We didn’t know it yet, but in 1999 Tom Cruise was at the tail end of one of the most impressive runs an actor’s ever seen. After a hot start to his career with early ’80s touchstones like Risky Business and The Outsiders, he churned out a little movie called Top Gun and got recruited by a little director named Martin Scorsese to star alongside a little actor named Paul Newman in The Color of Money. He regularly appeared in Oscar fare (Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men) and was criminally denied the Best Actor prize for Jerry Maguire. Along the way, he acted for just about every canonized director working at the time, from Scorsese to Francis Ford Coppola to Brian De Palma to Stanley Kubrick. The man was on an unprecedented heater that left everyone wondering what could possibly come next. His response? “Respect the cock, and tame the cunt.”
So goes a memorable line from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, in which Cruise plays Frank T.J. Mackey, a proto–Andrew Tate PUA with daddy issues, preaching to men about not letting women control them. It’s a far cry from Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt, who would rather die in painful and dramatic fashion than let one (1) woman get hurt in the slightest. But, in hindsight, it’s also quite the provocative role for a man who doesn’t provoke much these days, other than raised eyebrows when he wolfs down two buckets of popcorn or, you know, jumps out of a plane. Not so coincidentally, Cruise’s Magnolia performance also provided him with his last acting Oscar nomination—he was nominated as a producer when Top Gun: Maverick received a Best Picture nod in 2022 but hasn’t been recognized otherwise since that 2000 Oscar nod.
The Mission: Impossible series (likely) wrapped up over the weekend, with its eighth installment, The Final Reckoning, serving as a farewell tour for Ethan and the rest of the crew. And by that I mean there’s a literal tour through the previous films in the series via approximately 900 flashbacks in The Final Reckoning’s first hour. There are callbacks to Hunt dangling over the CIA headquarters in the first film and some strained references to former villains portrayed by Jon Voight and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s totally self-indulgent, but it’s an interesting eulogy for the franchise and one of the ways the film alludes to this chapter in Cruise’s career coming to a close. Another is a scene at the beginning of The Final Reckoning in which Ethan and Grace (Hayley Atwell) are trying to break out after Gabriel (Esai Morales) has imprisoned them. A brutal brawl breaks out, but we experience the fight only through Grace’s facial expressions as she watches Ethan butcher some henchmen. It makes one wonder whether the typical M:I fight choreography is catching up to the 62-year-old Cruise. Of course, any inkling that he may be unable to perform his signature stunts is ultimately disproved—a couple of hours later, Ethan is hanging off the side of a biplane while punching Gabriel in the face—but that really just reinforces the thought: How long can he keep doing this? Plus, after the reviews for The Final Reckoning (mostly positive, but not as effusive as the franchise’s highs), do audiences even want him to keep doing this? That is, after completely remaking himself over the past 15 years, does he have another revamp of his movie star persona in him?
After Magnolia, Cruise added another auteur to his arsenal with starring turns in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and War of the Worlds. He later reportedly alienated the director when Scientologists picketed the office of Spielberg’s friend, a doctor who prescribed Ritalin, after Spielberg had talked about him in front of Cruise. This is basically a microcosm of what was going on with Cruise in the 2000s. He was beefing with Brooke Shields about postpartum depression, telling a 60 Minutes reporter to put his manners back in, and of course jumping on Oprah’s couch, all while parroting bizarre Scientology talking points that were quickly unraveling the image of Hollywood’s most bankable star. Some of this was unearned—Cruise was also often the subject of homophobic jokes at the time, as tabloids and South Park made a meal over speculating which celebrities were secretly gay—but when you make statements like “psychiatry is a pseudoscience,” it’s hard for people not to find you, at best, off-putting. There was speculation around this time, too, that Cruise could lose Mission: Impossible—rumors swirled that Jeremy Renner’s character, introduced in the fourth film, Ghost Protocol, was brought in to potentially take over the franchise. (Renner has since denied this). Still, even though Cruise was still taking some interesting roles throughout the 2000s—his performances in Collateral and Tropic Thunder in particular stand out—it wasn't enough to offset the public opinion he'd formed by routinely baffling people in his press runs.
In 2008, after his reputation hit rock bottom, Cruise stopped talking about Scientology in public and told interviewers he wasn’t interested in discussing it. “I think I learned a really good lesson,” he told Today at the time, reflecting on the infamous interview with Matt Lauer from 2005 in which he discussed his thoughts on psychiatry. “I’ve been a Scientologist for 25 years. I think there’s a time and place for it. [But] when people are tuning in to hear about my movie, that’s what I’m here to talk about.” It was clear that Cruise’s image had gone off the rails, and he was taking action to regain control of it.
