Perspective: In four decades, the actor has attained near-mythic status by giving us what we want — including seven “Mission Impossible” movies. Talk to people who have worked with Cruise, and you hear about his genuine, almost giddy love for what he does.
Tom Cruise is about to blast back into our lives in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” the first half of the seventh installment of the action-adventure franchise he launched in 1996. The movie was delayed four times.
“Maverick,” a nearly beat-for-beat stylistic re-creation of the original, with Cruise playing a humbled, world-weary version of his obnoxiously hyper-competent title character, wound up grossing around $1.5 billion, making it Hollywood’s rarest rara avis: a global, trans-generational pop-culture phenomenon driven by a bona fide human being, rather than interchangeable actors buried under layers of Spandex and CGI.
To Liman, Cruise’s request for concept art was just another way of asking the question that has consumed him above all others, and goes furthest in explaining his continuing potency: What does the audience want, and how can I give it to them? “He genuinely recognizes that he’s a movie star because people like his movies, and not the other way around,” Liman says. “It’s not like he’s anointed. He really cares about his audience and giving them their money’s worth.
It was Cruise, Stiller says, who told him and co-writer Justin Theroux that their script for the Hollywood satire “Tropic Thunder” needed an additional character. “He said, ‘You’re making fun of actors and you’re making fun of agents, but you don’t have a studio head,’” Stiller recalls. Those motivational speeches are a Cruise hallmark; only rarely do they become rants, such as when he lit into “Dead Reckoning” crew members for violating pandemic precautions in 2021. “We are the gold standard,” he can be seen shouting in a video that instantly went viral. “They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us. Because they believe in us and what we’re doing.
The impression of Cruise protesting too much became queasier in 2005, when he professed his love for girlfriend Katie Holmes by manically jumping on a couch during an Oprah Winfrey interview. A few months later, he criticized Shields for taking medication for her postpartum depression, which led to an infamous interview on the “Today” show during which he defended Scientology and its anti-psychiatry stance to co-host Matt Lauer. “Matt. Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt. You’re glib,” Cruise said.
Ever the generational avatar, Cruise has become a vessel, not for our aspirations and wish-fulfillment fantasies, but for 21st-century exhaustion: with pandemics, with Trump-era political ructions, with the pressing demand that our celebrities’ private actions and beliefs align completely with our own. Sensing the wound in our collective consciousness, the Tom-ness of Cruise acts as both purgative and balm.
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