The 2008 movie that forced Tom Cruise to deny he wears a fake arse: “I do my own mooning”
There’s little that movie magic can’t accomplish these days, but did it cross the final frontier, enter uncharted territory, and reveal that Tom Cruise has been wearing a fake arse the whole time? Apparently not, according to Tom Cruise, anyway.
You’d have to admit, the irony would be delicious of a man who prides himself on doing his own stunts and making sure that his action sequences are captured completely in-camera, resorting to artificial enhancements to force the design team into misleading the world into thinking that what he’s carrying behind him is two eggs wrapped in a hankie.
Then again, Cruise is an A-list movie star and has been for the last 40 years, so he’s not without ego or vanity. He’s in his 60s now, but there doesn’t appear to be a single grey hair on his head. Maybe it’s just genetics, or maybe he’s been busting out the Just for Men to ensure that Collateral remains his only silver fox moment.
Since he also looks relatively youthful for his age and he’s rich and famous, the spectre of cosmetics, whether injectable or surgical, has also been levelled against him, whether true or false. Cruise doesn’t reveal anything about his life away from the cameras, though, so the mystery will continue to prevail.
However, he did feel the need to clarify that when he was playing a Nazi officer in Bryan Singer’s 2008 war drama, Valkyrie, in which one shot at around the five-minute mark appears to show him displaying a pair of arse cheeks that would make Kim Kardashian shed a single tear, it was all natural.
Because people are weird, the internet is weird, and the internet is full of weird people, it quickly became a viral sensation, with debates raging over Cruise’s glutes. Were they the genuine articles? Did the behind-the-scenes crew pad him up with a pair of juicy fakes? Was it a camera trick? Naturally, it was brought up in his presence, and he quickly sought to shut down the craic about his crack.
“There was no prosthetic in Valkyrie, no,” the actor alleged. “It’s me. It’s not CGI. I do my own mooning in films. So let it be known; I do my own mooning.” We didn’t really need to know that, to be honest, but since nobody seemed to believe him, and, as mentioned, the internet is a strange, strange place, the man who trained Cruise for his role in Valkyrie was forced to weigh into the backside barney, too.
“It’s real,” Wes Okerson insisted. “He was working long hours, and we were training every single day. Definitely, definitely real.” Not to put on a tin foil hat or anything, but if Cruise did opt to enhance his arse for Valkyrie, there was no better film to do it in, since it wasn’t his most talked-about prosthetic of 2008.
The same year, he played Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, which required him to spend hours in the makeup chair every day to get into character. Maybe, just maybe, that convinced him that when everyone was looking one way, he could look the other and stuff some shapely padding down his kecks.
