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How Many Different Licenses Does Tom Cruise Have

How Many Different Licenses Does Tom Cruise Have? Exploring the Multi-Talented Actor’s Hidden Skills

Tom Cruise is undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, known for his incredible acting talent and his daredevil stunts in action-packed movies. However, there is more to this iconic actor than meets the eye. While many articles focus on his net worth or filmography, let’s take a unique deep dive into Tom Cruise’s lesser-known side by exploring the various licenses he holds. From piloting aircraft to performing his own stunts, here are nine interesting facts about the different licenses Tom Cruise possesses.

1. Private Pilot License:

Tom Cruise is a certified pilot and has held a private pilot license since the early 1990s. He is known for his love of aviation and owns several aircraft, including a Gulfstream IV and a P-51 Mustang.

2. Helicopter License:

In addition to piloting airplanes, Cruise also holds a helicopter license. This allows him to fly helicopters, further showcasing his passion for aviation and adventure.

3. Commercial Pilot License:

Surprisingly, Tom Cruise has gone beyond his private pilot and helicopter licenses and obtained a commercial pilot license. This license permits him to fly aircraft for commercial purposes, should he ever desire to do so.

4. Motorcycle License:

Not only is Cruise skilled in the air, but he is also a licensed motorcycle rider. He has been spotted riding motorcycles both on and off-screen, demonstrating his proficiency in navigating these two-wheeled vehicles.

5. Jet Ski License:

Cruise’s love for high-speed thrills extends to the water as well. He holds a jet ski license, enabling him to ride these exhilarating watercrafts with ease.

6. Skydiving License:

Known for performing daring stunts in his movies, it comes as no surprise that Cruise holds a skydiving license. He is trained in both solo and tandem jumps, allowing him to execute these adrenaline-pumping feats on his own or with a partner.

7. Scuba Diving License:

Exploring the depths of the ocean is yet another passion of Tom Cruise. With a scuba diving license, he can embark on underwater adventures and witness the beauty of marine life up close.

8. Racing License:

Cruise’s need for speed extends beyond motorcycles. He also possesses a racing license, which allows him to participate in motorsport events if he wishes to showcase his driving skills on the track.

9. Weapons License:

Though not surprising considering his action-packed films, Tom Cruise holds a weapons license. This license permits him to handle firearms for various purposes, including training for movie roles that involve the use of weapons.

Now that we’ve explored some fascinating facts about Tom Cruise’s licenses, let’s address some common questions that often arise regarding his diverse skill set.

1. How did Tom Cruise become interested in aviation?

Cruise’s passion for aviation began during his childhood. He often went to the airport to watch planes take off and land, sparking his interest in flying.

2. Has Tom Cruise ever used his pilot license for a movie role?

Yes, he has. In the 2012 film “Jack Reacher,” Cruise flew the helicopter during a thrilling chase scene.

3. How many hours has Tom Cruise logged as a pilot?

While the exact number is unknown, it is reported that Cruise has logged thousands of hours as a pilot.

4. Has Tom Cruise ever raced professionally?

No, Cruise has not competed professionally in motorsports. His racing license is primarily for personal enjoyment and potential participation in amateur events.

5. Has Cruise ever used his weapons license outside of movie sets?

There is no public record of Cruise using his weapons license outside of his movie roles. It is presumed that his training is primarily for on-screen performance purposes.

6. How often does Cruise skydive?

While there is no fixed frequency, Cruise has been known to skydive occasionally, often during breaks from filming.

7. Are there any other licenses or skills that Cruise possesses?

Apart from the licenses mentioned, Cruise is also trained in various martial arts, including karate and aikido.

8. Does Cruise have a captain’s license for operating large vessels?

No, there is no evidence to suggest that Cruise holds a captain’s license for operating large ships or vessels.

9. How does Cruise find time to maintain his licenses while working on films?

Cruise is known for his dedication and intense work ethic. He likely manages his time efficiently to ensure he can pursue his passions alongside his acting commitments.

10. Has Cruise ever used his licenses for humanitarian or philanthropic purposes?

While his licenses may not directly relate to his humanitarian work, Cruise has been actively involved in charitable efforts, particularly through his support of the Church of Scientology’s initiatives.

11. Is Cruise planning to pursue any other licenses in the future?

As his career progresses, it wouldn’t be surprising if Cruise adds more licenses to his repertoire. However, his future intentions remain unknown.

12. Has Cruise ever had any accidents or mishaps while using his licenses?

There have been no reported accidents or mishaps involving Cruise while using any of his licenses. He maintains a high level of professionalism and safety in his pursuits.

13. Are there any films in which Cruise performed his own stunts using his licenses?

While Cruise has performed numerous daring stunts throughout his career, there is no specific information regarding stunts that directly utilized his licenses.

14. Does Cruise’s love for aviation influence his film choices?

Cruise’s passion for aviation may indirectly influence his film choices, as he has starred in movies that involve aviation or aerial sequences, such as “Top Gun” and “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.”

15. Does Cruise plan to pass on his passion for aviation to his children?

Cruise’s children, Isabella and Connor, have shown some interest in flying, but there is no public information regarding their pursuit of licenses.

