With a waft of his Sandi Toksvig-style feathery haircut the 62-year-old took a tiny steadying step forward, the kind that any 62-year-old makes when rising from watching too much sport on television and has sofa cramp in their thigh, except for this 62-year-old it was to fall from the edge of the roof of the Stade de France in a live abseil at the close of the Paris Olympics.
It was absolutely no accident that the Tom Cruise stunt was a redo of the spoof parachute jump staged by Queen Elizabeth and James Bond to kick off the London Olympics in 2012. The 12-year period from 2012 to 2024 for Cruise has been the strangest of any Hollywood star, which for an ordinary mortal would be filed under the label of “midlife crisis”.
Except that it follows none of the typical protocols if you don’t include a commitment to waxed agelessness and straddling motorbikes. In fact 2012 was when he gave up getting married to younger women.
Yet in a strategy that can be summarized as befriending cuddly British actors, painful self-flagellation and rather surprising glimmers of feminism, Cruise has clawed his way back up the mountain of public opinion, a feat more audacious than any literal stunt.
Case in point, his meeting with the acclaimed 26-year-old Spanish-American singer Victoria Canal at Glastonbury this summer, and the tabloids immediately speculating that they were a couple. Instead, Canal took to her Instagram grid last week to post that the rumors were “bonkers … I’m sorry to bum you out but I am not dating the man, albeit a lovely person & artist”. She finished by adding, “Tom has been nothing but a respectful and encouraging person and mentor.”
Relax, guys! Cruise is not going to marry her into the Church of Scientology, he’s just an ultra-macho action hero guy who wants female artists to get the respect they deserve!
His homage to the Olympics in London in 2012 contains all the seeds of Cruise’s rehabilitation decade since then: the Anglophilia, his determination to best action heroes more iconic and far younger — Daniel Craig, playing Bond in 2012 aged 44, certainly did not parachute into the Olympic stadium. Most of all, royalty.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Cruise was considered Hollywood royalty with his talent for zeitgeist-defining blockbusters, but from the turn of the century began to be regarded in many quarters with suspicion or mockery.
This was largely due to PR disasters relating to his loyalty to Scientology and his espousing related beliefs, and his divorce from Katie Holmes, an actress with a persona so cute her unhappiness seemed to trigger a protective cuddle reflex in the American public.
So in 2012 Cruise’s reputation was at its nadir. It marked the year of his Holmes divorce. It also marked the year he turned 50. From this point on he retreated and radically changed direction; Cruise would never again give a profile interview to a reporter. He would also bury his traditional acting career and from 2012 onwards he would refuse roles with the character range that had made him famous, such as those in Jerry Maguire, A Few Good Men or Rain Man.
From 2012 he would play only action heroes, endlessly flying and jumping into new voids with billion-dollar franchises such as Top Gun, Jack Reacher and, most lucratively, Mission: Impossible.
Royalty he may have been but only in the British Henry VIII sense, with Cruise’s three ex-wives, his break from childhood Catholicism to a bizarre new belief system, and his refusal to explain. By contrast, Cruise’s fall from the Olympic stadium on Sunday night marked his ascent: the king of Hollywood once more. The rest of the filmed sequence zeroed in on his biceps and the strength they needed to haul him atop the Hollywood sign. Cruise smiles and murmurs into his radio, “I’m on my way.”
How did he do it? As someone who has watched Cruise my entire life, I would never have imagined the actor I saw play a cocky, testosterone-fuelled young man dancing in his pants in Risky Business in 1983 would be wearing a crotch harness dangling over Paris more than four decades later.
Especially not with the PR storms he has endured in between, and let us now say a prayer for the resilience of the powerful man, contrasted with a comparable woman. These storms mostly date to 2005 when Cruise’s sister was briefly in charge of his publicity. In that year Cruise went nuclear on Oprah Winfrey’s show, jumping on her sofa, shouting “yes” as a profession of his love for Holmes — or, as The Washington Post put it, “Chernobyled”.
Cruise next critiqued his fellow actor Brooke Shields because she had taken antidepressants after experiencing postnatal depression. Cruise said on NBC, “I really care about Brooke Shields … but there’s misinformation, and she doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry … psychiatry is a pseudoscience.”
Cruise called Shields “irresponsible”. Shields responded that Cruise “should stick to saving the world from aliens and let women who are experiencing post-partum depression decide what treatment options are best for them”. He later apologized.
His filmography up until 2012 could be described as interrogations of masculinity, frequently, as in The Color of Money or Born on the Fourth of July, related to hyper-macho sports or the military. This could often be highly skeptical: my favorite Cruise performance is in Magnolia, in which he plays a motivational speaker estranged from his father, a young man made toxic and vulnerable through feelings of abandonment and betrayal.
