July 10 sees the release of the new plutonium grade Tom Cruise blockbuster,Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, in which Cruise reprises his role as special agent Ethan Hunt. It’s the seventh film in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which since its inception in 1996 has taken an estimated US$3.5 billion ($5.65b) at the box office. With an eye-watering budget of $290 million ($468m), due to the pandemic, the film has been three years in the making. Dead Reckoning Part Two is scheduled for release next year.
Tom Cruise is now 61 and over the past 40 years has made more than 50 films which have reportedly grossed more than US$11.5b ($18.57b) worldwide. Undoubtedly the biggest movie star in the world, so enduring and so immaculately himself, it is tempting to think that Cruise emerged fully hatched as, well... Tom Cruise. But that wasn’t always the case.
The son of a salesman, Cruise had a peripatetic upbringing, forever the new kid in school and frequently bullied. A good athlete in school, it was a knee injury that led to him taking up drama lessons. He once said that with another twist in life he might have become a motor mechanic, or a priest - at 14, Cruise enrolled in a Catholic seminary with the vaguest idea of becoming a priest, an aspiration that perhaps hinted at his later commitment to the pseudo-religion Scientology.
It was Risky Business, in 1983, playing a teenager who invites hookers into his parents’ home, that signalled his arrival in Hollywood. But it was starring as a hot-shot navy pilot in Top Gun, in 1986, that elevated him into the major league.
With his cow-lick of dark hair and a smile as wide as the prairie, Cruise was the archetype of the clean-cut all-American boy - “a kid off a Wheaties box”, as Oliver Stone, who in 1989 directed him in Born on the Fourth of July, described him - and whose default air was one of “aw gosh humility”. Making The Color of Money (1986) he insisted on addressing the director Martin Scorsese as “Mr Scorsese” and his co-star Paul Newman as “Mr Newman”. “I’m old,” Scorsese protested, “but not that old.”
Conscientious, perfectionist, driven, abstemious - so dedicated to the task at hand that it was said that during takes he would sprint to the lavatory and back - he would talk of his abiding desire to challenge himself, and the audience’s perceptions of him, by taking on wildly differing roles.
He was the paralysed Vietnam war veteran Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July; the streetwise brother to Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant in Rain Man; a motivational speaker and pick-up artist in Magnolia, one of three roles for which he has been Oscar-nominated. Nothing was more against type than his role acting opposite his then wife Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s film about a marriage disintegrating in fantasy, sexual obsession and self-deception. Cruise’s marriage came to an end not long after the film was completed.
But it’s probably fair to say that he gave up acting, in the sense of pretending to be other people, some years ago, instead settling into the serious business of being, well, Tom Cruise; firm jawed, crinkle-eyed, buffed and toned, “the living manifestation of destiny”, as Ethan Hunt is described in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation; that destiny seemingly being Cruise quite literally putting his life on the line at every available opportunity, whether its dangling from helicopters, free-jumping between buildings, jumping out of an exploding fish tank (“That one”, he later recalled, “was particularly crazy”) or climbing the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, a stunt that required special permissions to drill into floors and walls and break 26 windows in the 829-metre-tall building to accommodate Cruise’s safety harness. The new Mission: Impossible includes what is being claimed as his most dangerous stunt yet: driving a motorbike over a cliff.
Asked by the American chat-show host Jimmy Fallon why he would put himself through these ordeals - Fallon was referring specifically to a scene in Rogue Nation, which shows Cruise hanging on the closed door of a military cargo plane as it speeds down a runway and lifts off into the air - Cruise flashed that prairie wide smile and replied: “I do it because it’s entertaining to you all. I want to entertain you.”
A shot from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One with (from left) Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson.
If any other star insisted on performing stunts like that, producers would step in at that point and insist they fall back on an experienced stuntman. But Cruise is the producer. As such he selects the directors, approves the cast, and decides how much he will personally participate in the films’ action sequences - which is as many as he possibly can.
Indeed, the fact that Cruise is doing these things himself has become a major selling point of the Mission: Impossible series, and why the films have been distilled down to a rolling sequence of set-pieces designed simply to marvel at Cruise’s bravery and the sheer brilliance and ingenuity of the orchestrated car chases and stunts.
His demands for authenticity extend to his co-stars. Hayley Atwell told The Telegraph that her screen test comprised two hours of stunt choreography, including an unarmed combat sequence and mixed martial arts, “just to see where my natural abilities lay” and that it was a prerequisite of being cast for the film that she do all her own stunts.
Atwell describes Cruise as “like Peter Pan in a pinball machine”, polite, well-mannered: “he’s just got extraordinary charisma”, a natural extrovert who is “clearly very comfortable with who he is”.
Which doesn’t tell us much. But then Cruise is a man who doesn’t give much away about himself - and certainly less than he did. I interviewed him in 1992, at the time of the release of Far and Away. What sticks in my mind was his total self-assurance. The firm handshake, the unwavering eye-to-eye contact, the legs planted firmly apart - a posture that body-language experts say conveys openness, confidence and control, but on a Tube train might convey a certain indelicacy. You sense he had worked on the small tricks of personal psychology.
Kelly McGillis And Tom Cruise in the 1986 classic Top Gunn.
We spoke for an hour, in which Cruise talked of his upbringing, his love of film, his work ethic - formidable - and how “the star aspect is strictly ancillary to me”, without actually revealing very much of himself at all.