16. How long did it take Cruise to obtain his various licenses?

The duration of time it took for Cruise to obtain each license varies, as it depends on the specific requirements and training involved for each certification.

17. Does Cruise ever combine his licenses, such as piloting an aircraft while skydiving?

While it might be an exhilarating thought, there is no evidence to suggest that Cruise has combined his licenses in such a manner.

In summary, Tom Cruise’s licenses go far beyond his acting prowess. With his private pilot, helicopter, commercial pilot, motorcycle, jet ski, skydiving, scuba diving, racing, and weapons licenses, he showcases a diverse range of skills and interests. From the skies to the open road and even underwater, Cruise’s licenses reflect his relentless pursuit of adventure and passion for pushing boundaries both on and off-screen.

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Tom Cruise Created a Flight-Training Program for Top Gun: Maverick

Along with his deep ties to Scientology , Tom Cruise is also known for his commitment to real stunts. So it should come as no surprise he wanted the actors in Top Gun: Maverick to actually deliver their lines from the cockpits of moving F/A-18 planes. “I wasn’t ready to make a sequel until we had a special story worthy of a sequel and until technology evolved so we could delve deeper into the experience of a fighter pilot,” Cruise said in a promotional video for the movie.

Without proper preparation, however, g-forces exerted on the body by acceleration can result in illness or a dangerous loss of consciousness. To combat that, he personally designed a rigorous monthlong program that introduced his co-stars to different jets and instructors as they learned to fly and slowly built up their g-force tolerance. According to Men’s Health , the aspiring aviators eventually had to sustain up to eight g’s, or around 1,600 pounds of pressure. The cast — including Monica Barbaro, Glen Powell, Greg Tarzan Davis, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Miles Teller, and Lewis Pullman — filled out daily forms for Cruise to review until they were ready for real Navy pilots to take them up in F/A-18s equipped with six IMAX-quality cameras. (The Pentagon reportedly does not allow nonmilitary personnel to operate F/A-18s.) From puking to getting personalized feedback, here’s what Cruise’s co-stars have described going through during the Top Gun training made by “Maverick” himself.

Miles Teller (Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw)

“Nothing bonds a cast together more than collective suffering,” Teller said in the Cannes production notes for Top Gun: Maveric k. “I think, when you’re going through something and you know how tough it is yourself, and you look to the left of you and to the right of you and you see that person going through it, it kind of pushes you a little harder and further than you would normally go. It’s so unique for us that we will only be able to talk about this with each other for the rest of our lives.” Ahhh, trauma bonding.

Teller explained to Men’s Journal that all the elements of Cruise’s training, even breathing techniques, were utilized during the final sequences shot in the F/A-18s. “Every single day of the shoot we were really getting after it,” he said. “Up until the very last day people were fainting and puking.” In fact, Teller told London Live that he personally felt like vomiting every time he went in the air. “It’s funny,” he said, pausing to chuckle with the interviewer. After a moment, however, he added, “Wasn’t so funny for me.”

Monica Barbaro (Lt. Natasha “Phoenix” Trace)

In the Cannes production notes , Barbaro credited Cruise’s training program with preparing her not only to act in the planes but also turn cameras on and off, check makeup, fix props, and communicate with pilots. She explained to The Wrap that Cruise’s “perfect” training program also included minute-by-minute rehearsals with a pilot in a fake plane so that actors could plan when to say their lines. “It was pretty intense,” she said. “We got to watch Tom do it a few times. I was the first person of us pilots to do it. I was the guinea pig.” And while the cast had to go through all the rigorous flight training before even stepping on set, per the New York Daily News , Barbaro made it clear that the work continued during the ten-month shoot. “If we ever had a day off from filming, we would be sent over to the airport to go fly … to keep sustaining Gs,” she said. “It would’ve been a huge disservice to get out of shape.”

Lewis Pullman (Lt. Robert “Bob” Floyd)

Pullman didn’t mince words when it came to describing the experience of g-forces. “It felt like you had an elephant sit on top of you,” he told the Daily News . “You’re trying to keep all the blood to your brain so you don’t pass out, and you’re trying to remember your lines and you’re trying to look cool doing it.” Or as he later put it to The Ringer , “It’s sort of like your spine is sliding back into the chair and a rhinoceros just popped a squat on your lap.”

Pullman said that Cruise’s training regimen condensed two years of flight training into three months, covering everything Cruise wished he’d been taught on the original Top Gun. According to Pullman, one of the planes used during training actually allowed the cast to pull more g’s than needed for the final shoot. “So if we could master that without a G-suit, once we got up in the F-18s, it would be like we had been running with weights on,” he explained.

He was also impressed by the tailored feedback that came with the program. Initially, Pullman said, the cast thought that no one was reading the evaluation forms they were asked to fill out every day. “But whenever we saw Tom, he would come up to us and say, ‘Hey man, I saw that on your last flight you had a little trouble pulling zero Gs. Here’s what I do,’” Pullman recalled. “It was like, ‘Holy smokes, Tom Cruise is taking the time out of his jam-packed day to give me personal tips.’”

