Dear Gossips,

Can you hear that sound? It’s the sound of a million gossip hounds howling with delight as Tom Cruise gave an interview to GQ, his first cover profile with that magazine in twenty years, and it is a SCREAM. It’s entertaining in the way that only Tom Cruise is, which is to say—this man lives on a different plane of reality and reconciling his world to ours is impossible. Ask him literally anything and he will redirect the conversation to talking about making movies. Intimacy is a mere impression, Cruise gives away nothing he does not want to.

But where I want to start is the cover photo:

At one point in the interview, Cruise acknowledges that he just turned sixty-four, like he is admitting to the chronological fact of being alive for sixty-four years. But I want to ask him how old he THINKS he is. Because I want to hear the number. You know, the number. The number he thinks is representative of his age. I don’t think it’s “sixty-four”. I also don’t think it’s a real number. It’s probably like…forty-cat. Don’t ask Tom Cruise, “how old are you”, ask him, “how old do you think you are”.

And then there’s the absolute word salad of his responses. GQ kindly put up some video clips of his interview with Zach Baron, here is but one:

Baron’s question is straightforward, why are you doing this now, when you haven’t done it for twenty years? Cruise talks about literally anything else. Time, COVID, preserving the magic of making movies. I just think about all the great actors who have done cover profiles without dispelling the magic of movies and don’t think it’s that impossible and, again, I think there is a more definitive answer, but Cruise won’t give it. Because it’s probably “I don’t want to and I’m successful enough that no one can make me”, but that makes him sound churlish. “Something something the magic of movies” is better PR.

Finally, there’s a deep dark hole early in the interview that everyone sidesteps. I assume certain topics were struck before Cruise agreed to this interview, I don’t blame Zach Baron for not pushing. I don’t think he had an option to push. And obviously, Cruise is not opening this door, either. But when asked about his background, Cruise says this: “I always had a secret thing of: I want to improve things. I want to improve myself. But not at the detriment of others. So I was always looking, I guess, for what is the greatest amount of creation and the least amount of destruction?”

I would love to hear what his ex-wives and children think about this, especially Suri, who has maybe probably dropped “Cruise” from her name. He’s skirting around Xenu here; self-improvement is how they get people in the door of a Scientology center. And the obvious follow-up is that there IS a wake of destruction in his past. There’s an estranged daughter; there are two other children whose relationship with their mother was irrevocably altered because of him, there’s whatever private hells Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes endured while married to and divorcing him (and Mimi Rogers, his first wife, who reportedly introduced him to Scientology in the Eighties). It was an actual security operation for Holmes to exit that marriage. That sounds at least a little detrimental.

But of course, these are things Cruise will never answer for. No one will even ask the question. Tom Cruise is simply too successful—too famous, too “the last Movie Star”—to be held to account for these things. Why is he doing this interview now? Because he has successfully remade his reputation with the public, he’s put couch-jumping and surprise divorces far enough behind him that he can promote huge movies without his personal life troubling the press tour.

He has the industry capital to control his vulnerability and the skill to mimic intimacy with a public that wants this version of Cruise: a weirdo devoted to movies above anything else. As long as it’s all about movies, we don’t have to think about the other stuff. Tom Cruise’s greatest role is that of “Tom Cruise”. He’s performing it brilliantly.

Click here for more of Tom in GQ.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah

Photo credits: Mario Sorrenti/GQ

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