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• The Couch Jump That Rocked Hollywood

Tom Cruise’s 2005 appearance on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ was an iconic episode of television—and a turning point for how we discuss and understand celebrities

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In the spring of 2005, an unknown 20-something in California uploaded a 19-second video of himself to the internet. “Me at the zoo,” the first YouTube video, featured cofounder Jawed Karim rambling about animals. “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks,” a man said, gesturing toward an elephant enclosure. It was boring, but it was the beginning of something.

That same spring, Karim’s YouTube quickly found one of its first hits. Its origins were far less obscure than a tech guy on a field trip. At the time, Tom Cruise had a more-than-reasonable claim to the title of biggest celebrity in America. He was the movie star, a leading man with mom-approved handsomeness, a nimble physicality, and a gung-ho intensity that played on the big screen as magnetic instead of disturbed. He counted Top Gun , Jerry Maguire , and two Mission: Impossible movies among the idol-making roles under his small belt. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey had already established herself as not only the biggest celebrity on daytime television, but the biggest celebrity in media. She’d made the careers of Drs. Phil and Oz. She’d debuted O, the Oprah Magazine . She’d hollered “You get a car!” to a euphoric crowd. Cruise’s May 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show seemed destined to be yet another fluffy meeting of monstrously famous minds. Instead, traditional media’s powerhouse duo was about to provide the new video-uploading service with a clip that would demonstrate the format’s growth potential far better than a rinky-dink recording of a random dude musing about zoos.

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Before Cruise came out on stage that day, the crowd at Chicago’s Harpo Studios had already hyped itself into an ecstatic frenzy, whooping and clapping and jumping in overwhelmed pleasure at being in the presence of Winfrey, in her space, living their best lives. By 2005, Oprah had transformed her daytime talk show from a variation on Phil Donahue’s talk theme into something new, something that took the voyeuristic thrills of seeing televised confessions and elevated them with the language of self-help seminars and the polish of Hollywood. “Oprah is sitting in the throne of American pop culture,” said WBEZ anchor Jenn White on the podcast Making Oprah , describing Oprah’s cultural cachet in the early aughts. “She commands a regular worldwide audience of tens of millions. She can turn a book into a bestseller, a product into a trend, and people into stars.” At that point, Christianity Today had identified Oprah as “one of the most influential spiritual leaders in America.” Her audiences resembled gaga congregants.

Cruise was in Chicago to talk about his upcoming movie, Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds . Instead of sticking to the promotional script, though, the compact action star gushed about his new girlfriend, actress Katie Holmes. “You’re gone,” Oprah said, searching for words to describe Cruise’s over-the-top infatuation. Within 15 minutes, Cruise had leapt onto Oprah’s couch in a spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm for his personal life. Cruise’s offbeat showboating was memorable in part because of its unusual setting; The Oprah Winfrey Show was where celebrities traipsed to shine up their reputations and get a warm embrace from a sympathetic fellow star. Oprah would polish, not grill. But Oprah, usually so masterful at empathizing with her guests, appeared to be at a loss. “You’re gone,” she repeated. The charismatic preacher had been sidelined by an even more earnest proselytizer.

People hated it. More importantly, they loved to hate it. Most importantly, they loved to talk about hating it. Divorced from its context and remixed into YouTube clips and GIFs, Cruise’s couch outburst looked far more bizarre than it had during the episode, when at least the studio audience had been equally hyped up and Oprah had encouraged him to talk about his personal life. Within the context of the episode, Cruise’s behavior was strange but not outrageous. On the internet, isolated and amplified into a single furniture-leaping moment, it looked like an A-list meltdown . The most popular spoof was called “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah,” where Cruise appeared to kill Oprah with lightning. Family Guy parodied it. Even Sesame Street eventually parodied it. But the couch clip went beyond launching parodies and viral videos. The response to the Cruise episode signaled a changing of the guard in Hollywood media, from a pecking order where publicists and studios could strike deals with access-hungry press toward a more democratic and chaotic media landscape. Even though Cruise had been in a terrific mood during his Oprah appearance, it was appropriate that his tomfoolery was reframed to look far more aggressive than it was. The internet and the media were about to get much sharper.

“Tom’s couch-jumping coincided with the rise of gossip blogs,” Matt James, who runs the celebrity gossip site Pop Culture Died in 2009, told The Ringer . “The entire incident became a testament to the way public opinion could form online in the pre-Twitter era, and how damaging it could be in the long run.”

Longtime Hollywood gossip blog Lainey Gossip also credited Cruise’s leap onto Oprah’s couch with galvanizing the media landscape. “This rise of the gossip blog quickly accelerated,” site creator Elaine Lui wrote in 2015. “Celebrities were not being contained the way they used to be. And the PEOPLE and Entertainment Tonight coverage just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Not when these illusions were so quickly being destroyed. This incident became one of the most critical chapters in the Origin Story of Internet Gossip.” The intense online response to Cruise’s convention-breaking presaged a shift in how celebrity freakouts were covered, as it was one of the first major entertainment-world meltdowns to saturate the blogging world. “There was something so personal, so oversharey, so necessarily engaged with the audience in Cruise’s couch-jumping that it set the tone for the kind of one-person media circus we’d expect and enjoy in the years to come, to varying degrees of sadness (Britney Spears), amazement (Charlie Sheen) and despicableness (Chris Brown),” Gawker ’s Rich Juzwiak wrote in 2012. While the word “meme” hadn’t yet entered the mainstream lexicon, Cruise’s furniture leap went viral. “Culturally, it was, in my mind, one of the first celebrity memes,” Brandon Ogborn, the writer behind The TomKat Project , an excellent play examining Tom Cruise’s reputation, told The Ringer . “That clip was reenacted so many times. It was kind of a watershed moment for internet culture.”

Along with memes came a cascade of internet commentary on Cruise’s behavior, most of it overwhelmingly negative. While Oprah’s studio audience had been pleased with his effusiveness, the story line soured in the digital world. “Now, whenever something happens in the news, we can go online and quickly find the tide in which public opinion is turning. In the early days of the internet, it wasn’t that distinct,” James said. “That changed with Tom. The people who watched Tom’s appearance and felt it was maybe even the slightest bit heartwarming went online to find that the majority opinion was Tom had lost his mind.”

It was an exciting time for bloggers, and terrible timing for Cruise. He had fired his longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley, in March 2004. Kingsley was a powerhouse with a viselike grip on the dicks of traditional outlets. “She was adamant about keeping Cruise out of the tabloids. At press junkets, she demanded that journalists sign contracts swearing not to sell their quotes to the supermarket rags,” film critic Amy Nicholson wrote for LA Weekly in 2014, arguing that internet culture was to blame for Cruise’s fall from grace. “Then Kingsley expanded her reach and insisted that all TV interviewers destroy their tapes after his segment had aired.” Without Kingsley, Cruise didn’t have his usual PR fixer at hand to tell him what not to do, to tell him how to course-correct once the backlash began, or to tell the press to lay off. Instead, Cruise had replaced the flinty Kingsley with his sister, Lee Anne DeVette, a fellow Scientologist. The public reaction to his romance with Holmes was no good even before The Incident. According to a People poll, the majority of respondents saw the relationship as a publicity stunt . “We can’t get enough of the TomKat show because eventually the paint will start to chip and we will hopefully see all the ugliness as openly as we’ve been shoved the lovey-dovey bullshit,” Perez Hilton wrote. Cruise’s past habit of keeping his private life to himself and manicuring his public image had given him an idyllic but distinctly artificial sheen, one that may have counterintuitively exacerbated the response when he finally stepped out of line. “He had never done anything publicly wrong before,” Nicholson told The Ringer . “He’d always been so perfect.” Cruise’s over-the-top display of hyper-public affection, possibly made more intense by his desire to prove that his love was real, backfired. Instead of making people think he was a romantic, Cruise just made people think he was weird.