Danny Ramirez (Lt. Mickey “Fanboy” Garcia)

In an interview with Men’s Health , Ramirez called the intensive training program “the Tom Cruise School of Being a Badass.” He added that logging more than 40 hours of flight time “pulling mad Gs” taught him “the art of puking and rallying.” Before he shot Top Gun: Maverick , Ramirez apparently had never known how to recover after vomiting. “So in a confined space, and to be able to push through it, I was very proud of it,” he told The Ringer. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be cut out of this movie.’” He also shared his admiration for his co-stars who were going through the same training, noting that Barbaro “for sure never puked,” despite pulling the most g’s on the EA-300. “But Lewis [Pullman] has the most grit of anyone I’ve ever met,” Ramirez recalled. “He was going to puke and instead said, ‘Not today,’ and swallowed it all back down.”

Jay Ellis (Lt. Reuben “Payback” Fitch)

“Flying commercial is boring now,” Ellis said when TMZ stopped him, appropriately, outside of LAX. He told the A.V. Club that Cruise’s commitment to reading everyone’s daily questionnaires was humbling. The cast submitted responses on a computer that were then sent to Cruise. “The next day you would get an email from Tom,” Ellis recalled. “And he would say, ‘Hey, I read your questions last night. Going to add a few more days to your flight training. Does next week work for you?’” But Ellis’s training takeaways weren’t limited to aviation. According to Ellis’s interview with Men’s Health , Cruise taught him to keep viewers engaged by being conscious of camera movements, which he later brought to his roles on Mrs. America and season four of Insecure . The skill seems like it’d be useful on any set, but especially so on Top Gun: Maverick, given that director Joseph Kosinski estimated that every 60 to 70 minutes of acting in the sky translated to a mere minute of usable footage.

Greg Tarzan Davis (Lt. Javy “Coyote” Machado)

Davis told The Ringer that he lied during his audition for Top Gun: Maverick and said that he was not afraid of heights. As you might expect, that meant he had some fears to face when it came to flight training. But according to the cast, the training was set up to explain the mechanics and physics of what would happen on the plane before they took flight. “Tom makes sure you feel comfortable with it, then he lets the instructors do what they need to do,” Davis said.

Still, he faced his own physical challenges while in the air taking g’s. In addition to g-forces distorting his face so much that it looked like the life in his body “drained out,” he struggled with motion sickness. Due to the camera setup, he could not look at the horizon to settle his stomach. “You have to look inside the cockpit — that makes you even sicker,” he said. Like his fellow onscreen pilots, Davis also praised Cruise for actively responding to the training questionnaires in hopes of improving the learning experience. “He’s like the greatest Yelp reviewer ever,” Davis said.

Glenn Powell (Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin)

At CinemaCon , Powell explained that Cruise put together the training program so that his co-stars wouldn’t be puking or passing out in government assets. “Half the shots in this movie, I’m literally holding a bag of my puke,” he admitted, noting that pulling g’s was incredibly painful. “Every time we went up there you have to mentally brace for a fight,” he said. “You get on the ground and you’re exhausted. That’s what’s impressive about Tom. He’s flying more than anyone in the movie — he would fly three times a day.” Powell told The Ringer that breathing in the face masks for pilots required pushing out and sucking in air nearly to the point of hyperventilation. Cast members also had to learn to do a flexing maneuver to keep blood from rushing away from the brain and to the legs. But whenever the said maneuver was executed incorrectly? “You can see the tunnel start to close in and you’re like, ‘Oh no,’” Powell said. “You just try to keep pushing blood back in your head so you don’t black out.”

Still, with Cruise in the lead, the training program was inspiring to his younger co-stars. According to Powell, the seasoned actor gave “all the young guns” on the film an iPad with Ground School, which would allow them to study to become pilots in real life. “I started flying on my own, and Tom was with me every step of the way,” Powell said. “After I got my private pilot’s license, there was a note waiting for me on the ground from Tom that said, ‘Welcome to the Skies.’”

• top gun: maverick
• on the record
• monica barbaro
• glen powell
• greg tarzan davis
• danny ramirez
• miles teller
• lewis pullman

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Can Tom Cruise fly fighter jets? When he got his pilot’s licence and how much of Top Gun he’s flying for real

Tom cruise is famous for his commitment to realism, and frequently performs his own stunts.

The much anticipated Top Gun: Maverick i s about to hit the big screen, and critics are already raving about the quality of the flight scenes.

Tom Cruise is famous for his commitment to realism, frequently performs his own stunts, and even broke his ankle while filming Mission Impossible in London in 2018.

But does the daredevil do his own flying? Here’s everything you need to know.

What can we expect from the new Top Gun ?

Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is back and is still feeling the need for speed. His bosses have him in their line of fire, but he remains the best navy test pilot around and commands respect from his flying colleagues.

There is a seemingly impossible mission to blow up an Iranian uranium enrichment plant and Maverick is dispatched to train up an elite team of graduates for the task.

Expect some breathtaking aerobatic displays which, judging by the critics and not entirely surprisingly, outstrip those of the original.

Geoffrey Macnab, writing in i , said “the aerial photography is every bit as spectacular as you would expect”.

The sequel, he adds, “defies cynicism and confirms Tom Cruise’s status as Hollywood’s ‘mission leader’ when it comes to blockbusters ”.

