Tom Cruise wants the last word

Tom Cruise is intense. We know this. Whether he’s pressing interviewers about their glibness or just holding eye contact for an inordinate amount of time, Cruise — the last movie star, as he’s been coined — is the definition of passion. 

But in a rare GQ profile ahead of his much-anticipated new film, “Digger,” Cruise’s zeal reaches heights even the intrepid actor might think twice about parachuting from. In the story, Cruise says a lot without saying much at all, sidestepping questions with the skill of both a performer and the high-profile poster boy for a contentious religion. Cruise avoids the personal by making his work inextricable from his life, thereby asking the reader to perform a clever thought exercise: What if Tom Cruise were telling the truth?

If Mister Movies is as devoutly committed to cinema as he is going clear, let’s humor him; separate the man from his beliefs as much as those beliefs — the product of religious conversion at a young age — have isolated him. “I want to improve myself, but not at the detriment of others,” Cruise tells GQ. “There is a common ground in humanity, and I’m looking for that common ground.” Taking him at his word, I relate to Cruise’s starry-eyed passion for films and all the ways they can bring people together. Much of my life is dedicated to preaching that art, and practicing reverence for it can be the glue that keeps us together when the world wants us torn apart.

Then, Cruise will fire off head-scratching bromide. “I’m a citizen of the world, a citizen of humanity,” he says in response to a banal question about where he shot “Digger.” There comes a time when one extols cinema’s virtues so fiercely that it feels like posturing. Say all you like about the power of movies. But without getting into cinema’s experiential humanity, it all begins to sound like hogwash. 

Yet, for every ludicrous statement, there’s a kernel of genuine wisdom that feels especially pertinent right now: “If you care about something, we don’t take the easy road,” Cruise says — an apt analogy for corner-cutting AI and influencing. And though he’s reticent to talk about his age or beliefs, at 64, Cruise seems to know how he wants to be remembered: not a Hollywood star, but a movie star. In Cruise’s mind, those are two very different things.