The actor who called out Tom Cruise’s “deluded” behaviour: “That’s what he’s capable of”
Spending 40 years living in the insulated bubble of being a world-famous celebrity means that some eccentricities are to be expected, and as the biggest movie star on the planet, it was almost inevitable that Tom Cruise would develop a few of his own.
It’s a sentiment that anyone who’s ever seen the way he eats his beloved popcorn will appreciate, since he doesn’t so much devour as open his mouth like that scene in 1999’s The Mummy when Arnold Vosloo’s Imhotep turns himself into a giant sand cloud, but at least the kernels aren’t going to miss.
Christian Bale used what he aptly described as Cruise’s “intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes” to use Cruise as an inspiration for Patrick Bateman, and that was over 25 years ago. He’s more of a personality than a person, and you won’t ever hear him talk about anything other than his love of cinema.
Then there’s the Oprah Winfrey incident that saw his star power take its biggest-ever knock and gave him his most embarrassing professional moment when he was booted out of Paramount’s inner circle and accused of being a turn-off to the planet’s entire female population, which was the lowest of blows.
Of course, there’s always the L Ron Hubbard-shaped elephant in the room, and the A-lister espousing the benefits of Scientology landed him in hot water during a notorious 2005 chat with Matt Lauer, where he effectively called psychiatry a form of pseudoscience, and decided it was a good idea to launch an unprompted attack on Brooke Shields for taking medication to deal with her postpartum depression.
The actors, who used to be friendly enough that she was a regular fixture on the prestigious annual cake list, co-starred together in 1981’s Endless Love, which was Cruise’s feature debut. Obviously, she wasn’t expecting to become the focal point of a publicity storm, but in her memoir, she did reveal that she received an apology… of sorts.
“It wasn’t the world’s best apology, but it’s what he was capable of, and I accepted it,” Shields wrote. “Had Tom taken a public swing at me before I became a mother, I probably would have stayed quiet. I would have ignored his ridiculous rant. I might have been content to sit back while this very famous man hijacked my experience to advance his own (deluded) agenda. I would have been satisfied that his behaviour would speak for itself.”
She didn’t take it lying down, though, instead penning a withering op-ed where she suggested that Cruise would be better off if he were “to get back to fighting aliens,” rather than commenting on something he wasn’t qualified to discuss at length, since, as Shields didn’t really need to point out, “Mr Cruise has never suffered from postpartum depression.”
He may have said sorry, but she doesn’t get those cakes sent to her house on an annual basis anymore, so it wasn’t as if all sins were instantly forgiven, and it sounds like the Suddenly Susan star didn’t care much for his atonement anyway.