Deadline Hollywood praised the film saying it “tops the original in every way imaginable” adding it is “an example of Hollywood filmmaking at its zenith”.

The original Top Gun was released on 16 May, 1986 and went on to become one of the most famous films of the 80s.

In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, deeming it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Is the flying real?

Cruise is well known for doing his own stunts, and he has built that reputation through decades of action films such as the Mission Impossible and Jack Reacher movies.

“People had asked for a sequel for decades,” Cruise told the PA News service. “And the thing I said to the studio from the beginning was: ‘If I’m ever going to entertain this, we’re shooting everything practically. I’m in that F/A-18, period.”

The cast of Maverick underwent serious training in how to cope in the air, meaning the footage you see is in fact real, not CGI.

The course was developed by Cruise, lated three months, and included tuition in underwater evacuation, aerial aviation and flight itself.

They were also prepared for the dynamic pressures of G-force.

They started in single-engined planes, moved on to a Czech-designed jet trainer called the Aero L-39 Albatros, and then the F-18 Super Hornet.

Miles Teller, who plays ‘Rooster’ the son of ‘Goose’ from the original film, explained: “We trained for this for a long time, Tom had us in a flight programme for several months before we ever started filming.

“But it was never something you really ever got, like, super comfortable with, at least for me. It was something that every time I went up, it really tested me and I felt like I wanted to puke pretty much every time.”

The team also learned to operate cameras and about cinematography as they were essentially filming themselves up there.

But were they actually in control of the aircraft?

Despite this training the Navy did insist on having trained officers at the controls of the F-18 Super Hornet, which is worth £56m.

Glen Roberts, the chief of the Pentagon’s entertainment media office, said a regulation bars non-military personnel from controlling a Defence Department asset other than small arms in training scenarios.

Instead, the actors rode behind F/A-18 pilots, and external shots are of trained Navy pilots.

Cruise, who has been a licensed pilot since 1994, did fly a P-51 propeller-driven fighter plane and a few helicopters for the movie.

The planes aircraft carriers and military bases are also real locations.

Who else stars in the Top Gun: Maverick ?

The cast includes:

• Tom Cruise as Captain Peter “Maverick” Mitchell, a test pilot
• Miles Teller as Lieutenant Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw
• Jennifer Connelly as Penelope “Penny” Benjamin
• Val Kilmer as Lieutenant Tom “Iceman” Kazansky
• Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson
• Ed Harris Rear Admiral Chester “Hammer” Cain

It was directed by Joseph Kosinski and written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and long-time Cruise collaborator, Christopher McQuarrie.

Top Gun: Maverick is dedicated to the director of the original Top Gun , Tony Scott, who died in 2012.

Lady Gaga has co-written Hold My Hand , the lead song for the sequel’s soundtrack’s.

Those who remember the original Top Gun will recall its big hit song was Berlin’s You Take My Breath Away . It won an Oscar for Best Original Song.

When is Top Gun: Maverick released?

It is set for release in UK cinemas on 27 May.

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Simple Flying

What planes does tom cruise own.

Let’s take a look at Tom Cruise’s aircraft collection.

• Tom Cruise is a licensed pilot with qualifications as a multi-engine instrument-rated pilot and helicopter flying skills.
• Cruise owns a collection of airplanes, including a vintage P-51 Mustang fighter from World War II and a Gulfstream IV G4 jet.
• There may be additional aircraft in Cruise's fleet, such as a HondaJet and a Bombardier Challenger 300 jet, according to a travel expert.

It wasn't just a show for 'Top Gun.' Tom Cruise is one of the few actors who genuinely love aviation. He has been a licensed pilot since 1994 and is able to fly several types of aircraft. However, it doesn't stop with a license. The famous Hollywood actor also has a collection of airplanes varying from vintage fighters to business jets.

What kind of license does Cruise have?

In various discussions, Tom Cruise has revealed that his affinity for aviation was crucial to his initial attraction to the original 'Top Gun.' He shared that he holds qualifications as a multi-engine instrument-rated pilot and has continued to enhance his skill set throughout his life. Notably, he acquired helicopter flying skills for the remarkable stunts seen in the 2018 film 'Mission Impossible: Fallout.'

Plane collection

North American P-51 Mustang fighter

During a segment on The Late Late Show, Cruise took host James Corden for a ride in his own vintage P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Tom Cruise acquired this World War II fighter in 2001, which was initially built in 1946.

The P-51 Mustang was an American long-range fighter bomber that served alongside other conflicts during World War II and the Korean War. It was developed by North American Aviation and was retired in 1984. Nevertheless, even today, the fighter is utilized for air racing by civilian pilots. After being donated to an Illinois museum, the plane underwent restoration in 1997.

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Making his recent performance in ' Top Gun: Maverick ,' Tom Cruise takes to the skies in the P-51 Mustang fighter. What adds intrigue to this is the revelation that he wasn't just portraying the pilot on screen – he was actually at the controls of his very own P-51 Mustang fighter.

Gulfstream IV G4 jet

With an estimated price tag of $20 million, this jet boasts the capability to accommodate as many as 19 passengers. Notably, it reportedly comes furnished with luxuries, including a jacuzzi and a dedicated movie-screening room, according to Business Insider.

