Becoming and unbecoming Tom Cruise

Exploring my favourite Tom Cruise genre.

I’ve talked already about how Tom Cruise has essentially collapsed his longest-running character (Ethan Hunt) into his own public persona. Now, at long last, is my explication of the Tom Cruise persona through my favourite Tom Cruise genre.

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In 2024, actor/director Andrew McCarthy released a documentary/therapy session about having been a member of the Brat Pack. In an incredible stroke of luck, this doc—called BRATS—came out at the height of Brat Summer, so its adjacency to the zeitgeist got it a bit more attention than it might have had otherwise. To me, BRATS was an incurious and awkward piece of self-indulgence. It’s hard to watch a man try to convince his peers that being labeled as the hottest and most popular bright young things in Hollywood is what scuppered his career.¹ But one of the few moments of genuine curiosity came when McCarthy tried to define who exactly counted as a member of the Brat Pack.

David Blum’s iconic celebrity profile that coined the expression lays out its own taxonomy, which is racist (Nicolas Cage is labeled “the Ethnic Chair”), sexist (no women included, despite it coming out after Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club), and just too narrow overall. (Vulture, with the benefit of hindsight, has a much more comprehensive taxonomy that I think should count as the definitive one.) But one thing David Blum got right, even back then, was that Tom Cruise was his own thing.

Judd Nelson had 48 hours to respond and was frankly never heard from again.

Tom Cruise was in some proto-Brat Pack classics like Taps and The Outsiders, but he still has never really been associated with them. It’s kind of weird seeing him and Emilio Estevez in Mission: Impossible together, because they feel like they’re from two entirely different corners of the ‘80s, even though they played besties in The Outsiders. But there’s always been something about Tom Cruise that made the idea of him being part of a secular group of people with things in common completely unfathomable. By 1985, he was clearly destined for superstardom—a superstardom that has lasted a bizarrely long amount of time.

To be a superstar requires a bespoke blend of self-awareness and obliviousness. Tom Cruise is necessarily remote and out-of-touch, because celebrity is isolating and reality-warping even if you aren’t leading a non-secular group of people with nothing in common besides their compulsory devotion to you. But Tom Cruise is also necessarily aware of how he plays on-screen and in public, otherwise he couldn’t have stayed this famous for this long. It’s a superstardom with enough longevity and phases to it that it can be in conversation with itself. Which is why my absolute favourite, career phase-spanning genre of Tom Cruise’s oeuvre is movies where Tom Cruise becomes Tom Cruise™️.

Risky Business (1983)

I remembered this movie as being silly and boring, so on behalf of my teenage self, I want to say: Risky Business, I owe you an apology. I was not familiar with your game. This movie is actually quite hilarious, and, as anxious and completely adequate high school senior Joel, Tom is looser and more un-self-consciously silly than I typically see him.

The scene where Tom announces his Movie Stardom—the Bob Seger slide into the living room—became a cultural touchstone for good reason. This is Joel’s first night home alone without his parents, and he celebrates this adult milestone by pouring himself an entire highball of his parents’ scotch with a glug of Coke, and trying to eat a still-frozen TV dinner with his hands. (The choice to have him do this while wearing his tucked-in pink Oxford shirt is a perfect one). By the time he’s untucked his shirt and slid into the frame in his tighty-whities, we’re laughing at this strange little dork.

The whole dance scene is as endearingly goofy as it is physically impressive. Taken out of context, as this scene typically is, it’s still electrifying to watch. This was the beginning of audiences loving to watch this man express himself with his whole body.

But the scene where Tom announces his Tom Cruise Movie Stardom comes much later in the film. At this point, Joel has slept with Lana the sex worker, and they’ve turned Joel’s home into a brothel for the night. The brothel party is in full swing when Bill, the Princeton friend of Joel’s father, arrives to conduct Joel’s interview. During said interview, we watch Joel finally find peace with the “ruined future” he’s been terrified of for the whole movie. His parents’ dream of Ivy League respectability is not his dream. He’s ready to do his own thing. He turns to Bill, puts on his Ray Bans, and says the running line of the movie— “Sometimes, you just gotta say, what the fuck? Make your move.”

Now THAT’s what I call Tom Cruise™️!

The sunglasses. The Cesar Romero smile. The “watch me freak this” energy. This was a star going supernova. This was Tom Cruise becoming Tom Cruise™️—a swaggering charisma factory who refused to acknowledge limitations.

Top Gun (1986)

I’m going to spend as little time as possible on Top Gun, because I really hate this movie. I hate empty-headed jingoism, and this version of Tom Cruise Movie Stardom, because it’s truly so boring. All Maverick does is constantly endanger everyone’s lives (it is shocking that he isn’t responsible for Goose’s death, even though he thinks he is) and pester that gorgeous lesbian, and only gets away with it all because he’s played by Tom Cruise. He’s the cocky douchebag who has to learn an important lesson—that he’s awesome and talented enough to justify his cocky douchebaggery—and I just hate it. But this type will come back, so dog-ear this page.

shut uppppppp

Jerry Maguire (1996)

Tom’s most mid-90s performance, in a movie that boasts three of the most meme’d lines of the decade². Jerry opens the movie as a man who thinks he’s Tom Cruise™️, with the intensity and charm dialed all the way up and the humanity dialed all the way down. He almost immediately has a crisis of conscience, unable to live with the soullessness anymore, and his very ‘90s outburst (a mission statement, not a memo) gets him fired ASAPtually from his high-powered sports agency. He spends the rest of the movie wrestling against his soulless Tom Cruise™️ instincts, gnawing fear of being alone, and general unwillingness to be an actual human being who experiences actual intimacy.