He quickly got weirder, and darker. Shortly after his couch leap, Cruise started a feud with Brooke Shields by dismissing her experience with postpartum depression. He went on Today to go even further, insisting that psychiatry and psychiatric medicine were dangerous. While Cruise was a longtime Scientologist, he had never openly advocated for the abusive group’s more controversial beliefs so publicly before. “It was a time when he really just let himself go, and let his freak flag fly. And it was also a time when he was really proselytizing for Scientology. I think it was a huge explosion of press that was bad press, because the Tom Cruise machine just stopped,” Ogborn said. “He said, This is who I am, I’m going to jump on that couch, I’m going to tell Matt Lauer he’s glib. ”

In less than a year, Cruise contorted his reputation from a hard-working, eccentric leading man into Hollywood’s premiere guileless kook. “Cruise: I will eat the placenta,” a 2006 Daily Mail headline , is a good example of the sort of news he generated. When California banned the sale of ultrasounds for personal use that year, it was known as the “Tom Cruise law” because Cruise had publicly purchased an ultrasound machine to view his daughter in the womb. South Park went for the jugular, as expected, but ridicule came from all over. Noah Baumbach wrote a New Yorker piece where the joke was that his dog was stupid and enthusiastic … just like Tom Cruise. Even Lauren Bacall dissed him to reporters. People still showed up for Cruise movies. War of the Worlds had a huge opening , but studios feared that Cruise’s bankability was tainted after Mission: Impossible III made nearly $150 million less worldwide than its predecessor. Cruise’s reputation was undeniably threatened. His Q rating, used to measure celebrity appeal, dropped 40 percent. “From that point on, we all accepted Tom Cruise was crazy,” James said. “It was a done deal.”

Cruise’s uninhibited media blunder bender cost him a lucrative, long-term production deal with Paramount. His behavior was blamed for the deal’s destruction. “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount,” Viacom chairman Sumner M. Redstone told The Wall Street Journal . The Oprah Winfrey Show , meanwhile, continued on as an unstoppable cultural force. From all accounts, as much as the couch-jumping episode yoked Oprah and Cruise together for eternity as a punch line, it also ruffled feathers at Harpo. “She was not invited to his wedding, and he was not invited for a very long time to come interview with her,” Ogborn pointed out, noting that Harpo employees would frequently come talk to him after the Chicago run of The TomKat Project to discuss that period of time. “They said she was fucking pissed when it happened.”

Regardless of Oprah’s personal opinion of Cruise’s behavior, the interview didn’t hurt her professionally. A mock set from the show is now on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of an exhibit on Winfrey. There was no lasting damage to her legacy. (Curators declined to comment on the role of the interview in her cultural history.) If anything, the couch-jumping episode only provided a bolstering example of Oprah presiding over must-watch TV. The show’s guiding ethos focused on going big and doing the best, resulting in ever-more-elaborate gift giveaways and surprises for the audience. While Cruise’s antics might have thrown off the dynamic between guest and host that Oprah preferred, his interview ultimately fit the bill for the gripping, unexpected, and wholly memorable. “Tom’s televised freakout was just another notch in her belt,” James said. Talk-show hosts now manufacture segments specifically to do well on YouTube and other online platforms, but it was Oprah who generated the first viral talk-show clip.

The incident certainly did not kill Cruise’s career, either. In 2008, his comic turn in Tropic Thunder helped undercut his reputation for unrelenting self-seriousness. (The same year, Cruise reunited with Oprah for a much calmer interview.) Cruise maintained his career throughout his reputational turmoil by sticking with Mission: Impossible and thematically similar films. “He’s always done such great work with this franchise, but he’s almost clinging to it nervously, like he’s afraid to let go and take a real risk,” Nicholson said. “He’ll take risks inside the film with stunts, but he’s not taking risks inside his own career, like doing the dramatic work that marked a lot of what he did in the ’80s, or by chasing an Oscar, which is something he gave up on.” Although he never quite regained his status as a Hollywood golden boy, he has mellowed into an aging statesman of action flicks—and anyway, his divorce from Katie Holmes and continued association with Scientology have left a longer-lasting stink on his name than his exuberant talk-show appearance. In 2015, GQ heralded “Cool Tom Cruise.” This summer, he is starring in the sixth Mission: Impossible movie. The critical response to both the film and Cruise’s performance has been overwhelmingly positive. “What’s always been so ironic to me about the Tom Cruise quote-unquote backlash is that it seemed to me that audiences still really loved him, even if newspapers were telling them that they didn’t,” Nicholson said. “I feel like he’s proving something that never needed to be proven.”

The real legacy of the couch-jumping incident has almost nothing to do with Cruise or Oprah specifically and everything to do with how people reacted online to the moment. Tom and Oprah’s strange conversation, and the reaction it provoked, is now preserved as thousands of digital artifacts, emblematic of how information traveled in the early aughts. Rewatching the episode and the viral videos it spawned feels quaint now. The bloggy media cycle that produced Cruise memes has been replaced by a cesspool of broken newsfeeds smushing conspiracy theories and branded content against real news and irrational presidential tweets with such velocity that it seems deeply unlikely that Cruise’s hop onto a loveseat would provoke much at all in 2018. However, it’s even less likely that Cruise would’ve been able to make it so far into his career without finding his kooky personality exposed as he did in 2005.

Up-and-comers have learned to respond to a different and less controllable form of media attention. There is a whole brand of celebrity in which the famous are expected to engage with fans on social media. Celebrity PR disasters don’t often happen in such glossy settings anymore; instead, they are frequently facilitated by social media and accelerated by fans and detractors who dig up old tweets . The last time a daytime talk-show guest created a media supernova after their appearance, it was Danielle Bregoli, a.k.a. Bhad Bhabie, a.k.a. “Cash Me Ousside” Girl, who parlayed a viral moment shit-talking on Dr. Phil into a viable rap career . I doubt Bregoli knows about Tom Cruise’s Oprah appearance, but her own twist on the daytime meme underscores how much has changed since Cruise took his happy hop. Performative, contrived freakiness in front of a live studio audience can be an asset now. The big leap is figuring out how to navigate internet criticism without spinning out—a frequently impossible mission.

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Tom Cruise Jumped On Oprah's Couch And Lost His Mind 11 Years Ago

Entertainment Writer, The Huffington Post

Eleven years ago today, actor Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch like a trampoline when he appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Cruise declared his love for then girlfriend (and future ex-wife) Katie Holmes and hopped up on the furniture before Oprah said, "He's gone. He's gone. The boy is gone."

The daytime host was more right than she knew. Though Cruise's name is still a big box-office draw, these days, he is better known for being an outspoken advocate for Scientology and for his public antics. The couch jump marked the first shift in Tom Cruise's image away from the heartthrob he'd been. (Pop quiz: Which movie was Tom Cruise promoting when he appeared on "Oprah" in 2005? Answer: It was "War of the Worlds," but no one remembers because he jumped on Oprah's couch.)

The same year as Couchgate, Cruise got in hot water for criticizing actress Brooke Shields for using antidepressant Paxil to treat her postpartum depression. He later got in an argument with Matt Lauer on " The Today Show" for his criticism of psychiatry.

As for his romance with Holmes, Cruise has been divorced from the "Dawson's Creek" star since 2012. He is also reportedly feuding with actress and former Scientology member Leah Remini over her tell-all memoir , which made many claims about Cruise and his family, including one that he had a meltdown over cookie dough.

What's up with Jerry Maguire now? He recently wrapped up filming "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back," and there are rumors of a "Top Gun" sequel . In Sunday night's premiere of AMC series "Preacher, " an unknown force possessed a number of religious figures, including Cruise, which caused the actor's head to explode on the show (real-life Cruise reportedly wasn't happy about the joke ).

Cruise may still be a movie star, but he's mostly a Scientology punchline at this point. Jumping on that fateful couch was just the tip of the iceberg.

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Let's revisit the Tom Cruise/Oprah's couch incident

It was one of the most-watched moments in the Internet’s relatively brief history. When Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch and declared his love for Katie Holmes, it was the daytime TV moment for a DVR, GIF-ready age.

But, as Amy Nicholson reports for L.A. Weekly , the moment we all thought we saw never happened. He never jumped up and down on the couch; he simply stood. The nitty-gritty of the infamous May 2005 Oprah appearance is but one revelation in her fascinating piece, How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star .

In the article, Nicholson explores how Tom Cruise went from the biggest movie star in the world to an Internet joke (who still manages to open films), with fascinating insight that attempts to explain the context behind the Oprah appearance (for example, that Cruise was playing to an audience that was quite different than bloggers), as well as larger points about that time period — it’s hard to believe all that media craziness was nine years ago.