The Gulfstream IV G4 is a long-range executive jet designed and built by Gulfstream , a General Dynamics company based in Savannah, Georgia, United States, from 1985 until 2018. Its production spanned from 1985 to 2018, resulting in over 900 G4 units taking to the skies. This jet can cover distances of up to 7,100 kilometers and achieve a top speed of 850 kilometers per hour.

Is there more?

Whether the actor has more aircraft in its fleet has been under speculation as it was never officially confirmed. But according to a Business Insider report, in addition to the vintage fighter jet and the Gulfstream IV G4, Jack Sweeney, who is famous for reporting the travel habits of numerous celebrities, including Elon Musk, said he has been able to identify Cruise's HondaJet and a Bombardier Challenger 300 jet.

Want answers to more key questions in aviation? Check out the rest of our guides here .

Sources: Business Insider , South China Morning Post

These 60 Facts About Tom Cruise Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know

Otherwise ageless movie star tom cruise is celebrating his 60th birthday and here's a guide to the man behind the myth..

Tom Cruise , he of the ageless face, body and energy level, is celebrating a birthday July 3.

Contrary to what's visible to the naked eye, the actor is turning 60. 

He has the appropriate amount of work under what must be a utility belt to back that up, including his first-ever billion-dollar box office haul with Top Gun: Maverick . But it's Cruise's sheer zest for entertaining audiences that continues to awe and delight.

And his viral lecture  in December 2020, when COVID-19 pandemic protocol wasn't taken as seriously as he demanded on the set of Mission: Impossible 7 ,   proved that the world's biggest movie star isn't afraid to throw his hard-earned Hollywood weight around, either.

"I said what I said," he told Empire  in an interview published in May 2021. "There was a lot at stake at that point."

Alas, production was suspended anyway  in June 2021 after a positive COVID test, but after all sorts of pandemic-induced delays,  Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One is  finally  slated for July 14, 2023, with Part Two  to follow on June 28, 2024.

"I have an aggressive side, absolutely," Cruise told Cameron Crowe 36 years ago  for  Interview  magazine . "I need a creative outlet. Now I work out every day. I get up and work out 45 to 60 minutes. And that's how I start my day. Discipline is very important to me."

When Brad Pitt , who's only 58, told GQ Australia  a few years ago that he thinks making movies (or at least being in them) is "a younger man's game," you could practically hear Cruise's inimitable laugh.

So, with our need for speed recently fulfilled, in honor of his milestone birthday here are 60 things to know about Tom Cruise:

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1. Thomas Cruise Mapother IV  was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, N.Y., to  Thomas Cruise Mapother III , an electrical engineer, and Mary Lee Pfeiffer , both of Louisville, Ky. (His grandfather and great-grandfather were both Thomas Cruise Mapother, as well.)

2. He has two older sisters, Lee Anne and Marian , and one younger sister, Catherine , nicknamed Cass. 

3. Cruise wanted to act from around the time he was 4 and started doing impressions of everyone from Donald Duck to Humphrey Bogart and Elvis Presley .

4. In 1974, when the family was living in Ottawa, Mary Lee packed up and took the kids back to Louisville. She officially divorced Tom III in August 1975 and, six weeks later, he remarried, briefly. Joan Lebendiger , recently widowed, had four kids, one of whom later told biographer Andrew Morton that they never saw their stepbrother Tom again after the wedding.

"As a kid, I had a lot of hidden anger about that. I'd get hit, and I didn't understand it," Cruise  recalled to  Vanity Fair  in 1994.

"He was the kind of guy who really got picked on a lot at school himself when he was growing up," he said of his father. "He had also been small, though he ended up being six foot two. People had been quite brutal to him. Inside, I believe he was a really sensitive individual." Tom III could also "actually be quite loving." 

But in 2006 he told Parade  that his dad was "a bully and a coward—the person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you. It was a great lesson in my life, how he'd lull you in, make you feel safe and then, bang!"

Cruise visited his father in the hospital before he died of cancer in 1984 and Tom III said he'd get better and they would "'talk about the whole thing,'" the actor told  VF , but that never came to pass.

5. Tom was very close to his mother, whom he described to James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio   as "a very warm, charismatic woman, very kind, very generous." She worked four jobs at any given time to take care of them, and Tom had a paper route to pitch in. "Every night I'd come home, bathe my feet and sit in the family room, and Tom would massage my feet for a half-hour," Mary Lee recalled to Rolling Stone . (She died at 80 in 2017.)

6. He was also protective of his sisters and, as the man of the house, took on the role of scrutinizing their boyfriends when they'd come by to meet the family.

7. Cruise was raised Catholic and he spent his freshman year of high school at St. Francis Seminary in Cincinnati, after a priest named Father Ric Schneider gave a talk at his (also Catholic) school in Louisville. "He was a typical teenager, trying to find his way in life," Schneider told the New York Daily News in 2013. "We would give them an IQ test, and he just about made the cut. The cutoff is 110, and he scored exactly 110."

It's been rumored that Cruise considered entering the priesthood, but he doesn't it remember it that way. "We didn't have the money back then, and I went for the education for a year, and it was free," Cruise has explained.