(Since Jerry is supposed to be one of the out-of-shape guys in contrast with the A-list athletes he represents, we don’t get a ton of Tom Cruise’s signature physicality. Of course, he does run a couple times. But my fave physical bit he does is when, during one of Jerry’s many spirals, he starts drunkenly jumping rope indoors while wearing a sport coat and Ray Bans. If that’s not a loving dig at his whole Tom Cruise persona, I don’t know what is.)

Speaking of the running: crucially, one of his Tom Cruise Runs is to find his wife—Renée Zellweger at the peak of her button-cuteness powers— finally shed the Tom Cruise™️ armor he’s been clinging to, and give a charmingly rambling speech.

In order to remind us of Tom Cruise’s power as an actor, Jerry Maguire had to un-become Tom Cruise™️. He’s not the cocky, soulless guy his instincts keep telling him to be, or who the audience has come to expect Tom Cruise to be. He’s a sincere, fumbling man whose vulnerability gets him the intimacy he so longs for.

Collateral (2004)

I’m including this movie on the Tom Cruise Becomes Tom Cruise™️ list for a few reasons. First of all, the movie fucking slaps. Tom Cruise, hit man, hiring Jamie Foxx, cab driver, to drive him to his various hit jobs for the night? That’s cinema, baby.

Second, Tom simply doesn’t play villains often enough. He’s really incredibly good at it. And here, he appears to be playing a chilling riff on Christian Bale’s interpretation of him—“this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes”—that allegedly inspired Bale’s American Psycho performance. Tom plays Vincent with all of the Tom Cruise charm dialed all the way down, but his intense charisma dialed all the way up. You can’t take your eyes off him, in the same way you can’t take your eyes off a coyote that appears in your path.

And finally, this is the Tom Cruise movie where someone else has to become Tom Cruise. Jamie Foxx’s Max starts the movie as passive, deeply risk-averse, and accommodating to the point of being obsequious. He is Vincent’s opposite in every way. But for one scene, he has to pretend to be Vincent in order to survive a conversation with Vincent’s client, a drug kingpin who wants all of the witnesses in the case against him killed. So he empties himself of all self-doubt and humanity in order to become Tom Cruise™️.

Tom Cruise is such a massive superstar at this point that Jamie Foxx becomes a movie star by pretending to be him in a movie with him. Like, Foxx was nominated for two Oscars in one year because of this movie and Ray.³ Is that not bananas to you?

Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011)

The people love this entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and I get why. The Kremlin break-in is some great live-action cartoon comedy from a great director of animated films like The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. And the Burj Khalifa scene, still the most famous set piece in the franchise, is a masterclass in Tom’s Buster Keatonian understanding of how to make a stunt really sing.

First, the scene has to establish that there is no other option for our hero than for him to do this stunt. Then, it lays out exactly how the stunt should play out, with the magic gloves—“blue is glue”—and what will happen if it doesn’t play out the way it should—“red is dead.” Finally, it lets the stunt succeed, then fail, so that our hero must rely on his ingenuity and physicality to survive. This scene is legendary for a reason, and it’s the beginning of Tom Cruise seemingly putting his life on the line to entertain us. It’s also the end of Ethan Hunt as a character, because from here on out, he is just Tom Cruise™️.

(Me myself personally? I just like this one. I think the Mission: Impossible movies rise and fall with their female characters, and Paula Patton does not bring the spunky energy of Michelle Monaghan in Mission: Impossible 3, nor the indomitable sleekness of Rebecca Ferguson in Rogue Nation and Fallout, nor the spunky sleekness⁴ of Hayley Atwell in the Reckoning ones. The Ghost Protocol villain is also a caricature of ‘10s action villains—pointedly uncharismatic, quietly devoted to his fiendish plot that is so high-stakes that it’s actually pretty boring.)

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

My all-time favourite Tom Cruise movie, and the best example of Tom Cruise becoming Tom Cruise™️. Crucially, his Edge of Tomorrow character, Cage, starts the film merely pretending to be Top Gun Tom Cruise. Cage is a wartime PR consultant, given a military title and uniform because he is providing his services to said military. When he gets on the wrong side of General Brendan Gleeson (the cuddliest grump in any movie) and is pressed into actual service, he first—hilariously—tries to run his way out of it.

And once he’s actually on the battlefield, he dies within two minutes. This being a Tom Cruise sci-fi action movie, the specific nature of his death sends him into a Groundhog Day loop, reliving the same day every time he gets killed. We watch Tom Cruise die dozens of times in this movie—first on the battlefield, and then when my darling Emily Blunt takes him under her wing for the most brutal training imaginable (every time he breaks a limb, she shoots him to death so he can reset. She’s a fucking legend). Her training enables Cage to become, essentially, her equal: a magnificent super soldier who inspires awe in his comrades. AKA, Top Gun Tom Cruise™️. And we’re just about back where we started.

The only way for a man to deserve Emily Blunt’s time.

1. I liked him in The Joy Luck Club, but does anyone even remember he was in that movie? Or almost any of the Brat Pack movies, for that matter?

2. In chronological order: “show me the money,” “you complete me,” and “you had me at hello.”

3. This has only happened 12 times in the near-century that the Oscars have existed.

4. Ethan can apparently only be paired with variations on one theme.