The co-star who hated every second of working with Tom Cruise: “He tormented a lot of people”
As popular as he is among audiences and his peers, Tom Cruise isn’t universally beloved. Not many people in Hollywood are, to be honest, but one former co-star couldn’t stand being around him.
The public persona he’s presented is that of a permanently smiling and friendly guy, one who doubles as one of the most vocal defenders of the theatrical experience’s sanctity. Nobody outside of his inner circle seems to know the real Tom Cruise, and that’s entirely by design.
Even the people he does consider close friends, like Simon Pegg, have revealed that he does very Tom Cruise-esque things in his day-to-day life, such as piloting a helicopter into the Cornetto trilogy star’s garden, or giving his protege, Glen Powell, a six-hour instructional video to watch on everything he never thought to ask about filmmaking. Weird? Yes. Disingenuous? Not really.
On the other side of the coin, he bugged the shit out of Brad Pitt when they were making Interview with the Vampire, annoyed Mickey Rourke by existing, and pissed off Brooke Shields when he used her struggles with postpartum depression to tout the values of Scientology and the evils of psychiatry, although he did eventually apologise.
One name guaranteed never to find itself on the illustrious coconut cake list is Bronson Pinchot, who played one of his first major movie roles opposite Cruise in 1983’s Risky Business. The scene where the leading man slides into the living room in his pants remains one of his most iconic moments, but his co-star didn’t come away from the production with the best memories of the star.
“We thought Tom was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth,” he told The AV Club. “He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn; we were all very young at the time. Tom was 20, and I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that.”
Pinchot described the actor as “tense” and accused him of making “constant, constant, unrelated” homophobic comments. “There was no basis for it,” he added. “Very, very strange.” Cruise has filed several lawsuits in the past and won against people alleging that he was gay, which the Beverly Hills Cop alum found wonderfully ironic.
“Years and years later, when people started to torment him with that, I used to think, ‘God, that’s really fitting, because he tormented a lot of people as a 20-year-old,” he said. Accusing one of the biggest and most powerful figures in the industry of homophobia could have potentially led to murky legal waters, leading Cruise’s reps to issue a statement saying, “This is so far removed from who Tom Cruise is as a person; this must have been said in jest,” with Pinchot somewhat clarifying his remarks to The Wall Street Journal.
“The context of the question was, ‘How did he strike me as a person’ at a point in his career when he was a virtual unknown,” Pinchot explained, adding that “in hindsight, that for a 20-year-old with no background in theatre, such language is actually unremarkable, which I did not know at 23.” What remains undeniably true, though, is that he didn’t enjoy a second of his time working with Cruise.
