The most devastating moment of Tom Cruise’s career: “It really hurt my feelings”
It takes thick skin to succeed in Hollywood, and having spent four decades as one of the industry’s biggest stars, Tom Cruise needed skin thicker than most.
That said, the actor rebounded from his mid-2000s lull by retreating even deeper into his carefully curated persona as Tinseltown’s marquee action hero. There used to be a time when Cruise would offer people an insight into his life away from the silver screen, but those days are long gone.
A combination of his bizarre couch-jumping antics on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, being dropped by home studio Paramount as a result, and his ludicrous criticisms of Brooke Shields and psychiatry saw Cruise shut the curtain, and it’s been almost 20 years since he opened up about his personal life.
To be fair, it worked, with the actor maintaining his spot at the industry summit after a tricky period, evolving into a hybrid of megawatt megastar and daredevil stuntman to solidify his position among the most bankable names and above-the-title draws left standing in cinema.
When he was more of an open book, though, Cruise’s feelings could be hurt. Brad Pitt may have detested every moment of shooting 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, but his co-star was dragged through the mud by not only author Anne Rice but also fans of the book, who protested his casting in the streets.
“The Tom Cruise casting is just so bizarre, it’s almost impossible to imagine how it’s going to work,” she said. “I have one question: Does Tom Cruise have any idea of what he’s getting into? I’m not sure he does. I’m not sure he’s read any of the books other than the first one, and his comments on TV that he wanted to do something scary and he loved ‘creature features’ as a kid; well, that didn’t make me feel any better. I do think Tom Cruise is a fine actor. But you have to know what you can do and what you can’t do.”
After being publicly derided by the author for being the completely wrong choice for the part, Cruise was a little upset. It turned out that his impenetrable armour of self-confidence had its vulnerabilities, forcing him to address the backlash and confess that it didn’t feel great for the creator of the character he was playing in a movie to tell everyone he was the opposite of who they had in mind.
“When it first hit, it really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it,” Cruise admitted, per Esquire. “Her venom hurt. You don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it. That’s unusual.” Still, he took it in his stride and eventually won Rice over with his performance.
The writer clambered down from her previous position and acknowledged that “it’s to his credit that he proved me wrong,” even if the more vocal Interview with the Vampire aficionados remained unconvinced.
