Judd Apatow mocks Tom Cruise during DGA speech
The director Judd Apatow took shots at Tom Cruise, poking fun at his small physical stature and his beliefs in the Church of Scientology during an award speech at the Directors Guild of America Awards. Apatow hosted the ceremony.
During his monologue, Apatow sarcastically heaped praise on the recent Cruise-starring film Top Gun: Maverick for being able to keep Cruise’s five foot, seven-inch height something of a concealment. “The visual effects in [Top Gun:] Maverick were so top-notch I couldn’t even see the stack of phone books Tom Cruise sat on to reach the flight controls,” he said.
Apatow added: “That’s why he’s always jumping out of tall buildings because you can’t tell how short he is when he’s in a 100-storey building. That’s why when he’s standing on a wing of an aeroplane, he’s always alone; he doesn’t want anyone there next to him for scale.”
From there, the director also referred to a famous 2005 Tom Cruise appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, when he jumped up and down on the sofa to show his stunt-performing prowess. “Remember when Tom Cruise jumped up and down on a couch, and we all thought, ‘what a lunatic’. And now he rides a motorcycle off a cliff and BASE jumps, and we’re all like, ‘Tom’s fine!’”
It was at this point that Apatow called Cruise’s history with Scientology into question. “Tom is not fine. Something is wrong with him,” he added. “Someone needs to explain to him something called CGI. But every time he does one of these new stunts, it does feel like an ad for Scientology. I mean, is that in Dianetics? Because there’s nothing about jumping off a cliff in the Torah.” Cruise himself was not present at the ceremony, but the Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski was said to be unimpressed by the jokes.
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