As Nicholson points out, the Oprah Couch Incident happened at a time with a lot of rapid changes in entertainment culture — the launch of PerezHilton.com, the growth of TMZ, the inundation of camera phones making everyone paparazzi, etc. The piece is interesting from a How We Got Here angle, as well as its ability to shed some light on what publicity meant in the ’90s versus now — Nicholson also gets great scoop about how that infamous Matt Lauer/Tom Cruise interview came to be (never underestimate a good publicist).

For old times’ sake, watch the Cruise clip below, and then go read Nicholson’s full article :

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It’s Been 10 Years Since Tom Cruise Made Oprah’s Couch Famous

Tom Cruise’s infamous Oprah interview turns 10 on May 23. And while the episode of the show has been exaggerated in the popular consciousness (Cruise never really jumped up and down on the couch, merely stood on it briefly and then did a lot of kneeling), the Internet never forgets.

That’s thanks largely to videos like “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah” and an endless succession of GIFs and memes that cemented Cruise’s appearance on the show in the zeitgeist.

“Certainly, I did not think it would turn into the brouhaha that it did,” Oprah told TV Guide later . She has since refused to re-air the footage, calling the wave of viral clips that have sprung up around it “unfair.”

But it continues to live on, particularly in situations like the one above, in which Wayfair PR placed a couch in Boston’s Copley Square and asked people what would make them happy enough to jump up on it, à la Cruise, complete with Oprah and Cruise masks.

This article originally appeared on People.com .

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Relive the Moment When Tom Cruise Jumped On Oprah's Couch

Updated on 5/23/2015 at 5:30 PM

On May 23, 2005, Tom Cruise showed his incredible cat-like agility by jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch. Ten years later, we celebrate this moment that went down in pop culture history.

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How Tom Cruise Jumping on Oprah's Couch Changed Everything

Ten years ago, a media event took place that changed the public's perception of one of its most beloved stars. And while he has continued to see success, his image has never recovered — and it's possible it never will. I'm referring of course to the jump heard 'round the world: Tom Cruise 's interview with Oprah Winfrey .

Freshly in love with Katie Holmes , a relationship long speculated to be the result of a "wife search" sanctioned and lead by the Church of Scientology, Cruise visited his friend Oprah — and a very on-board audience who loved every moment of the interview — and discussed his newfound happiness. And he did so by grabbing Oprah's hands, standing on the couch, and retrieving Holmes from backstage to show off his prize.

Some things go viral and when we look back years later, we see they weren't such a big deal. This is not one of those things. This is just as awkward as it was in 2005.

People responded. And the response was an embarrassment. While the studio audience was incredibly stoked, the viewers at home — and online — were weirded out. This display of emotion was so intense, so striking, that it rang false. Or, if not false, definitely kind of creepy. It was too much. So, the memes began.

Cruise would continue to have box office success thanks to the Mission Impossible franchise — though for a few years his star dimmed a bit. (Anyone remember Lions for Lambs or Knight and Day ?) But the public's image of him has never been the same. Never again would he be dreamboat Tom Cruise, universally beloved celebrity. He has been since and will remain the overly intense guy who either must be hiding something or has lost the ability to act like a regular person.

Critics have blamed bloggers and internet culture for their abuse of the clips, like the above, ultimately leading to the backlash that still exists against Cruise, but it was more than just a couch jump. This was also a time when the internet was giving the public more information than ever before, meaning most of us were learning about Scientology for the first time. We saw this video on YTMND , we could read about Operation Snow White and other scary stuff, and we would soon all be able to read this still terrifying Katie Holmes W magazine interview . If you missed that interview back in 2005, it's still a great, creepy read. Holmes answers every question with a robot-like focus on how perfect Cruise is (whether that was the question or not) and is often answered for by a Scientology handler. Cruise's Oprah exuberance was clearly contagious — here's one example:

...A security guard lumbers into the dressing room and presents Holmes with a giant silver box tied in a thick purple ribbon. A small crowd gathers to watch her gleefully tear open the package and pluck out a Chanel diamond necklace—a gift, naturally, from Cruise. “He’s my man! He’s my man!” she screams, then jumps up on her chair to do an impression of her fiancé’s now-famous sofa shtick from Oprah.

People begin to cheer. “This is your moment!” cries the manicurist.

“I can do splits too,” Holmes says, jumping down and splaying herself across the floor. On that note, I suggest, we should probably get the photo shoot started.

“On that note,” she replies, “I love him.”

And when the two split years later, no one was surprised by tales of Holmes's harrowing escape — and no one saw that as mere media hyperbole. Our eyes had been opened to the fact that movie star Tom Cruise was also perhaps weird public figure Tom Cruise. And he likely always will be.

What came first: the couch or our discomfort? Oprah may have been the impetus, but Cruise was hardly a victim of mean memes and viral videos. He was a victim of a public that had become too difficult to fake it in front of.

It's the 10-Year Anniversary of Tom Cruise Jumping on Oprah Winfrey's Couch—Watch to Relive It All Over Again!

See the "brouhaha" all over again.

It has been TEN years since Tom Cruise famously jumped on Oprah Winfrey 's couch while declaring his love for then-wife Katie Holmes . Can you believe it?!

It has been a decade since he told Oprah's audience, "I'm in love," before hopping up and down like a madman on that famous gold couch. Do we feel old? Do we feel deceived? Who could've known that the man who was so in love with the Dawson's Creek alum would later get divorced to the subject of his hyperactivities?

Color us surprised about the fallout, but at least the Internet has blessed us with the ability to re-watch this momentous occasion all over again. While watching the video on a loop might make you think he's a little crazy, his actions were entirely out of his excitement and love for Katie.

"She's truly extraordinary," he told Oprah and the riled audience of his then-girlfriend while promoting War of the Worlds .

"Dear God, you are gone," Oprah told him between laughs.

"I'm gone and I don't care," Cruise responded.

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With the dawn of YouTube, the clip went viral and even spawned another video,  Tom Cruise Kills Oprah , using some graphics and the meme on a loop. His zealous attitude about Katie at the time might have affected the way many perceived the Hollywood A-lister, and even the talk show host later came out and said she felt bad for the way that interview turned out.

"Certainly, I did not think it would turn into the brouhaha that it did," Oprah later told  TV Guide Magazine . "I thought it was an expression of delightful exuberance and love that any woman… would be thrilled to have her man jump on a sofa in love with her...I think the use of that clip was really, really unfair."

She refused to re-air the footage afterwards, calling the wave of viral clips "unfair."

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Even though they would go on to get married in 2006, many believed the courtship was a farce. An opinion piece in the  New York Times  called the romance a "lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business."

The marriage may not have lasted forever, but this video will. Watch the clip above to see Tom Cruise make Oprah's couch debatably more famous than he is. 

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Oprah: Tom Cruise's Couch Jumping Was Wilder Than It Seemed

Nov. 11, 2005— -- The public, and certainly the comedians, were amazed when Tom Cruise bounced on Oprah Winfrey's couch proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes, but the talk show queen told "Good Morning America" she had no idea what was going on at the time.

"It was wilder than it was appearing to me," Winfrey said. "I was just trying to maintain the truth for myself because I couldn't figure out what was going on. And what I was prepared for was the dance that happens when you're doing celebrities -- when you know they're not going to tell you, but you're going to ask anyway, and then you try asking another way."

Instead of the "dance," Winfrey was confronted with an Irish jig on top of her furniture.

"I was not buying -- not buying or not buying," Winfrey said of Cruise's declarations of love. "That's why I kept saying to 'you're gone, you're really gone.'"

Cruise's infamous appearance on "Oprah" is just one of many celebrity moments on the anniversary DVD celebrating Winfrey's 20 years on air.

Winfrey has accumulated great wealth over the years -- Forbes estimates her fortune to be $1 billion -- but said she does not worry about the money changing her.

"You know why? Because you realize this as you get older -- you're still the same person, but you're older," Winfrey said. "And that is the same thing with money. I am the same person. I have just grown to be more of myself with better shoes."

Winfrey said she has learned many things about herself through the years, and that includes big lessons about her weight.

"Now I look at the weight and I understand that the weight is not about anything other than stress and disconnection and that at the time I was in such denial about it," Winfrey said. "It really was the degree to which I was engaged in the work and disconnected from the rest of my life. And that happens to me all the time. Now I understand it and can get my life back, can pull back to center and find some clarity and understand that when I start eating and repressing feelings that it's really because I'm out of control and everything else is out of control."

There are still some things yet to learn and do for Winfrey. If the world were to end in six months, Winfrey said she would go to China because she's never been to the East, and then she would come home and sit under her trees.

