I can vividly recall the first time I encountered Tom Cruise: not at the movies or on the living room TV, but in a viral edited GIF of him smothering Oprah with force lightning.
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him → recall → lightning
For most of the 21st century, following a slew of disastrous TV appearances (not least this famously antagonistic exchange with Peter Overton on 60 Minutes), Cruise’s public reputation has fallen somewhere between megalomaniac and meme.
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reputation → follow → megalomaniac
Audiences no longer believe in Cruise as an exceptional everyman, an emblem of America’s conscience, or an international sweetheart.
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Audiences → believe → conscience
Instead, we’ve come to embrace him as cinema’s hardest working action star.
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we → come → star
The Mission: Impossible series, which began as a slick Brian De Palma thriller (and only Cruise’s second action role), has since ballooned to a multibillion-dollar phenomenon off the unhinged spectacle of its middle-aged lead actor confronting his mortality in a barrage of cartoonish, real-life stunts.
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actor → begin → stunts
Even for sceptics, there does appear to a universal pleasure (schadenfreude?) in watching a fabulously wealthy man break his ankle on camera for our entertainment.
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man → appear → entertainment
But with the franchise frontman closing the book on the last two decades of blockbuster showmanship and pivoting back to ambitious original fare (see: his upcoming apocalyptic comedy Digger), it’s time we also returned to recognising him seriously as one of our greatest dramatic actors.
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we → close → actors
Let’s just get this out of the way: the popular notion that Tom Cruise is somehow more of a maladjusted weirdo narcissist than any other celebrity of his calibre, from Brad Pitt to Johnny Depp, is simply PR smoke and mirrors.
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Cruise → let → Depp
We are frankly better off abandoning the idea that anyone who’s churned through the machinery of Hollywood since their youth, with a net worth exceeding half a billion dollars, is remotely normal.
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who → abandon → dollars
Even before the confluence of publicity disasters in the mid-2000s (the inevitable result of replacing his long-time publicist with his sister), the pre-millennium Cruise would not have been a graceful fit for our current era of hyper-online, smoothed-over movie stardom.
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Cruise → replace → stardom
Over the decades, Tom Cruise has deftly moulded his inescapable star persona into an array of idiosyncratic, often subversive performances that illuminate the culture around him.
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that → mould → him
Looking back at his breakout performances as Joel in Risky Business and Maverick in Top Gun, his façade of effortless cool, shaded by two of the most recognisable sunglasses in pop culture, is noticeably stretched tight over an obsessive, constantly over-compensating attitude.
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façade → look → attitude
This is, after all, a man who tops out at 170cm.
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who → top → cm
That Cruise, the actor, is so transparently eager to impress his audience and outdo his peers – even as a young, relative unknown, he cast off his lucrative Brat Pack association to chart his own course – it made him the perfect Reagan-era leading man.
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him → impress → course
Risky Business, The Color of Money, and even the much-maligned Cocktail set the stage for a young, 20-something Cruise to craft the prototypical grindset bro: a sweaty, vacuously charming protagonist who trades his innocence for the promise of unimaginable wealth.
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who → malign → wealth
By proving he could hold his own against an ageing Paul Newman in Money, Cruise also established a winning template that saw some variation of a jacked-up young gun square off with Hollywood legends (including Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall and Jack Nicholson) of an older generation.
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variation → prove → generation
Any Tom Cruise movie is, of course, destined to be consumed by its leading man, but what’s less appreciated is his generosity as a collaborator who coaxes out tantalising new qualities from his co-stars.
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who → destine → stars
Notably, Hoffman and Newman both won Academy Awards for Best Actor in their films starring alongside Cruise.
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Hoffman → win → Cruise
In the 1990s, Cruise committed himself to some of the greatest on-screen crashouts committed to celluloid.
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Cruise → commit → celluloid
Where the depths of his arrogance, neuroses and insecurities were hinted at in earlier movies, this decade on screen unravelled his once-bulletproof star persona to perversely captivating ends.
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decade → hint → ends
Eyes Wide Shut lampooned male impotence; Interview with the Vampire unleashed an immortal with an endlessly self-destructive drive; Magnolia curdled his familiar bravado into loathsome entitlement in his prescient depiction of a showboating pick-up artist.
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Magnolia → lampoon → artist
Jerry Maguire can be seen as Cruise’s most direct attempt at reckoning with his status as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
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Maguire → see → stars
Playing the titular sports agent who inconveniently develops a conscience, he actively grapples with the dichotomy between Tom Cruise the smarmy bullshit artist and Tom Cruise the human being.
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he → play → Cruise
At his core, Cruise excels at playing someone trying very, very hard to be normal – and when the pretence slips, his talent at going nuclear is virtually unparalleled.
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talent → excel → someone
In a movie stuffed with famous quotes, it’s worth noting this one line that would loom over his transition into middle-age: “24 hours ago, man, I was hot.
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I → stuff → age
Now, I’m a cautionary tale.
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I → ’m → ?
It may seem silly to make a case for Tom Cruise, of all people, as being underrated.
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It → seem → people
He’s the only movie star who can define a billion-dollar franchise, not the other way around.
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who → ’ → franchise
He’s always had a legion of fans, even at his lowest points in the public eye.
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He → have → eye
But as he grew into a larger-than-life action figure, and as his best dramatic performances receded into the past, our culture has started to take his unique talents for granted.
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culture → grow → talents
Regardless: when his latest film Digger (directed by Birdman’s Alejandro González Iñárritu) finally releases on October 1, I’ll see you at the movies.
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I → direct → movies
- Jeopardy!: The best thing on TV right now is a quiz show hosted by a Mormon brainiac
- Femme fatale:
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thing → host → brainiac
- Nice guys finish first: Why this film is criminally underrated
- Binge-watching: Short seasons are ruining TV; bring back the 22-episode season
- Killer ballerinas: Why is Hollywood so obsessed with them?
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Hollywood → finish → them
The Aporia
