Tom Cruise: Hollywood's Ageless Vampire

(Photo Creative Commons License, FMT)

When the time came to put together our class magazine, I was sure to turn up with a few good portraits. I was the artist of the class, after all, and I wasn’t much good at anything else, so it was my time to shine. I basked in the quiet ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ that my skills provoked.

Nothing, however, compared to the day that I drew Tom Cruise.

Frankly, I didn’t know what the big deal was about. I had been reading a comic book (I don’t remember which one) and happened upon a drawing of the famous heartthrob, and because the work was already done for me, I copied the simplified black lines onto a piece of Executive Bond I had stolen from my father’s desk. The striking likeness, with a few minor issues with proportion, had a ripple effect that reached a crescendo when a wave of girls from various classes came to view my drawing at lunchtime. Someone took the drawing and stuck it on the class notice board. There were squeals and giggles. Seniors deigned to enter our classroom and seriously contemplate the drawing.

I was over the moon.

I dared not tell them that Tom Cruise was the equivalent of processed paneer to me. I was a Daniel Day-Lewis fan, but how was I supposed to explain that elegant chameleon to anyone who cared to know? It was a convenient lie and made me briefly popular.

Tom Cruise had always been the primary dreamboat when it came to the Schoolgirl High. I remember being invited for slumber parties with the mandatory Cocktail and Top Gun viewings followed by late-night chitchat. I wasn’t that socially sophisticated, and besides, the logistics of getting dropped off and picked up seemed too complicated for my busy parents, so I was never recruited into the Tom Cruise Fan Club.

Many years and many Tom Cruise movies later, I’m only paying the actor a reluctant courtesy for his work ethic and his innate acting talent which, I believe could be used for more sensitive portrayals. This is in spite of the borderline neurotic interviews (Christian Bale was inspired enough to incorporate some of his quirks into his portrayal of fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman, after all). And let’s not forget the ridiculous Scientology medallion and his equally ridiculous scouting for a suitable wife through the Scientology Church.

… But let’s forget about all of that.

Consider the glow-up after his first role in Endless Love, a filler role that anyone could’ve done, to his second tiny but life-changing experience in the movie Taps, during which he “went to every single department, studied every part of the movie […] I studied every aspect of films.”

This oft-repeated story of what pushed him to enter films is a reminder of how finicky the actor is when it comes to studying his roles and the extreme lengths he goes to to perform his own stunts. His young co-stars in the otherwise cringy sequel to Top Gun, not only learned to fly fighter jets under his guidance but also learned to film themselves acting while flying. To come away with everyone’s life intact is something we need to appreciate in a time of green screens, CGI, and AI manipulation. I admire that, but the first role that changed my mind about him means a lot more to me because I thought the movie was perfect.

Until I watched Barry Norman’s review of Interview with a Vampire, I thought of him as, quote, “just another pretty face.” To wit, I never found the actor attractive until then. Tom brought out the menacing sensuality of Anne Rice’s vampires: the perfect balance between Lestat’s sassy flamboyance and Louis’s melancholic beauty.

Norman repeatedly prods Tom about the ‘homo-erotic subtext’ in the movie when, according to me, the homo-erotic subtext of Maverick and Iceman’s juvenile antagonism can’t be beat. Jerry Maguire is another movie I found remarkably cringe, but then I never claimed to be a Tom Cruise fan at any point. I only decided to pay the actor my grudging respect when I assembled my thoughts over the years, so my thoughts are contradictory.

The third role I really like him in is Ben Stiller’s offensive comic caper, Tropic Thunder, where he plays an egotistical movie producer, again, with a believable lack of empathy for any other human being. In fact, aspects of the belligerent Hollywood producer are a little too close to the tongue-lashing he gave the crew on the set of Mission Impossible—Fallout.

His acting projects ought to have nothing to do with his real-life personality, but why, Tom Cruise, do you play villains so extraordinarily well?

Take his role in the Michael Mann thriller Collateral, where he plays the hitman Vincent, who goes about a night of multiple kills with psychopathic efficiency. The trigger-happy assassin is the precursor to the excess of John Wick; every hit is felt, and he has no particular code that would rescue him in the eyes of the audience, except a passing concern for the aspirations of his unfortunate taxi driver. And it’s about the only movie where Tom Cruise carries a salt and pepper hairdo without the need to appear sexy.

Which brings me to his refusal to age like other actors. Even now, despite his 62 long years, he carries the same look, except for a brief interlude where he sported a low ponytail. He owns a fabulous pair of eyebrows, a delight to draw; the eagle-like gaze underneath is carried by a pair of eyes that are proportionately large. TBH, I’m torn; I can’t decide about the guy.

But there is an inability to break the image he’s created for himself. He hasn’t greyed, and the insistence on remaining a real-life vampire betrays an ill-advised inability to adapt to the trajectory of a well-strategized career. Whatever he says about not knowing whether a movie is going to be a hit or not, he’s intelligent, and he knows what he’s doing, but he needs to age normally. Let’s cut him some slack and assume he can’t change his look because he’s always playing Ethan Hunt, but doesn’t Ethan Hunt age either?

His interview praising the Scientology Church could provide evidence as to when the actor started to look borderline kooky to his audience, because before that, he seemed a perfectly normal, slightly shy movie star thrust into situations where the public intruded into his personal life.

When you’re in the public eye, public opinion, depending on your bankability, has a level of importance. The Taps experience is pretty much the same story repeated over decades in interview after interview, which makes me think that he’s not great at the social aspects of his job, that he’s used the story as a filler for interviews that inevitably turn out awkward. In spite of the parade of oddities on The Oprah Winfrey Show, you have to admit Tom Cruise’s interview really stands out. His terrible real-life acting betrays a personality uncomfortable with the public pedestal.

I wish he wouldn’t be, but the camera has a tendency to cut at the layers and expose the viscera for the world to see, consume, and ridicule. The vulnerable can’t survive it, and that makes me think Tom Cruise wears his fictional characters like armour. Without it, he’s defenceless against the onslaught of nosy questions, hence his habitual defensiveness in interviews. He is, in a way being himself when interviewed, a deliberate choice when he has an array of diverse characters to choose from to act his way through them.

Take this brief moment when a prankster squirted him with water during a premiere, and he chided the man with the severity of a schoolteacher. No abuse, just a sound talking to. Take the anti-psychiatry rant. Tom Cruise telling this 60 Minutes interviewer to “put his manners back in.” Then, take this refreshing compilation of his Graham Norton Show appearances and notice how he never tries to take the limelight away from his costars.

The man is not without his faults, and as long as you keep a wide berth of his triggers, you have to appreciate how he’s literally risking his life to perform his stunts. Case in point, this interview with Matt Damon in which he talks about how Tom Cruise fired the “safety guy” because he disapproved of a stunt that Tom proposed, saying it was too dangerous.

Anyway, I want to see him in a non-action role once again, with the fragility he portrayed in Born on the Fourth of July. I’ve personally had enough of the Mission Impossible movies and want to see him in a role that could portray the vulnerability we need to see without the armour, the action, and, for once, for goodness sake, looking his actual age.