"If the world was ending, I would want to be in the place that I love and nothing better than sitting under my trees with all of my dogs and that's what I would do," Winfrey said.

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It's Been 10 Years Since Tom Cruise Jumped on Oprah's Couch

On May 23, 2005, the world was shaken to the core. Well, mostly just one couch on the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show was shook, but it definitely seemed like a much bigger deal. It’s true: Tomorrow is officially the 10-year anniversary of that time Tom Cruise (or as Oprah would call him, “TOM CRUIIIIIIIIIIISE”) jumped on  Oprah Winfrey ’s couch.

And it was all over Katie Holmes . The conversation went something like this:

Tom: "She's truly extraordinary." Oprah: "Dear God, you are gone." Tom: "I'm gone and I don't care.”

WATCH: Is Scientology keeping Tom Cruise from seeing Suri? Find out

Here is Tom Cruise’s couch incident by the numbers:

1 - Number of months after Tom and Katie confirmed they were dating. 1 - Number of years (approximately) before “TomKat” got married. 5 - Number of times Tom got down on one knee, a pose later made popular by Tim Tebow. The Pre-bow? 3 - Number of times Tom grabbed Oprah’s hands and shook her body. 1 - Number of times Tom jump onto Oprah’s couch. (Which is not to be mistake with Tom jumping on Oprah’s couch, which contrary to collective memory, he did not do.) 7 - Number of years before they got divorced.

It’s the gift that kept on giving. Like when it gave us the gift of this GIF:

NEWS: Cruise was “scared sh*tless” doing ‘Mission: Impossible’ stunts

Not everyone thought it was as funny: "Certainly, I did not think it would turn into the brouhaha that it did," Oprah told TV Guide . "I thought it was an expression of delightful exuberance and love that any woman...would be thrilled to have her man jump on a sofa in love with her."

“I think the use of that clip was really, really unfair,” Oprah continued, scolding literally the entire world. Ten years later, Tom likely thought people had gotten over the couch thing or forgotten it ever happened.

Well. The Internet never forgets.

Let’s end on a positive note: Remember all the awesome action movies Tom Cruise has given us?

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The hollowness of Tom Cruise

How Tom Cruise went from superstar to laughingstock and back again.

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Tom Cruise has spent this year flying high, literally.

At CinemaCon in April, when Mission: Impossible 7 screened its first trailer for theater owners, Cruise sent along a video intro that he’d filmed while standing on top of a biplane flying over a canyon in South Africa. It ended with him launching into a barrel roll. When he arrived at the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick in San Diego in May, he flew there in a helicopter he piloted himself , emblazoned with his own name and the title of his film.

He’s also flying high on a metaphorical level. Cruise turned 60 on July 3, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Top Gun: Maverick has made over $1 billion since it came out in May , the first film of Cruise’s career to do so and just the second film to manage the feat since the pandemic began in 2020. (The first was Spider-Man: No Way Home .)

In the pandemic era, a lot of movies are making only the most cursory appearance in theaters before they hit streaming, if they make it to theaters at all. Not Tom Cruise movies. The idea of Top Gun: Maverick premiering on streaming instead of in theaters? “Never going to happen,” Cruise said at Cannes in May , even though the completed film languished for two years before seeing the light of day. When Paramount told Cruise that Mission: Impossible 7 would play in theaters for only 45 days instead of the three months Cruise was used to, Cruise hired a lawyer .

For his efforts, Cruise is being hailed as the savior of the cinematic experience.

“Can Tom Cruise save the old-fashioned blockbuster?” asked the Telegraph .

Empire magazine described Cruise’s fight as “the battle to save cinema,” with “the biggest movie star in the world” at the vanguard.

“Cruise is here to remind us that the industry will not die on his watch. Not if he can help it,” said the LA Times . “And honestly, who among us won’t be thrilled if Cruise triumphs in life as in the movies?”

It seems clear that Cruise sincerely sees himself as the savior of the big screen, and all the jobs that depend on it. (Or at the very least, he sees himself as the savior of Tom Cruise movies appearing on the big screen.) During the pandemic, he told audiences at Cannes, he called up theater owners to say , “Please, I know what you’re going through. Just know we are making Mission: Impossible , and Top Gun is coming out.” In December 2020, leaked audio footage from the set of Mission: Impossible 7 showed Cruise upbraiding crew members who violated Covid social distancing policies.

“They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us,” Cruise can be heard to shout on the footage . “Because they believe in us and what we’re doing. I’m on the phone with every fucking studio at night, insurance companies, producers, and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies. We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherfuckers.”

“That’s what I sleep with every night,” Cruise concluded: “the future of this fucking industry!”

By now we should know: Tom Cruise is the hero of a movie that never ends. It’s one where he always, always saves the day.

That wasn’t always the case. Cruise’s stock plummeted in the 2000s after Oprah’s couch and Brooke Shields’ antidepressants . Yet today, Cruise is once again considered a bankable and iconic star. He is no longer a publicity liability for a movie studio.

There’s only one thing that Cruise might not be able to save. That’s the nagging, persistent sense that if the movie were ever to stop, when the lights came up, there would be nothing left of Tom Cruise at all.

“Cruise’s own laugh,” concluded Alex Pappademas in the New Yorker this May, “is the best Tom Cruise impression you’ve ever heard.”

But who says the movie ever has to stop?

Tom Cruise saves chivalry

“I like treating a woman the way that she deserves to be treated.” Tom Cruise to Oprah Winfrey, 2005 .

Here’s an oddity in the latest spree of killer Tom Cruise publicity: For once, the press is really into the way he’s interacting with women.

Over the course of his Top Gun press tour, Tom Cruise has been handed one positive headline after another for his chivalrous habit of taking charge of all ladies present, from Kate Middleton to his co-stars. If there is a woman in the same space as he is, Cruise will escort her up and down stairs and through doorways, present her to the camera, and make sure she is taken care of. It makes for incredible press. In her coverage of Cannes, gossip maven Elaine Lui remarked on how carefully Cruise looked after Top Gun co-star Jennifer Connelly. “I’m told he was never not attentive,” Lui wrote , “always focused on making sure she was looked after, never not ready with a hand to guide her from one place to another, never missing an opportunity to talk about how spectacular she looked, seemingly enthralled by her so that the cameras would pick up on his eyeline and transfer their focus to her.”

This display of “chivalry,” Lui concluded, was “very Tom Cruise.”

Chivalry is part of the old-fashioned action-hero masculinity Tom Cruise has long represented: the hero with the square jaw and faultless manners, kind and attentive to everyone around him. It’s also been central to Tom Cruise’s personal mythology for a long time, in both good ways and bad.

On the good side, Cruise used to be in the press on a regular basis for rescuing regular people: saving a family from a burning sailboat; getting the victim of a hit-and-run to the hospital and then paying her medical bills. Every actor who’s ever worked with him seems to have a Tom Cruise story about him making them some impossibly thoughtful gesture or gift .

On the bad side, quoth Elaine Lui , “Remember how he used to ‘present’ Katie Holmes?”

Cruise’s 2005 marriage to Katie Holmes was marked by its public displays of affection. Cruise was constantly presenting Holmes to the camera, cuddling up to her in public, proclaiming his love for her in ever more enthusiastic ways. Even before he jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch and sent his career into a precipitous downslide, he told Oprah that he covered a hotel room in rose petals for Holmes, and that he took her on a motorcycle ride on the beach.

“I’m a romantic, okay?” Cruise said at the time. “I like treating a woman the way that she deserves to be treated.”

Romantic or not, that marriage also represented a low point in Cruise’s professional life. In the wake of his couch moment with Oprah, Cruise’s popularity plummeted, his reputation took a hit, and he almost lost the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Then came the enormous and damaging wave of publicity in 2012, when Katie Holmes divorced Cruise. Stories rolled out by the day: that Holmes had planned the divorce for two years in order to make sure she would retain custody of the couple’s daughter, Suri; that she had to orchestrate the whole thing with burner phones and secret laptops and lawyers in multiple states ; that she had done it all — developed this whole two-year master plan — because that was how badly she wanted full custody of Suri . Specifically, the story went, Holmes wanted to save Suri from Scientology.

Cruise has since worked diligently to move past the so-called TomKat years. He’s been so effective that all his gentlemanly gestures on his current press tour tend to read as charming, not creepy. But there’s a clear and strong connection between Cruise’s love of chivalry then and his love of chivalry now. They are part and parcel of what appears to be a driving force behind Tom Cruise’s quest to be a hero, win the girl, and save the world: Scientology.