Such an encounter would be unthinkable today. He has no need of “one-on-one” - as the term has it - sit-downs with magazine journalists to promote his films, and nowadays his defences are resolutely up.
Much of this, one suspects, is due to the publicity over his personal life that has arisen over the years from Cruise’s membership of the Church of Scientology.
Cruise was introduced to Scientology in the late 1980s by his first wife Mimi Rogers, and it was reported that it was his commitment to the church that led to his divorce from his second wife Nicole Kidman in 2001. According to former Scientologists, the church had decided that Kidman was a “Suppressive Person”, who could jeopardise the spiritual wellbeing of Cruise and the two children the couple had adopted during their 10-year marriage. (The Church of Scientology denied these allegations.)
The divorce was followed in 2004 by the bizarre claim that the actress Nazanin Boniadi, a Scientologist, had allegedly been selected as Cruise’s prospective partner - something it was claimed that resulted in Boniadi being subjected to a number of questionable behaviours by the church, although they strenuously denied the allegations.
Tom Cruise as Captain Pete Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick.
Shortly afterwards, Cruise was in a relationship with Katie Holmes and excitedly jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch declaring: “I’m in love!”
That marriage ended in divorce too after five years, with Holmes reportedly feeling intimidated by the church and fearing its influence on the couple’s daughter Suri. Holmes was given sole custody of Suri, now 17, in a divorce settlement that reportedly contained “ironclad” rulings that she would not be exposed to anything related to Scientology.
When, in our interview, I asked Cruise about Scientology, the affable tone noticeably hardened: “Lemme ask you... What do you know about Scientology? What books have you read?” he responded. I had read L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and been persuaded by someone handing out leaflets outside the organisation’s office on Tottenham Court Road to take an intelligence test. (Has potential, the results read - or words to that effect - but would be improved immeasurably by a course. See price list...) Cruise was unimpressed: “Okay, so you’ve read one book. If I want to know something, I’ll go to that source and find out about it. I’ve read a lot about Scientology. I’ve studied it, and I know it works for me.”
So important did Cruise’s membership of the organisation become that for a long time it was rumoured that he had been earmarked by Scientology’s leader David Miscavige (“two years older and a couple of inches shorter than Cruise,” according to Vanity Fair) as his second-in command and possible successor.
In a recent interview, Alex Gibney, the film-maker who made the 2015 film Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, suggested that Cruise had taken “a step away” from Scientology, and was no longer “the kind of ambassador” he used to be, citing the 2005 film War of the Worlds in which Cruise put up a booth promoting Scientology on the set - one of a number of episodes, including the Oprah couch-jumping, and Cruise criticising Brooke Shields on the Today show for taking medication to relieve postpartum depression, that led to a Dominick Dunne profile in Vanity Fair headlined “Has Tom Cruise Lost His Marbles?”
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman at the premiere of Mission: Impossible, in 1996. Photo / AP
Nowadays, Cruise engages with the media strictly on his own terms: remote, untouchable, adored, as if concealed behind the kind of rubber mask that features in the Mission: Impossible films.
He is said to have homes in Beverly Hills and the Colorado ski resort of Telluride, but much of his time in recent years has been spent in Britain, where Mission: Impossible has been filmed. He has a home in Biggin Hill, convenient for landing his private jet, but also close to Croydon, where Isabella, 30, the artist daughter he adopted with Nicole Kidman, now lives.
Both of the two children he adopted with Nicole Kidman followed their father into Scientology. His son Connor, 28, a chef and food influencer, lives in Florida in what is described as a “Scientology community”.
In 2006 Cruise bought a home in East Grinstead in Sussex, where Saint Hill, the British headquarters of Scientology, is located. Cruise sold that home in 2016, but is a regular visitor to Saint Hill and is believed to have spent the first Covid lockdown in a wing of the property.
What everyone who has ever encountered Cruise says is that he is nice - very nice. Stories abound of his generosity and kindness: stopping his car at an accident and accompanying an injured woman to the hospital and paying her medical bills for a broken leg and bruised ribs; rescuing a 7-year-old child whom he noticed being crushed against a barrier at a Mission: Impossible premiere. He acknowledges his fans with an enthusiasm that goes beyond the normal call of duty for a Hollywood star.
Last year, he appeared at the Cannes Film Festival to promote Top Gun: Maverick. Stepping out of his limousine, he spent six minutes greeting the fans crowded on the other side of the barriers - an unconscionable length of time by anybody’s standards to be signing autographs, posing for selfies and holding the prairie-wide smile fixedly in place. (As he turned away, an assistant moved forward to squirt disinfecting gel into his palm.)
Later he sat down for a rare interview in front of a live audience, who accorded him a standing ovation of almost two minutes just for walking on stage. The event was billed as a “MasterClass” conversation, but the only mastery on display, according to one observer, was Cruise’s “unflagging ability to reveal nothing”, remarking that the talk could have been an extension of Paramount’s 68-page press kit for the film.
What you get is what Cruise wants you to see - the last great movie star, in his commitment and his perfectionism, a hero in the old-fashioned mould, willing to risk everything when other franchised film heroes depend on CGI and green screen for their superpowers.
In the opening sequence of Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise’s role as a test pilot is challenged by a commanding officer who dreams of replacing humans with drones. “The end is inevitable,” the officer tells Maverick. “Your kind are headed for extinction.”
Tom Cruise’s mission, the one he’s chosen to accept, is to prove that for as long he’s around, they’re not.