8. Mary Lee got remarried to Jack South in 1978 and the whole family moved to New Jersey when Tom was 16.

"In the beginning, I felt threatened by my stepfather," Cruise told Rolling Stone . "There's a part of you that's in love with your mother. But he is such a wise, smart man. He loved my mother so much that he took us all in, four young people. We'd bet on football games, and he was a terrible bettor, so I'd make lots of money."

As for his dad, Tom III, who had recently passed away, "I think that he felt remorse for a lot that had happened. He was a person who did not have a huge influence on me in my teens; the values and motivation really came from my stepfather. But he was important. Really important. It's all sort of complex. There wasn't one thing I felt."

9. He was always a daredevil, jumping off things, riding his bike too fast, sometimes into walls and, here and there, breaking bones. In high school he joined the glee club and did plays. He was also an athlete, over the years dabbling in soccer, baseball, basketball, football and ice hockey, and he wrestled. Sports and acting were where he really stood out and, shocker, the ladies have loved him since grammar school.

"I was a wild kid," Cruise admitted. "I'd cut school. Everything had to do with my wanting always to push the envelope to see: where do I stand with myself? How far can I go?"

10. Cruise has been open about his battle with dyslexia, calling himself "a functional illiterate" in school, though he "loved learning. I wanted to learn, but I knew I had failed in the system."

"My energy was always all over the place. Reading was not at the top of my list, because it took me so long," he told Cameron Crowe for Interview in 1986. "When I wrote a paper, my mother would help me with it. I would take a test and get very nervous. I would skip questions and skip lines. I've gotten better. I've learned to control my eyes. I used to have to use my finger all the time. I just wasn't relaxed about it."

11. Senior year of high school he got kicked off the football team after he was caught drinking, according to Morton, but that left him time to audition for the school musical, Guys and Dolls . He played Nathan Detroit, and a commercial director who happened to catch a performance told him he should pursue acting professionally. So, he started going to New York on weekends to audition for musicals—and he missed his graduation ceremony while performing in an amateur production of Godspell .

12. Cruise made his movie debut in the 1981 drama Taps , in a role that was bigger than the one he was originally cast in "because you could see right away that he had a giant talent," former Paramount head Sherry Lansing said in Stephen Galloway 's 2017 biography Leading Lady . "He was always extremely focused and exceptionally polite."

13. On the set of Francis Ford Coppola 's The Outsiders , featuring a veritable who's-who of '80s-era heartthrobs , prankster Cruise scrawled "Helter Skelter" on co-star Diane Lane 's mirror and put honey on her toilet seat.

14. The only direction Cruise received for his iconic Risky Business dance to "Old Time Rock and Roll" was one line in the script: "Joel dances in underwear through the house." He ad-libbed the rest, grabbing the candlestick, "using it as a guitar, jumping on the table. I waxed half the floor and kept the other half dirty, so I could slide in on my socks. As we went along, I threw more stuff in," he shared with Crowe in 1986.

15. Cruise dated his Risky Business co-star Rebecca De Mornay , who called him a "pure person." She told Rolling Stone in 1986, "There's something earnest and virtuous about him that's quite rare." According to Taps co-star Sean Penn , they were out at a club in New York one night and after realizing that a girl he was talking to was trying to pick him up, Cruise "screamed at her, 'I have a girlfriend I'm in love with!'" (Perhaps at the time readers thought Penn might be exaggerating.) He and De Mornay started dating in the summer of 1983 and maintained a long-distance relationship while he shot Ridley Scott 's Legend in London, but broke up when he returned to the U.S. to start making Top Gun .

16. Top Gun producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson envisioned no one other than Cruise playing Maverick after they saw a magazine story about the elite flying school at San Diego's Miramar Naval Air Station and went down to see the hot shots in person. "From the first time we went down to Miramar—even before the script was written—we said, 'These guys are Tom Cruises,'" Bruckheimer told Rolling Stone .

17. Although Cruise also told Rolling Stone in 1986 that he wasn't sure he would be able to get married in his "present state of mind," he tied the knot with  Mimi Rogers on May 9, 1987, two years after meeting her at a dinner party. Emilio Estevez  was Cruise's best man.

18. Paul Newman , his co-star in 1987's The Color of Money , turned him on to race car driving and Cruise has been feeling the need for speed on land and in the air (and sometimes on the water) ever since. Years later the student became the teacher when, in 2010, Cruise taught Zac Efron  about motorcycles. "I don't know," Efron told Details when asked why Cruise offered to do that. "I don't even want to know. It's just so cool that he gave a s--t, the fact that he cared at all."

19. Mimi and her first husband, Jim Rogers , were both members of the Church of Scientology (Jim was a high-level auditor) and she's said to have introduced Cruise to the organization, giving him L. Ron Hubbard 's Dianetics and other literature. His immersion in Scientology coincided with the release of Top Gun and the actor becoming one of the biggest stars in the world, and to this day Cruise remains the most famous member of the church.

20. Despite being critically panned, 1988's Cocktail , starring Cruise as a playboy bartender, gave Disney its biggest opening weekend ever at the time: $11.8 million.