Tom Cruise saves mankind (from thetans)

“That’s what drives me: is that I know we have an opportunity to really help, for the first time, effectively change people’s lives. And I am dedicated to that. I am absolutely, uncompromisingly dedicated to that.” Tom Cruise, Scientology recruitment video, 2004 .

The controversial Church of Scientology, founded by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1953, appeals to the sort of worldview Cruise embodies. The world is under attack from evil forces, Scientology teaches, and all that stops them is one good man who’s not going to let petty rules get in his way.

Scientology is also, despite the number of celebrities it boasts among its ranks, a publicity liability. It’s widely suspected of being a pyramid scheme at best and at worse alleged to be an abusive cult profiting from forced labor and human trafficking , according to lawsuits and reports from former members. Its central cosmology, which teaches that human beings are plagued by immortal alien souls called thetans brought to Earth by the galactic emperor Xenu billions of years ago, is ripe for mockery.

The reporting that exists on Cruise’s connection to the church is both lengthy and damning. In September 2012, Vanity Fair published an exposé by Maureen Orth on the way Cruise outsourced management of his romantic life to the church. Tony Ortega, the closest thing there is to a beat reporter on Scientology, has a dedicated Tom Cruise tab on his website. In 2013, celebrated New Yorker reporter Lawrence Wright expanded his existing Scientology reporting into the book Going Clear , which prominently delved into Cruise’s status in the church. In 2015, Going Clear was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO documentary by the director Alex Gibney, again featuring plenty of Cruise stories. The story they told is dramatic, and it plays heavily on Cruise’s apparent understanding of himself as a savior figure. (The Church of Scientology has strongly denied all these accounts , describing them as lies from disgruntled former members and journalists with grudges.)

Cruise joined the Church of Scientology during his first marriage to Scientologist Mimi Rogers, after Top Gun had already made him a star. According to now-defected former church officials, allegedly he began to drift away from active practice during the ’90s and his marriage to Nicole Kidman, only to drift back as that marriage foundered in the late ’90s. The clincher came, those former Scientologists say in Going Clear , when Cruise said he wanted to tap Kidman’s phone , and the Church of Scientology obliged.

Keeping Cruise happy apparently became a priority for the Church of Scientology. When Cruise needed a new love interest, the church reportedly recruited a young member for the job , gave her a makeover to Cruise’s specifications, and then broke up with her for him after he tired of her. When the woman told a friend what had happened to her, the church reportedly sentenced her to months of menial labor in punishment.

Around the same time that Cruise was making his grand return to the church, he fired his longtime Hollywood publicist, allegedly because she told him to stop talking about Scientology so much when he was on the publicity trail for The Last Samurai . He brought on his Scientologist sister to manage his image instead.

As Cruise was becoming more and more committed to the church, the tabloid industry was beginning to go rabid . By 2004, Us Weekly had gone from monthly trade magazine to weekly gossip rag, pitting itself against People magazine. In Touch Weekly, Life & Style Weekly, and OK! had all emerged. These magazines thrived on an endless diet of outrageous celebrity soundbites, and as Tom Cruise made the publicity rounds for The War of the Worlds , he kept offering them up, one after another.

“Some people, well, if they don’t like Scientology, well, then, fuck you,” he told Rolling Stone . “Really. Fuck you. Period.”

Citing Scientology’s distrust of psychiatry, Cruise criticized Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression, and then told Matt Lauer he was being “glib” when Lauer suggested he might have overstepped his bounds.

Cruise’s public behavior became more and more erratic. On the same War of the Worlds publicity tour, Cruise infamously jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch, enthusiastically declaring his love for Katie Holmes.

Holmes seemed to be getting caught up in the Scientology swirl herself. A W magazine profile of Holmes saw her conduct an interview with a “Scientology chaperone,” who prompted Holmes with phrases about how much she adored Cruise when she seemed to fumble for words.

The spree of outré quotes took their toll. In 2006, one report found that between the spring and summer of 2005, Cruise fell from 11th most-liked celebrity in the US to 197th .

Fox News predicted the end of Cruise’s career. “It will be all but impossible now for a new generation of film fans to see past his erratic public behavior, the Oprah couch shenanigans, the decrying of psychiatry and now the rejection of Catholicism for a religion invented by a science-fiction writer,” they opined .

Cruise, seeing the writing on the wall, veered away from talking about his religion during his movie publicity tours. But for the next 10 years, Scientology would continue to haunt his public image.

In 2008, a video leaked to the press that was reportedly a Scientology conversion effort, filmed in 2004 . It featured Cruise glassy-eyed and grinning in a black turtleneck, talking about all the ways Scientology has changed his life. “Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anybody else,” he explains. “You know you have to do something about it.”

“Let me put it this way,” said Gawker, which broke the news of the video : “if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.”

In 2012, the Cruise-Holmes divorce cracked open the door of Tom Cruise Scientology stories. A host more came pouring out — and not just in the tabloids, but in legacy print magazines and prestige cable shows: Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the Village Voice, HBO.

According to former Scientology officials, the Church has continued to manage Cruise’s life. Reportedly, it’s granted him the full benefits of its more unsavory enterprises, including the Church’s alleged use of slave labor .

Former Scientologist John Brousseau says the church has custom-built luxury vehicles and sound systems for Cruise and provides the staff who manage his many homes. Because this labor is provided by the Church, it’s done through Sea Org, the Scientologist association that’s been accused of human trafficking and forced labor . ( The Church has described these claims as “both scurrilous and ridiculous.”) According to Ortega , Sea Org members who worked on Cruise’s property “were paid only about $50 a week by the church, even though their hours could reach 100 a week.” Cruise has a net worth estimated at $600 million .

The picture painted of Cruise by former members of the church is not flattering. They tend to describe Cruise as a well-meaning man who, fundamentally, is not curious, and who is happy to have beautiful things handed to him without looking at their cost. Scientology is attractive to Cruise, in this account, because it makes his life easier while simultaneously flattering his ego with the belief that he is a hero.

But as damning as those stories are, they have largely faded out of public memory. In the 10 years since his divorce from Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise has been working hard to change the narrative.

Can Tom Cruise save Tom Cruise?

“People can create their own lives. … I decided that I’m going to create, for myself, who I am, not what other people say I should be. I’m entitled to that.” Parade, 2006 .

Cruise is currently experiencing a late-career renaissance. Cannes Film Festival feted him in May , awarding him an honorary Palme d’Or and marking the occasion with a red carpet air show. The press loves him again. Top Gun: Maverick is a major success, and the next slew of Mission: Impossible films are bound to be as well.

He’s even rumored to have a new girlfriend. If, as the tabloids claim, Cruise actually is (or was) dating his Mission: Impossible co-star Hayley Atwell , she would be his first public girlfriend since his divorce from Holmes 10 years ago.

So did he do it? How did Tom Cruise go from America’s 197th favorite celebrity to a bankable superstar once again?

The answer seems to be deceptively simple: He kept working, and he stopped talking — about Scientology, and about almost everything else too.

Cruise’s PR nadir came during a period of oversharing. Since then, he’s become known for his intense desire for privacy. “When was the last time paparazzi captured Tom Cruise on the street or anywhere but a film set or premiere?” wondered the New York Post in May 2022 . He heavily restricts the questions journalists are allowed to ask him before he agrees to an interview, and both his religion and his family life tend to be off-limits.

Meanwhile, Cruise has kept making movies. Tropic Thunder in 2008 and Rock of Ages in 2012 together proved he had a sense of humor. Edge of Tomorrow in 2014, which saw Cruise ceding much of the spotlight to co-star Emily Blunt, proved he knew how to share the screen with another star. And the Mission: Impossible franchise has churned out hit after reliable hit. “I can attest that I am alarmed at the extent to which I suddenly love Tom Cruise,” admitted GQ entertainment editor Ashley Fetters in 2015 , as Cruise publicized Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation .

Cruise has also benefited from the current cultural shame surrounding the tabloid culture of the 2000s. As the world agrees that tabloid targets like Britney Spears were hard done by in the heady, tacky days of Y2K, everything from the era has been painted with the same shade of remorse. Vilifying Tom Cruise for jumping on Oprah’s couch can feel like the same toxic impulse that led to a decade of mocking Spears for having her mental breakdown in public, even though what Cruise has been accused of abetting within the Church of Scientology is far worse than anything Spears has ever been accused of.

