“I pulled back and stopped”: the movie Tom Cruise refused to promote and why it didn’t even matter
The thought of Tom Cruise point-blank refusing to promote one of his movies is unthinkable, since he’s always made a point of going all-out to drum up buzz for his latest release.
This may have completely passed you by, since he rarely mentions it, but the guy fucking loves the movies. As a result, when he makes a movie of his own, he’ll travel the world, shake hands, and hype the absolute shit out of it, all while never saying anything whatsoever about his personal life.
He’s a weird guy, Tom Cruise. Ever since he went apeshit on Oprah Winfrey’s couch two decades ago, he’s retreated into the protective cocoon he’s built around himself, where he exists as more of a cypher than an actual human being. He’s Tom Cruise, and we all know who Tom Cruise is, but we don’t actually know anything about what Tom Cruise the person, not the movie star, does away from the cameras.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because it means we don’t have to hear him decry the psychiatric profession, confess to attempted manslaughter live on television, or extol the merits of Xenu to anyone who’ll listen, but there remains something unexplainably unsettling about that what Christian Bale once accurately described as “intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes”.
To put things into context, ahead of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning‘s premiere, Cruise traversed the globe, touching down everywhere from London and Cannes to Seoul, Tokyo, and everywhere in between, to whip the cinemagoing public into as big a frenzy as possible.
At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, before the release of Top Gun in the summer of 1986, he hadn’t widely promoted one of his films for three years. Not even Risky Business, the picture that launched him to stardom when he skidded across the floor in his kecks, which he abandoned well before it hit the big screen in August 1983.
“I supported the film up to a point,” he reasoned. “Then, when everything kind of started going, I pulled back and stopped it all. I had to say, ‘Listen, guys, for myself, I’m just not personally ready to do this.'” Tom Cruise shitting himself over dealing with the media sounds ridiculous today, but he got cold feet when it came to building anticipation for a coming-of-age comedy.
Not that it mattered in the slightest, with writer and director Paul Brickman’s caper serving as the mainstream breakthrough that Cruise had always longed for. Risky Business was the exact moment he evolved from a promising newcomer into a nailed-on future superstar, all while avoiding talking about it to anyone outside of his inner circle.
Audiences showed up in their numbers to see the freshly minted sensation in his star-making turn, while he did everything in his power to hide away from the spotlight, something that’s been unimaginable for him ever since.
