Tom Cruise: The Last Movie Star?

Is it just me, or do we have fewer and fewer true A-list movie stars these days? We seem to be inundated with unmemorable bandwagon influencers, but I’m talking about the kind of star with sheer force of presence. Whatever you think about Tom Cruise, it’s hard to deny he’s one of the last of that breed and harder still not to respect his devotion to his work.

Say what you want about him, but his commitment to the craft is amazing. There’s a seriousness, almost an old school integrity in the way he approaches filmmaking. The extremes he pushes himself to are both awe inspiring and slightly insane in the best possible way.

I still remember the leaked audio from the Mission Impossible set during COVID. It was intended to expose him, to make him look unhinged; but for many people, including me, it had the opposite effect. What I heard was someone who genuinely cared; about the production, about people’s jobs, about the money and time on the line. Sometimes truths are delivered hard, but that doesn’t make them any less true. His reaction showed someone who wasn’t just focused on the final product, but on the people whose livelihoods depend on these massive, expensive productions. It was his craft, his team and he took it seriously; rightly so.

In our modern culture, we spend so much energy dissecting people’s personal lives and investing in curated images that we forget how little of them we actually know. There’s plenty of speculation about Cruise, but none of it is really our business. If we only admired those with perfectly angelic track records, there’d be no one left to admire.

Fundamentally humans are flawed by default, and often it feels like the most talented are the most flawed. It’s almost a catch 22. It doesn’t mean peoples wrong doings should be swept up under the carpet, but it also doesn’t mean someone’s talent can be ignored. We talk about separating the art from the artist, but the truth is that craft reveals character to a degree also. Cruise’s discipline, work ethic and absolute commitment speak to something good in him.

I’ve loved so many of his films: The Last Samurai, A Few Good Men, Rain Man, Collateral, The Firm, Cocktail, Top Gun, Mission Impossible, American Made…

But Hollywood itself seems like a dark, suffocating place and a world I would never want to be part of in its superficial, lost rat race. The scrutiny anyone on a public platform lives under is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I care less about their personal lives and more about what their work speaks.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe we don’t need our actors and public figures to be saints. That’s what saints are for. We need actors for something entirely different: to care enough to remind us what real movie magic feels like and honour their roles and fulfil them. It’s a bonus if they happen to be saintly people too, but we need to remind ourselves people are who they are, flaws and all.

So instead of putting people on pedestals, maybe we should learn to admire the admirable parts;  the pieces of them that shine through the work. Because no one is perfect and we live in a world where humans are made up of the best and the worst simultaneously and the two can coincide. But some, like Tom Cruise, care enough to make art that feels larger than life and raise that cinematic experience for a viewer. And that might be what a true movie star is.