In most ways, this strategy has been successful. The tabloid spectacle of Tom Cruise, Scientologist has been covered over by four decades of hard work from Tom Cruise, one of the last great movie stars .

But it’s not clear that Cruise can ever again reach the heights of public adoration he enjoyed in 2003. There’s a persistent strangeness around Tom Cruise’s image that has never quite resolved itself, a sort of falseness that he’s never been entirely able to weed out. It’s a falseness that’s rooted not in his Scientology but in his movie star core. From the beginning, the world has refused to believe Tom Cruise when he breaks out his giant movie star smile. It especially refuses to believe him when he laughs.

In an early pan of 1983’s Risky Business , Cruise’s breakout film, New York magazine took aim at the young star’s mannerisms. “Cruise has a slight, undeveloped voice and a nervous smile, which he relies on whenever the script reveals one of its innumerable holes,” the review ran .

In HBO’s Going Clear , footage of Tom Cruise laughing in his Scientology recruitment video plays while one ex-Scientologist declares, “Scientologists are all full of shit.”

A 2004 Rolling Stone profile devoted paragraph after paragraph to the oddness of “the famous Tom Cruise laugh.”

“It comes on just fine, a regular laugh by any standards. You will be laughing too,” wrote Neil Strauss . “But then, when the humor subsides, you will stop laughing. At this point, however, Cruise’s laugh will just be crescendoing. And he will be making eye contact with you.”

It’s as though there’s a hollowness at the center of Cruise’s image, some sort of vacancy that he is forever restlessly seeking to fill. As though if he can only save enough people, enough industries, enough worlds — maybe then, at last, he can finally be whole. But can anyone, even Tom Cruise, do that much saving?

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On the Media

He didn’t jump on the couch.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  We know how in this digital age even the smallest misstep can wreck a reputation. We've seen it so often it’s easy to forget that in our ultra-connected camera phone-toting social media-soaked world, we didn't always operate at such a rapid boil. But cast your mind back, if you can, to viral media's Stone Age. I’m talking almost exactly nine years ago, May 23rd, 2005. Tom Cruise is sitting on Oprah Winfrey's couch. The studio audience is stacked with preselected Cruise fanatics.

  [CLIP]:

  [AUDIENCE APPLAUSE/FANS SCREAMING]

OPRAH WINFREY:   You’ve got to calm yourselves.

  [CONTINUED SCREAMS]

They’ve got to calm themselves.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   The room is electrified by movie love, but the frantic fans aren’t interested in Tom Cruise's new movie, War of the Worlds . They want the dish on his new girl, Katie Holmes, America's sweetheart. And Oprah, ruffling Tom’s hair, holding his hand, touching his knee, wants to give them what they want.

OPRAH WINFREY:   Tom, does that mean you’re gonna ask her to marry you?

TOM CRUISE:   What just happened –

OPRAH WINFREY:   Does that mean you’re gonna ask her to marry you, Tom?

TOM CRUISE:   Oprah – Oprah, I – today?

  [LAUGHTER]

OPRAH WINFREY:   No, does that mean you’re going to ask her to marry you?

TOM CRUISE:   I got to discuss it with her.

OPRAH WINFREY:   You got to discuss it.

  [AUDIENCE SCREAMS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   Ever the pro, Oprah digs for deets about the moment love bloomed.

OPRAH WINFREY:   When – how soon after meeting her did, did it happen? You must have thought it was gonna happen. That’s why you wanted to meet her, right?

TOM CRUISE:   Don’t we have War of the Worlds , too?

OPRAH WINFREY:   Yeah, we’re going to come back –

  [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

We will do that, we’re gonna do that. That’s why you’re here.

  [TOM, AUIDIENCE LAUGHING]

That’s why you’re here. We’re going to do – we’re going to do that –

TOM CRUISE:   How long – okay, so what was the question again?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   Tom wants to stop the line of questioning and talk about his new movie. He hears the audience scream every time he moves, so to deflect the emotional inquisition he jumps up and down on Oprah’s couch.

OPRAH WINFREY:   Have you ever felt this way before?

 [AUDIENCE SCREAMING]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   This is the moment, now enshrined in pop culture history, that brands Tom Cruise as an unhinged has-been. But the trouble is, it never happened, says Amy Nicholson, head film critic for the LA Weekly.

AMY NICHOLSON :  He doesn’t jump on the couch. He gets up and sort of leaps on to stand on it but he never bounces on it like a trampoline. Oprah actually gives him the idea to stand on the couch, as a way of impressing her. At the very start of the episode, she says how happy she was that he attended her Legend Ball, which she had just had two or three days before. And she says to Tom, “I looked over at you and you were standing on your chair, and I loved that enthusiasm.” And I think that implants this idea in his head that if he doesn’t want to answer questions or if he wants to make her happy, he should just stand up again. So he stands up on the couch. And that is how we get Tom Cruise jumping. Because we had this great freeze frame of him in mid-air with his knees bent and Oprah sort of looking surprised, you see the word “jumped” and you picture him actually jumping, which is something that didn’t happen.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   What was going on in the media on the day that Tom Cruise met that fateful couch?

AMY NICHOLSON :  May 2005, it’s such a fascinating month. It’s the month that Perez Hilton launched PerezHilton.com, it’s the month that Huffington Post launched, you know, two major sites that showed the industry that you could have a huge revenue stream just by talking about gossip online. These two sites and the success of them, I think, created this echo chamber. I mean, May 2005 even predates TMZ by just a few months.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   As you note in your piece, if your video went viral bandwidth was getting used; it was expensive. But then this little company started and it made it much easier to post these videos.

AMY NICHOLSON :  Yeah, a little company called YouTube one week before May, the last week of April, put up their first video, “Me at the Zoo.”

  [CLIP]:

JAWED KARIM :  All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have these really, really, really long trunks.

 [END CLIP]

AMY NICHOLSON :  YouTube shows up and not only can you put a video up online for free, you can embed in a website. People don’t even have to leave your blog. You can draw traffic to you and all of a sudden we’re learning how to make revenue from viral video, completely new at the time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   I keep thinking though of another viral video, one that was taken wildly out of context during the presidential election, the Howard Dean scream.

HOWARD DEAN (HIGH-PITCHED VOICE ):  And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House. Yeah!

  [CROWD CHEERS][END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   He sounded somewhat demented during a campaign stop but, in context, it didn't seem nearly as loony.

How did that get out there, prior to YouTube?

AMY NICHOLSON :  We had a news cycle that was going 24/7 on cable channels. That kind of spread into news blogs. I feel like news blogs were a little bit ahead of the time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   Was Tom Cruise one of the first celebrities to stumble into the pitfalls of celebrity viral media?

AMY NICHOLSON :  He was definitely the biggest, which I think is why the story of his stumble almost became the story itself and not the facts of what was actually happening.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   He was, you claim, more or less untouchable prior to this moment because he was so, so careful.

AMY NICHOLSON :  Tom Cruise keeps his private life incredibly private. Right after Risky Business, he was 22, 23 at the time, he was part of this cool kids group that was about to be dubbed “the brat pack.” He thought, I can’t get lumped in with that because that’s one way to just become the next Judd Nelson and nobody remembers you in ten years.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   So after a stay in London, rather than taking on starring roles himself, he returns and chooses to play second fiddle to enormous stars, both of whom win Academy Awards for their roles, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Paul Newman, in this clip, in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money .

PAUL NEWMAN AS FAST EDDIE FELSON (CHUCKLING) :  Big money game.

TOM CRUISE AS VINCENT LAURIA:  Yeah, that's right, a big money game. So why don't you take your hands off the girl and let us play, okay, guy?

FAST EDDIE FELSON :  What do you care where I put my hand? Why don't you mind your own business?

VINCENT LAURIA :  Hey, gramps, put your teeth back in, get your hands off your daughter there and pay attention, you just might learn something here today.

  [END CLIP]

AMY NICHOLSON :  It’s incredible to think of like a 25-year-old actor, at that moment, choosing the harder option, choosing to try to prove himself as an actor. And Rain Man to me is just a great example because not only did he choose a film about a guy who’s gonna need his autistic brother, but Tom Cruise’s clout made Rain Man the number one hit of the year.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN AS RAYMOND BABBITT:   These are not boxer shorts. Mine are boxer shorts.  