21. According to Morton's 2008 biography  Tom Cruise , director Oliver Stone wanted Tom to be injected with a chemical that would have rendered him temporarily paralyzed so he could better identify with the role of real-life Vietnam War veteran and activist Ron Kovic in 1989's  Born on the Fourth of July . The insurance company understandably shut that idea down. The film still won two Oscars, best editing and best director for Stone, so it worked out.

22. People named Cruise its "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1990. Soon after, he and Rogers divorced. When Vanity Fair  asked about his first marriage in 1994, Cruise replied tersely , "It was a long time ago. I really don't think about it."

23. Cruise met Nicole Kidman  during casting for the racing drama Days of Thunder and they tied the knot on Dec. 24, 1990. They adopted two children, Isabella and Connor , and starred in two more movies together, Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut .

After Isabella arrived, Cruise told Vanity Fair in 1994 , "We talked about children from time to time, but there was always the work. But then we went, When is it ever going to be the right time? That's how the conversation started. You're lying in bed at night and you're trying to sleep, so you roll over and you go, What would happen if we had this in our life?

"One of the things that Nic and I talk about is that now suddenly we're a family. We're at that point where we're trying to define where we are. Can we still party? Are we really boring? Oh, my God . . . we're old!"

24. Disney had Cruise in mind when they created the look of the title character in 1992's Aladdin . "There's a confidence with all of his attitudes and his poses," lead animator Glen Keane said in a DVD extras feature.

25. An old tabloid go-to back in the 1980s and '90s was to claim that this or that star was gay, and Cruise was aware that the rumor was out there.

"First of all, I don't think it's an indictment," Cruise told Vanity Fair in 1994. "But I hadn't heard those rumors till about three months ago myself… I don't know why they say it. I've heard everything from I've cheated on my wife to my wife was there on the set of  The Firm  because she was pissed off about my love scene on the beach. It's not true, but people are going to say what they want to say."

26. Cruise wanted Brian De Palma to direct Mission: Impossible , which would mark his debut as a producer with his agent turned partner Paula Wagner , even though De Palma was in movie jail following several flops. Cruise even deferred his $20 million salary (not including his back-end deal) so they could raise the movie's budget. Mission accomplished: M:I made almost $500 million worldwide and spawned a franchise . De Palma, however, didn't attend the film's premiere in May 1996, reportedly because he and Cruise didn't always see eye to eye during production.

27. Shooting M:I , Cruise insisted they use a fan big enough to create the 120 mile-per-hour wind he'd be facing if he was really clinging to a bullet train while a helicopter exploded behind him. A crew member told Galloway, "He said, 'I want the wind blowing in my face and I want my jaws to be blowing.' That's Tom. He's a guy's guy."

28. The intense Eyes Wide Shut shoot was scheduled to last four months but ended up keeping Tom and Nicole in London for 18 months. Also during their time in England, as fate would have it, they attended Princess Diana 's funeral in September 1997, as did with Tom Hanks  and Steven Spielberg , who were in town making Saving Private Ryan .

29. "All I can say is that I hope we are together when we are 80," Nicole Kidman told  Talk  in 2000. "I can't say we will be, but I will be so devastated if we are not." Alas, they announced their separation on Feb. 5, 2001. "She knows why, and I know why," Cruise cryptically told Vanity Fair later that year. "She's the mother of my children, and I wish her well. And I think that you just move on. And I don't say that lightly. I don't say that with anything."

30. Penélope Cruz  successfully sued an Australian tabloid in June 2003, winning damages and a retraction over a story claiming she and then-boyfriend Cruise had postponed their impending marriage because she had cheated on him. They broke up in January 2004 after more than two years of dating, a source telling People the relationship "just ran its course."

31. The Church of Scientology denied a 2012 Vanity Fair report that Homeland actress Nazanin Boniadi , then a church member, had basically been recruited to date Cruise for a few months, starting in October 2004 with a group outing that included renting the skating rink at Rockefeller Center and dinner at Nobu. "I'd rather not talk about that," Boniadi told the New York Post in 2013.

32. Cruise specifically held out for J.J. Abrams to direct Mission: Impossible III —Abrams' feature film debut—after watching some episodes of Alias . Paramount was freaking out, wanting M:I3 for a summer 2005 tentpole release, which wasn't going to happen if Cruise and Abrams—busy at the moment with a show called Lost —got their way, but it turned out Cruise had an ace up his sleeve. Spielberg was ready to roll with War of the Worlds in time to give Paramount the summer blockbuster it needed while they waited for Abrams to become available.

33. On May 23, 2005, a giddy Cruise raised his arms in victory, got down on one knee and did a couple of fist pumps, and then jumped up on Oprah Winfrey 's couch (also twice), fueled by love for his new girlfriend, Katie Holmes . "You're gone," the talk show host observed.

"I've got so much energy, I can't help it," Cruise said.

They were both laughing hysterically and the studio audience was cheering, but… maybe you had to be there?

Lest anyone forget, Holmes was at the taping and Winfrey led a chant for her to come out. "She's gonna run!" Cruise exclaimed. "She is freaking out ." Then he took off for backstage to go get her, the camera trailing him, and once they had emerged Cruise enveloped the Dawson's Creek star in a hug.

That moment unwittingly set the tone for Cruise and Holmes' entire relationship, romantic to many but to everyone… just a lot .

