The single most embarrassing moment of Tom Cruise’s career: “He turned off all women”
Ever since he decided that he would refuse to talk about his personal life in a public setting to become more of a cinematic cypher than an actual person, Tom Cruise has basically become bulletproof to ridicule or embarrassment.
Yes, the couch-jumping incident on Oprah causes as much cringe as ever, and his denigration of psychiatry as nonsense while he celebrated the merits of Scientology in the same breath was preposterous, but that was 20 years ago, and he’s long since learned his lesson.
For the last two decades, wherever he appears, Cruise will only talk about a very small handful of subjects. He’ll talk about his movies, how he makes his movies, what he learned from the movies he’s made, other people’s movies, the movies he wants to see, how much he loves eating popcorn at the movies, and that’s pretty much it. It’s weird, but it’s spared him from being the subject of any more highly publicised takedowns.
Despite being the studio’s biggest star since Top Gun and making more pictures for Paramount than anyone else after headlining eight box office hits in the next two decades, the company’s former boss, Sumner Redstone, went full scorched earth on his biggest cash cow when he very publicly severed all ties with Cruise in the summer of 2006, shortly after the release of Mission: Impossible III.
“He was embarrassing the studio, and he was costing a lot of money,” Redstone raged, suggesting that the actor’s nauseating conduct wasn’t worth the risk. Adding insult to injury, he added that his wife had helped inform the decision because Cruise had apparently alienated his entire female audience in one fell swoop.
“Paula, like women everywhere, had come to hate him,” Redstone explained. “The truth of the matter is, I did listen to her. His behaviour was entirely unacceptable to Paula and the rest of the world. He just didn’t turn one off. He turned off all women, and a lot of men.” According to him, since his wife loathed Cruise, all women did, and he’d just been called a turn-off by a billionaire to the world’s press.
In response, the A-lister did whatever any normal and rational person would do by using Redstone as one of the main inspirations behind his Tropic Thunder character, Les Grossman, stealing scenes in a comedy that just so happened to be co-produced and co-distributed by Paramount. While he never confirmed that his jilted former employer was among his primary influences, it wasn’t exactly subtle.
The bad blood between them only lasted for a couple of years, though, with Cruise welcomed back into the Paramount fold for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. That marked the end of a lean period where the franchise’s third instalment, Lions for Lambs, Valkyrie, and Lions for Lambs had all underperformed, with Redstone crediting himself for the actor’s rejuvenated career.
“Tom said, ‘I want to come back,'” he recalled. “I said, ‘You’re never gonna get the same deal you had before, Tom’. He said, ‘I don’t care. I want to work them’. So I recommend that we take him back.” They kissed and made up, with Cruise celebrating Redstone as a “film lover and friend” following his death in 2020, but he didn’t half make him look like a twat beforehand.