TOM CRUISE AS CHARLIE BABBITT:   What's the difference?

RAYMOND BABBITT:   These are Hanes 32.

CHARLIE BABBITT:   Underwear is underwear.

RAYMOND BABBITT:   These are Hanes 32. My boxer shorts have my name and it says “Raymond.”

CHARLIE BABBITT:   All right, all right. When we pass a store, we'll pick you up a pair of boxer shorts.

RAYMOND BABBITT:   I get my boxer shorts at Kmart in Cincinnati.

CHARLIE BABBITT:   We're not goin’ back to Cincinnati, so don't you just start with that.

RAYMOND BABBITT:   400 Oak Street.

CHARLIE BABBITT:   We’re not going back to Cincinnati. You don’t have to go to Cincinnati to pick up boxer shorts.

RAYMOND BABBITT:   It’s Oak and Burnett in Cincinnati.

CHARLIE BABBITT:   What did I say?

RAYMOND BABBITT:   It's Kmart there.

CHARLIE BABBITT:   What did I - you hear me, I know you hear me.

RAYMOND BABBITT:   My boxer shorts have like –

CHARLIE BABBITT:   You don't fool me with this sh- [BLEEP] for a second!

RAYMOND BABBITT:   Yours are too tight.

CHARLIE BABBITT:   Ray, did you f– [BLEEP] hear what I said? Shut up!

AMY NICHOLSON :  Think about that now. In 2014, this is the summer of blockbusters, super-hero movies. He made a film about an autistic grownup not getting along with his brother, number one box office hit.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   Talk to me about his management. This seems arcane but actually it, it figures a great deal in your article.

AMY NICHOLSON :  Sure. Tom Cruise partnered with Pat Kingsley who’s this very old school incredibly smart publicist. She had a lot of huge clients that she could dole out and then withhold from papers, if they didn't do what she wanted. And she used all of her force to sort of bend journalists to her will. She was determined to keep his name as far away from Star and The Enquirer as possible.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   But, ultimately, he replaces her with his sister. Why does he do that?

AMY NICHOLSON :  It was a moment where he started to feel like he needed to talk more about Scientology openly. I think that was a tough call for both of them because he wanted to represent his faith which was starting to become under attacks from the media and say, I’m the biggest movie star in the world, let me try to make my religion sound normal to people. And she had the competing interest of having the studios tell her, don’t let him do that, we can’t let our movies get derailed by talk of his religion. He realized, and she realized, that they needed to go their separate ways.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   I have to ask you, some of this is clearly self-inflicted.

AMY NICHOLSON :  It’s true, but it’s a religion he very clearly believes in deeply that is sort of held up for public ridicule, which is why I tried to even downplay Scientology a bit in the piece.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   A little bit too much, perhaps.

AMY NICHOLSON :  Perhaps a little bit too much, but I also just sort of felt like that story’s been told. We know all about Tom Cruise and Scientology. And I find it interesting that we don’t hold up other actors to the same sort of scrutiny for their beliefs. But the sort of things Tom Cruise says about Scientology we tune out when it’s a football player spiking a touchdown and then thanking God. I think it’s a little bit strange that the rest of us do nothing but pick on somebody’s religion.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   But that doesn’t excuse him from passing judgment on Brooke Shields for using anti-depressants, does it? This is Tom Cruise speaking to Matt Lauer on The Today Show in 2005. 

TOM CRUISE:   Before I was a Scientologist I never agreed with psychiatry. And then when I started studying the history of psychiatry, I started realizing more and more and more why I didn't agree with psychiatry. And as far as the Brooke Shields thing is, look, you gotta understand, I really care about Brooke Shields. I want to see her do well. And I know that - psychiatry is – it’s a pseudo-science.                                              

AMY NICHOLSON :  He was not trying to legislate his beliefs. Here, he was just expressing an opinion. I wish we sort of directed the ire that we directed towards him equally to the ire of politicians in the public eye who are using their religious beliefs to actually take away medicines.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   I think we kind of pick on everyone, don’t we? [LAUGHS]

AMY NICHOLSON :  I, I think we pick on him a little bit unfortunately.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   The title of your piece in the LA Weekly was, “How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star.” But you argue he wasn’t destroyed at all; in fact, he’s never had a flop.

AMY NICHOLSON :  Exactly. I think what’s real interesting is the perception of his destruction. That summer that Tom Cruise went on Oprah’s couch the story became has Tom Cruise ruined his career by going crazy, and what never got put into the story is the fact that the movie he was promoting, War of the Worlds , was his biggest hit of all time. No matter what the numbers are, if the story exists that his career is over, everything’s been shaped to fit that narrative.

I always say that Tom Cruise is the greatest actor of his generation who’s hiding in plain sight, because after this sort of shakeup where even he was rattled and thought that maybe the public had fallen out of love with him, he decided to do the safest film projects possible, which are sci-fi films, action films and mashups of the sci-fi and action films, to try to prove that he still has box office clout. Occasionally, he’ll show up and be like the best thing in a cameo, like he did a Tropic Thunder.

 [CLIP]:

TOM CRUISE AS LES GROSSMAN:   You know how you handle an actor? They whine about anything, you pull down their pants and you spank their a- [BLEEP].

ROB :  You spank that a-[BLEEP], Les.

AMY NICHOLSON :  I think that his character in Tropic Thunder is kind of a joke on Sumner Redstone after firing him from Paramount. The explanation that Redstone gave to the press was, Tom Cruise is a fine actor but he’s committing career suicide and costing us revenue. It’s so strange because he wasn’t. Cruise actually was responsible for making 32 percent of the studio’s entire profits. That’s one actor and 32 percent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   When exactly did you become a Tom Cruise fan?

AMY NICHOLSON :  I became a Tom Cruise fan last year –

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

- while researching my book, actually. But I started to write the book under the same impression that everybody else had of Tom Cruise, that he’s really great as a personality and as a charismatic movie star and that he’s not much as an actor, and I thought in digging into his career I would be exploring - how does an average talent turn himself into a superstar?

And then, going back and actually watching the roles, I realized I’m completely wrong. His whole career has been about trying to prove himself as an actor and almost being a movie star, in spite of himself.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   So what do we take away from Tom Cruise’s tar and feathering by viral video?

AMY NICHOLSON :  Right now in the media we’re also quick to see a headline, hear of somebody messing up, there’s like an instant shaming. What I’ve taken away from this is even though I see a headline and a video, it doesn’t mean I know the full story. It’s given me a reminder that I need to pause before I shoot off like a mean tweet or, or a joke at somebody else’s expense, because I think reality is a lot more complicated than the internet condenses it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   And he didn’t jump on that couch.

AMY NICHOLSON :  And he didn’t jump on that couch! [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   Amy, thank you so much.

AMY NICHOLSON :  Thank you, Brooke. This has been great.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   Amy Nicholson is the head film critic for the LA Weekly. Her new book is called, Tom Cruise:  Anatomy of an Actor , and it will be published by Cahiers du Cinéma at the end of July.

TOM CRUISE AS FRANK T.J. MACKEY :  Tame it!

  [AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

Take it on headfirst with the skills that I will teach you at work and say no!

AUDIENCE :  No!

TOM CRUISE AS MACKEY :  You will not control me! No!

TOM CRUISE AS MACKEY :  You will not take my soul! No!

TOM CRUISE AS MACKEY :  You will not win this game! ‘Cause it is a game, guys. You want to think it's not, huh?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:   That’s Tom Cruise in Magnolia .

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Tom Cruise on ‘Oprah,’ Without Gymnastics

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By Alessandra Stanley

• May 3, 2008

“This is so normal!” Oprah Winfrey exclaimed as Tom Cruise took her through the vast, pristine, wood-paneled kitchen in his mountaintop estate in Telluride, Colo. Ms. Winfrey sounded relieved, almost as if she were half expecting to find space helmets and a teleporting station wedged next to the stove.

There was nothing normal about the conversation between Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Cruise, of course. Mr. Cruise, whose unhinged exuberance and acrobatic leap onto Ms. Winfrey’s couch in 2005 was the first in a torrent of embarrassing YouTube moments, was back on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to repair the damage. He had agreed to a two-part interview, and tellingly, the first one on Friday was on his couch, a reversal that they joked about, gingerly.

“I’m on your sofa now,” Ms. Winfrey said, mugging. Mr. Cruise laughed and said, “And we’re sitting.”