This also carried over to the types of roles he began to take. After he and Katie Holmes divorced in 2012—likely motivated in part by Holmes’s desire to protect their daughter, Suri, from Scientology—and disturbing details from TomKat’s breakup were regularly featured in the tabloids, Cruise started curating his on-screen persona strictly around blockbuster action features and death-defying stunts, weeding out the typical awards-darling dramas and auteur-driven projects that had defined the early part of his career. 2012 also marked the release of the last nonaction flick Cruise starred in: the long-forgotten hair metal musical Rock of Ages, in which Cruise sports a chest tattoo and sings “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Ever since, he’s almost exclusively worked with three journeyman action directors in Doug Liman, Joseph Kosinski, and Christopher McQuarrie—solid talents for sure, with eyes for framing the kinds of stunts Cruise wants to pull off, but no one’s confusing them for Kubrick. And largely, this era has been built around Ethan Hunt and Mission: Impossible.
In making that shift, Cruise has raised his own stock arguably even higher than it was when he was regularly starring in the most beloved movies of the ’90s. The Mission: Impossible franchise became a critical darling, with behind-the-scenes videos of Cruise’s increasingly dangerous stunts becoming a key part of the marketing and positioning him as the heir of Buster Keaton, one of Cruise’s heroes. Along with jumping off cliffs and climbing skyscrapers, a key element of this era of Cruise’s career has been his advocacy for the theatrical experience, especially after it was threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Hollywood strikes in 2023. During production of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning in 2020, he infamously berated the crew for not adhering to COVID guidelines, stressing that “if I see you do it again, you’re fucking gone. … You can tell it to the people who are losing their fucking homes because our industry is shut down.” Whether or not that hostility toward far less powerful crew members was justified, many saw where the actor was coming from. And when, six months later, Top Gun: Maverick became the first pandemic-era film that didn’t have to rely on three Spider-Men to cross the billion-dollar mark at the global box office, Cruise’s new reputation took shape: He’d saved Hollywood. Even Spielberg, who had reportedly been put off by Cruise all those years ago, told him so! It’s one of the most drastic reputation rehabilitations pop culture’s ever seen—in the late 2000s, he was a blowhard and a punch line, and by the mid-2020s he was the ambassador of movies.
So now that the IMF has closed up shop, what’s next for Cruise? Variety reported in early 2024 that he has his sights set on projects that go beyond his standard action fare, specifically mentioning that “he’d like to return to working with auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson.” But what would that even look like today? His Magnolia performance feels like a risk modern-day Cruise—a man who regularly puts his life on the line on-screen—wouldn’t dare to take. In fact, until a recent career retrospective interview with Sight and Sound, he’s rarely even talked about his iconic ‘90s run over the past 10 years—it’s like that part of his career was done by a wholly different person. Is it possible to get that person back? The man who brought Jerry Maguire and Dr. Bill Harford to life still has to be in there somewhere, but tapping into it may require saving a type of cinema that Cruise hasn’t touched in over a decade.
That’s not to say action films are now completely off the table for Cruise. He’s long teased a sequel to the 2014 sci-fi thriller Edge of Tomorrow (which may be closer to fruition now that he’s signed a deal with the film’s original distributor, Warner Bros.). Plus, after the success of Maverick, a Top Gun 3 is imminent. But after he reportedly angled for a role in Quentin Tarantino’s next film before it was scrapped, next up for Cruise is a starring role in Alejandro Iñárritu’s upcoming feature, alongside buzzy actors like Sandra Hüller and Jesse Plemons. The jury’s still out on Iñárritu’s auteur status—his last film, 2022’s Bardo, got some of the worst reviews of his career—but he certainly has a track record of making films that get the type of awards attention Cruise was accustomed to 25 years ago. Maybe Cruise sees this film as an opportunity to get the Oscar that has long eluded him. Iñárritu recently described the new film, which wrapped recently and is tentatively titled Judy, as a “brutal, wild comedy.” “I know comedy is not what people expect from me or Tom,” the director told The Hollywood Reporter last week. “[But] Tom makes me laugh every single day. He has this total commitment, this total madness.” Commitment is certainly one thing Cruise has never lacked, and maybe that’s enough to accomplish his most intriguing mission yet, should he choose to accept it: one more reinvention.