Cruise was estranged from his father after his mother left him when Cruise was 12. In an early interview with Parade magazine Cruise said his father “was a bully and a coward … the kind of person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you. It was a great lesson in my life.”
He went to visit his father a decade later in hospital when he was dying of cancer. His father agreed to the meeting if he could control it, with the rule that “I didn’t ask him anything about the past”. Cruise later concluded: “What a lonely life.”
Maybe that “great lesson” was in his mind when Cruise designed his reset after his third divorce, in 2012. His life thereafter seemed to shift gear into constant motion — both in the relentlessness of his action heroes such as Maverick, Reacher and Ethan Hunt, endlessly doing his “flat-palmed macho running” into the horizon but also his dogged pursuit of the British.
Part of the latter was logistical. The studios and locations for many of his films are in the United Kingdom. But when, for instance, he had a chicken tikka masala from a curry house in Birmingham in 2021, “as soon as he had finished”, reported the chef, he ordered the same dish “all over again”.
That takes action hero stamina and grit. While Cruise is rarely photographed if not publicizing or filming his movies, he will pop up at Wimbledon or Formula 1, or the celebrations for King Charles’s coronation, when Cruise said in an address to King Charles, “Pilot to pilot, you can be my wingman any time” — a distinct demotion for the monarch.
The British actors he has cultivated as friends are known for their distinctively British comedic self-deprecation, from James Corden, who mentioned that Cruise wanted to land his helicopter on his London roof, to the comedy writer and actor Simon Pegg, who said: “He likes me because I make him laugh.”
Cruise said in an address to King Charles, “Pilot to pilot, you can be my wingman any time” — a distinct demotion for the monarch.
When Cruise started his now famous cake gift list — a coconut cake sent to hundreds of his contacts at Christmas — he included a British journalist just because he made a humorous plea in print. Few things are more craven or more successful routes to the British heart than cake.
The cakes for his British friends arrive by private jet from a bakery in Los Angeles (Shields said last year she has now quietly been dropped off the cake list; I guess even Cruise has to put his cake budget where it is most useful).
In short Britain and the British pose no testosterone threat. Craig hung up his special gun bra at the age of 51 just as Cruise was strapping his on for the next decade. The interrogation of masculinity was shoved aside.
Unlike the Bond series, Cruise makes sure his female action co-stars are not there simply to be impaled in various ways. This is partly due to the cultivated sexlessness of Cruise’s action heroes: they are admired but not desired. In Knight and Day Cruise apologizes to Cameron Diaz’s character for touching her without consent. A female character has not taken her clothes off for Cruise since Rock of Ages in 2012. But also he is willing to cede agency to women: in Edge of Tomorrow in 2014 it is Cruise who is endlessly and violently kicked into shape by the British actress Emily Blunt. Blunt later said at the Cannes Film Festival that Cruise “was someone who was very much about my character being a girl. It was refreshing.”
Cruise does do a limited amount of press, but mainly in the form of jokey chats on late-night talk shows, quite often with British or British-based hosts and friends such as Corden or Graham Norton. Cruise will not speak about Scientology, nor about family. He has been photographed in public places with his son and daughter from his marriage to Nicole Kidman, but not his daughter with Holmes.
The subject that takes up most of his air time on talk shows is, notably, his stunts. It appears to be extremely important to Cruise not only that he does his stunts, but that the veracity of him doing his stunts is beyond doubt.
At one point on The Graham Norton Show they show footage of him breaking his ankle filming a stunt, and then carrying on running. Pegg, also on the show, says “that is so Tom”. The point of this carefully staged anecdote seems to be his machismo, but I think it is more his tolerance, or appetite, for pain.
When Cruise’s stock was at its lowest in 2012, he was only just cultivating his “doing my own stunts” persona that is now central to his ever-merging personal and professional identity. He decided that he wouldn’t just act, pushed aside by a stuntman for the tough stuff. He would suffer. I wonder if this atonement is the key to Cruise’s revival, consciously or not.
He wants us to see that he is really being battered, dangled, dropped and risked. Sure, it is a machismo flex that he can manage the physical feats, especially at 62. But as a born Catholic, it may also be important for Cruise that he endures a beating — physical or spiritual — to earn forgiveness.
When Cruise risked a live fall into the Stade de France, some of the most exceptional athletes on earth today greeted him at the base as a hero. Whatever our doubts, watching Cruise being kicked in the face somehow helps.
Helen Rumbelow has been writing for The Times of London since 1997
