The Tom Cruise movie that offended a nation: “I hoped it was all just a publicity stunt”
It’s surprisingly common for Hollywood movies to offend foreign governments. Finland banned Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove due to fears it might affect the nation’s relationship with the Soviet Union, for example. More recently, Vietnam banned Greta Gerwig’s record-smashing hit Barbie due to a brief shot of a map that the government believed undermined its sovereignty. And in China, countless American movies have been banned, including Back to the Future because of its “dangerous fictional element” of time travel, Deadpool because of violence and nudity, and Nomadland because of director Chloe Zhao’s critical comments about the government nearly a decade earlier.
Of all the movie stars likely to become embroiled in an international controversy over one of their films, however, Tom Cruise is not even on the list. The actor-turned-Hollywood mogul has gone out of his way to make his films as inoffensive as possible, occasionally even kowtowing to questionable foreign governments for the sake of getting his movies to the broadest audience possible.
In 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, for example, two tiny Taiwanese and Japanese flags on Cruise’s bomber jacket were removed from the trailer after an outcry from China. Even though they were later reinstated, the film goes out of its way not to mention the US military’s rivals, even when the entire movie is centred around a tactical mission that takes place in one of them.
He has also made plenty of high-profile visits to Saudi Arabia for film premieres and events, glad-handing with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, whose human rights track record is decidedly grim. Meanwhile, one of the most famous set-pieces in the Mission: Impossible franchise sees him scaling Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
Cruise will do whatever it takes to retain his global palatability and make his movies as widely seen as possible, even if that means staying neutral on every conceivable issue and keeping his affiliation with the Church of Scientology out of the headlines. So it was particularly surprising when outcry came from Germany over one of his films.
In the 2008 thriller Valkyrie, Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a prominent member of the Nazi military who unsuccessfully attempted to kill Hitler in 1944. Viewed as a hero in Germany, von Stauffenberg was executed by firing squad when the plot failed, and his family was sent to concentration camps.
When it was announced that Cruise would be playing the legendary colonel in an upcoming film, von Stauffenberg’s son had misgivings, particularly over the star’s affiliation with Scientology, which he called “off-putting.” Speaking of Cruise’s involvement in the movie, Berthold von Stauffenberg told Sueddeutsche Zeitung, “I hoped for a while that it was all just a publicity stunt by Mr. Cruise.”
He added, “He should climb a mountain or go surfing in the Caribbean. I don’t care, as long as he stays out of it.”
His fears were that the film would “turn into horrible kitsch,” though he said he wouldn’t attempt to stop the movie from going ahead. Whether Cruise was aware of his misgivings is unclear, but the movie did go ahead and received largely positive reviews.
For his part, Cruise has said that playing von Stauffenberg in the film was a childhood dream come true. Apparently, since the age of four, the Mission: Impossible star dreamed of killing Hitler even though, to state the obvious, the dictator was already dead at that point. Luckily for Cruise, the magic of Hollywood is that no story ever really dies.
