breaking social distancing rules.
“Everything that Tom cares about, in terms of his job, was at stake due to the pandemic,” Pegg explains. “For him there was a danger this virus could wipe cinema off the face of this earth.” Hence Cruise’s outburst and another reason why he is focusing on making blockbusters for cinemas — he wants to be the fleapit’s saviour.
“People can argue that cinema is frivolous,” Pegg says. “But it’s not. Cinema brings people together at a time we’re pulling apart, and that just added to Tom’s determination to put people in a room together. The power of cinema is, for him, precious and it’s vital we sustain it.”
So how does Cruise unwind after all that? “I don’t know if he ever unwinds,” Pegg says with a shrug. “He took us go-karting and zip-lining. He hates doing nothing. It’s: ‘Let’s do something more exciting!’ "
Atwell tells a story of her and Cruise, in London, masked up during Covid. A woman stopped Cruise for a long chat about a pet schnauzer he was holding but had no idea who he was — he chatted away; it delighted him.
And this, according to his friends, is who Cruise is — a man removed from his celebrity. McQuarrie recalls asking Cruise at their first meeting for the “weirdest story you’ve heard about yourself”. Cruise laughed and said the greatest myth about him was that people on set “were not allowed to look me in the eye”. The star has been known to have dance-offs with cast and crew.
“I’ve been able to hack my way through all the bizarre mythology that surrounds him,” Pegg says. “On one side he’s Tom Cruise — this enigmatic film star everyone wants to know about. And on the other he’s just a guy. I like being normal with him.”
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is in cinemas now.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
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