When Ms. Winfrey’s car drove up the Cruises’ driveway, Mr. Cruise and his wife, Katie Holmes, emerged from the house hand in hand to greet her. Like the first lady, Laura Bush, welcoming reporters to the family ranch in Crawford, Tex., Ms. Holmes was warm and gracious and quickly made herself scarce, hugging her husband and saying, “I love you,” as she walked out the door.

Mr. Cruise then sat winsomely through a barrage of questions about his marriage; their baby, Suri; Scientology; and in particular his rant to Matt Lauer in 2005 on “Today,” ridiculing the use of Ritalin and attacking Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants for postpartum depression.

“I mean, what I regret is that it just came out wrong,” he said. “What I regret is that even discussing Brooke in any way.”

This was not a promotional gimmick to boost box office sales. Mr. Cruise does not have a movie coming out imminently. (“Tropic Thunder,” in which he briefly plays not a leading man but a sleazy studio executive, is scheduled for an August release.) Mr. Cruise employed his charm — and taut stagecraft — in an effort to rehabilitate his reputation.

The actor was alternately earnest and eager, sober and good-humored, but the encounter was less like a movie star interview than like a news conference with a political candidate seeking to undo a gaffe — like Hillary Rodham Clinton’s trying to explain her statement about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia or Barack Obama’s distancing himself from his former, and now estranged, pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Mr. Cruise is his own Mr. Wright, however: he is Hollywood’s leading Scientologist, and it was his own statements, seemingly steeped in the tenets of his mysterious and widely mistrusted faith, that have tarred his matinee-idol image. Like a presidential candidate, Mr. Cruise distanced himself from his most egregious remarks, but defended his church, insisting that there was nothing strange about it.

“I believe in God,” he replied when Ms. Winfrey asked him whether Scientologists worship a higher being.

Mr. Cruise said he was hurt by the innuendo in a recent unauthorized biography that Suri is not his child. (He said she had been described as ”Rosemary’s baby.”) But he laughed when Ms. Winfrey asked him about rumors that his marriage to Ms. Holmes was a publicity stunt or was on the rocks. “That stuff’s like — you can — you just know they’re trying to sell it and spin it,” he said with a good-natured shrug. “So there’s certain things, you go, ‘O.K., come on,’ you know.”

But if the interview disproved anything, it was the notion that celebrities do not take YouTube parodies and ridicule by late-night talk-show hosts seriously.

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Tom Cruise Revealed He Was Intentionally Setup During His Wild Oprah Winfrey Interview

Behind closed doors, Tom Cruise told Seth Rogen how he really felt about the strange Oprah Winfrey interview.

Now if only every Oprah Winfrey interview can be like her time alongside Tom Cruise , or the rollercoaster with Lindsay Lohan . In truth, Oprah has had some dud interviews and the host even revealed that she has a code word when things aren't as interesting... RELATED - Tom Cruise Called Paramount Pictures Himself After A 30-Minute Meeting Telling The Studio 'We’re Making Another Top Gun' In the following, we'll review the controversial Tom Cruise interview from 2005. We'll examine what Cruise really thought about the interview and what he told Seth Rogen about it behind closed doors.

Tom Cruise's Couch-Jump On Oprah Went Completely Viral

The moment went absolutely viral and The Ringer described it best, within a couple of minutes, everything went completely south between Oprah and Tom Cruise.

"Within 15 minutes, Cruise had leapt onto Oprah’s couch in a spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm for his personal life. Cruise’s offbeat showboating was memorable in part because of its unusual setting."

It is said that the 2005 moment launched internet blogs and in addition, it showed the dangers of public opinion online, and how it can shape a person in the long run.

RELATED - This Actor Said He Doesn't Respect Tom Cruise On Live TV, Here's Why

Of course, the moment was all about Tom Cruise discussing his love for Katie Holmes, doing so in a very energetic way to say the least. "I just felt that way, and I feel that way about her. I can't even articulate it, to be honest. That feeling, that connection. Just who she is and what she means to me," Cruise stated.

We all know by now, the relationship did not last and the two went their own ways despite the "connection." Both sides kept very quiet about the interview during the years that followed.

However, Seth Rogen revealed that Cruise did in fact have an opinion about what had transpired.

Seth Rogen Revealed That Tom Cruise Stated The Interview Was Purposely Edited

We'll never really know the validity of this, but Rogen would reveal the details in his memoir book Yearbook . The moment in question took place during a five-hour Knocked Up meeting, which included Tom Cruise himself.

Over those couple of hours, Cruise had a lot to say, including the discussion of what went on during that interview. According to Tom, the interview wasn't as bad as it seemed and a lot of it was completely setup that way due to the editing.

“Well, yeah, they're making it seem like I'm losing my mind, there’s a coordinated effort to make it appear that way” Cruise allegedly told Rogen.

"They edited it to make it look so much worse than it was. They do that all the time.”

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Tom had the same to say following his interview with Matt Lauer, claiming pharmaceutical companies were out to get him, “because my exposure of their fraud has cost them SO much money that they're desperate. They're scrambling and they're doing everything they can to discredit me so I won't hurt sales anymore.”

In terms of his public comments about the Oprah interview, there really hasn't been many...

Tom Cruise Had Said Very Little About The Interview Publicly

In terms of actual words from Tom himself that we know of, there hasn't been many relating to the interview. He did make a joke about it , claiming he was in his "year of jumping dangerously," referencing the film, The Year of Living Dangerously.

Tom did touch base on his reputation back in 2008 alongside Pop Sugar . Similar to what he discussed alongside Seth Rogen, Cruise stated that he doesn't stress about it, given that the media spins it however they choose to.

"Listen I, I feel like definitely things have been misunderstood, and there are things I could have done better. But then there's also that world where you go, 'Oh, it's been spun to such an extent that. That's a truth also.' Knowing when and where to communicate, I think that's important. A lot of times I was nervous giving interviews. Or I wasn't sometimes as comfortable about things. And I realized that it's okay. There's stuff you have to just let go. I just have to do the best I can."

Clearly, all of that is in the past nowadays, as Cruise continues to enjoy serious success, especially from a career standpoint.

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Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch 16 years ago and it hasn't aged well

In May 2005, Tom Cruise momentarily lost the run of himself and trampled all over Oprah's couch as he proclaimed his love for Katie Holmes during an interview.

After months of speculation that the pair were together, Tom finally spoke of their relationship on Oprah's chat show and sent the host and viewers in the studio into the frenzy with his antics.

A month before this, Tom and Katie -- known as TomKat for a period -- made their first public appearance together in Rome, making them the most talked-about Hollywood couple of the time.

So, you can only imagine the mileage fans, haters, and the media all got out that *that* Oprah interview.

The actor , then 42, wasn't appearing on the show to lep about, and shout his love for the Dawson's Creek star , then 26, but instead to talk about his upcoming movie War of the Worlds also starring 11-year-old Dakota Fanning.

The interview was happening as Oprah's talk show was at the height of its popularity and audience members were regularly leaving with cars and a feeling of having been in the presence of royalty.

With the excitement in the studio already high, Oprah introduced Tom to the crowd, and, well, it all went downhill from there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQgXEkL3NV4

At the time, some called it sweet watching Tom talk about his new romance, however, I never felt it right to categorise it as 'sweet' but rather cringe-inducing.

'You're gone,' Oprah said of Tom's first pumping and victory laps of the studio -- a fairly appropriate and presumingly unintentionally Irish way of describing the moment.

As the frenzy in the studio began to die down with Tom's ongoing victory lap, Oprah took the reigns and prompted Tom to create another headline moment.

'Get Katie out here,' the host told Tom as the actor headed for backstage to push -- literally -- his new girlfriend out in front of the cameras and the hysterical viewers.

A reluctant Katie joined Tom and embraced Oprah as audience members continued to exert themselves at the sight of the pair together.

The moment was all over celebrity blogs and made his relationship with Katie the only celebrity love story worth talking about for the foreseeable.

Within months, Katie and Tom announced they were expecting their first child and a year later, the couple was married in a Scientologist ceremony in front of many A-lister pals.

Some 16 years later, with Katie and Tom long divorced and their daughter Suri now celebrating her 15th birthday, looking back at this iconic TV moment feels totally removed from where we are now.

The moment continues to be a pop culture reference for many who will think of Tom when gushing about a new love or testing out a new sofa.

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