Tom Cruise, risen from the depths of his public-relations disasters of the last decade, seems to be back in full cultural favor. This past week, you could catch him engaging in today’s mass-market celebrity rite of passage: lip-sync battling alongside Jimmy Fallon on the “The Tonight Show.” Cruise, a master lip-syncer from way back (Bob Seger, candlestick, dress shirt, no pants), and a famously eager and well prepared performer, was—not surprisingly—quite game.
He was there to promote his new movie, “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation,” and to speak specifically about a particular stunt that he’d pulled off during filming. If you’ve turned on a TV in the past month or so, you’ve probably seen it in the trailer: Cruise clutching onto the closed door of an Airbus A400M military cargo plane as it speeds down a runway and lifts off into the air. This is the stuff of stuntmen or, more likely these days, digital effects. Except, as Cruise told Fallon, and has mentioned at length everywhere else that he’s promoted the movie, that was really him strapped against the fuselage from takeoff, to flight, to landing, for eight different takes. It was, Cruise confirmed, cold and windy up there.
“What’s your problem, dude? Can’t you just chill out?” Fallon asked Cruise about his latest daredevilry and his well-documented insistence that he perform nearly all of his own stunts. Fallon’s expression was less of criticism than of admiration and simple awe. But it was nonetheless an essential question, perhaps the essential question when it comes to considering Cruise’s more than thirty years as a movie star. For a moment it seemed that Cruise might take the question seriously, plumbing whatever depths lurk within him to produce a startling answer. I can’t help it. I can’t stop. Help me! Instead he gestured toward the audience and said, smiling, “I do it because it’s entertaining to you all. I want to entertain you.”
At fifty-three years old, Cruise remains the nation’s premier action hero, thanks in large part to his own rather miraculous durability—he is, as Anthony Lane writes, “the Dorian Gray of action movies.” But this status also owes to the concurrent durability, and ongoing reinvigoration, of the “Mission: Impossible” series, of which he is not only the star but, as its producer, the architect as well. Cruise selects the directors, approves the cast, and sets the terms of his own participation in the action. That, in Cruise’s case, means being involved in as many stunts as he can.
The four previous installments of the series have seen him flipping and balancing at the end of wires, riding a wave loosed from an exploding fish tank, climbing cliff faces, driving cars and motorcycles into tight spots, and jumping from various high places to lower places—all while setting his jaw in its famous clench and staring intently into the distance. In the last movie, Cruise, running out of locations to conquer, got his colleagues and the movie’s insurers to let him hang from cables outside the upper floors of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, in Dubai. As a professional stunt coördinator told New York magazine this year, “Tom Cruise has balls of steel, and a stuntman’s nerve.”
Onscreen, dodging explosions, he runs like a man who truly is running for his life—his body tensed; his jaw set; his arms passing high above either side of his head; his hands flat, stiffly chopping the air. You can imagine that he runs that way in real life, too. To answer Jimmy Fallon’s question, Tom Cruise can’t chill out. Or to put it a different way, he is, in a general, non-diagnostic sense of the word, totally crazy—in that he seems to be living in public with a kind of uncommon, even unknowable intensity. This is at once alluring and repelling, the cause of both adoration and scorn.
The bad kind of crazy, the kind that made him, for a short stretch, untouchable and unloved by many, was the kind that found him jumping on couches or laughing maniacally in interviews or leaning close to Matt Lauer and trying to stare him to death while warning about the dangers of psychiatry and antidepressants. The good kind of crazy, meanwhile, is the impulse that leads him to insist upon strapping himself to the outside of a giant airplane, because he knows that audiences will be just that more thrilled upon knowing that it is really him out there being buffeted in the breeze. Both are expressions of an almost oppressive sincerity, and of a rare faith in his own transcendent capacity to convince, to convert, and to entertain. Cruise is a small man who, through the magic of the movies and the insistence of his own physical will, does large and remarkable things.
It’s likely, at this stage in his career and all generosity to the audience aside, that Cruise picks his movies based on what physical challenges they will let him surmount. Asked recently about returning to the cockpit for a “Top Gun” sequel, Cruise wasn’t picturing himself playing an admiral sitting behind a desk, and he insisted that the effects would be as real as possible. “I’m saying right now no C.G.I. on the jets,” he said. “If we can figure all that out, and the Department of Defense will allow us to do it, that would be fun.” It seems perfectly natural to hear Cruise talk about marshalling the forces of the nation’s military in the production of a movie. (Half of the pilots flying in the Navy right now are probably there because they saw “Top Gun” fifty times when they were kids.) In this latest “Mission: Impossible” movie, Alec Baldwin, playing the director of the C.I.A., calls Cruise’s character “the living manifestation of destiny.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, but if it applies to anyone, it applies to Tom Cruise.