34. A month later, Cruise accused Matt Lauer  of being "glib" when the Today host questioned his take on mental health care—specifically, his dismissal of psychiatry and his criticism of Brooke Shields ' "irresponsible" use of medication to treat postpartum depression.

35. Cruise and Holmes' daughter, Suri Cruise , was born on April 18, 2006.

36. Mission: Impossible III came out on May 5, 2006, and did… fine. It was (and remains) the lowest-grossing installment of the franchise, making $134 million domestically, but more memorably it marked the moment where folks started wondering if Cruise had lost his movie-star mojo, if his unadulterated zeal had turned off audiences for good. Not making it better: Paramount severed its 14-year relationship with Cruise's production company that August, and then-Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone actually told the Wall Street Journal , "We don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot. His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

37. Suri was introduced to the world on the September 2006 cover of Vanity Fair , zipped up in her father's leather jacket akin to how Paul McCartney   snuggled daughter Mary on the cover of his 1970 solo album McCartney . The first glimpse at the cover was a huge get for Katie Couric 's first night as lead anchor of the CBS Evening News .

38. Cruise and Holmes' wedding at the 15th-century Castello Orsini-Odescalchi in Rome on Nov. 18, 2016, reportedly cost upward of $3 million . Guest Giorgio Armani designed the bride's ceremony and reception dresses and attendees included Will Smith  and Jada Pinkett Smith , John Travolta  and Kelly Preston , David  and Victoria Beckham , Jim Carrey  and Jenny McCarthy , Leah Remini  and Angelo Pagan , and Jennifer Lopez  and Marc Anthony . Andrea Bocelli performed.

39. Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige was Cruise's best man. According to Remini, who left the church in 2013, a traditional Scientology wedding ceremony includes the vow "to never close their eyes in sleep on a disagreement or an upset."

40. Shields and husband Chris Henchy were also in attendance, Cruise having apologized for publicly disparaging his Endless Love co-star's use of medication to treat postpartum depression. "If you get invited to that wedding, you go," Shields recalled on The Jenny McCarthy Show in 2016. The actress even provided the bride's "something old": an antique enamel compact.

41. 2010's Knight and Day with Cameron Diaz  was widely treated as some sort of "comeback" movie for Cruise, a test to see if he could still have a monster action movie hit after Mission: Impossible III underwhelmed.

"I don't understand why people think that," he marveled to the U.K.'s Telegraph . "I've been working the whole time."

42. His roles in the interim had included his unrecognizable—and hilarious—surprise turn as crass, bullying, bald and fat studio exec Les Grossman in Ben Stiller 's Tropic Thunder , for which he earned a Golden Globe nomination.

"I had about a dozen people making the silicone prosthetics for his head, neck, chest, and hands," makeup designer Barney Burman recalled to Grantland . "We made him special gloves. I did the sculpting, someone else did the molds, someone else was casting them. I had six different people punching hairs into the scalp piece, so his entire head was one-at-a-time, hand-punched hairs; his arms were hand-punched one at a time; his chest was hand-punched."

Added Aida Caefer , "I made the fat suits for Tom Cruise. He was all for  the more ridiculous, the better . The suit went from his neck all the way down to his ankles…The character moved around a lot and he was so soaked in sweat that we had rotating suits for him—one in the morning and one after lunch."

"Tom choreographed all his own moves," Stiller said. "I remember watching him do this stuff and thinking this is so frigging funny."

43. The rumor that Cruise turned down the role of Iron Man, which would have changed the whole vibe of the Marvel Universe, is not true, he says. "Not close," he told ComicBook.com in 2018 when asked if he was really almost Tony Stark. "Not close, and I love Robert Downey Jr. I can't imagine anyone else in that role, and I think it's perfect for him."

44. For 2011's Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol , Cruise hung off the edge of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—the world's tallest building—without a double (though with the appropriate wires). And while he'd been doing as much of his own physical laboring as possible for decades, this reinvigorated Cruise's reputation as the guy who does all the death-defying stunts the insurance companies will allow. The film's $695 million worldwide box office also signaled that Cruise's reputation had preceded him—in a good way.

45. Holmes filed for divorce in June 2012. Her father, attorney Martin Holmes , had helped draft their prenuptial agreement and all was remarkably settled within weeks. And neither of them have ever talked about what happened . They've acknowledged that they were once married to each other, but why it ended has remained anyone's guess. And, oh, how the people have guessed.

46. Eyebrows were raised when the 5-foot-7 Cruise was tapped to play 6-foot-5 vigilante Jack Reacher from Lee Childs ' best-selling novel series.

"Size in my books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force," Childs explained. "Cruise portrays that in his own way."

47. Not as initially OK with the creative license was Interview With the Vampire   author Ann Rice , who according to Vanity Fair was livid in the early '90s when Cruise was cast to play Lestat, having written the character with Rutger Hauer in mind.

"It always helps if one is controversial in casting a movie," director Neil Jordan said. "I just thought that if Tom was willing to go the distance this character demands—and he was—then we could end up with something quite extraordinary, and we did."

48. Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation was legendary before it hit theaters in 2015 for Cruise's viral airplane stunt, in which he hung onto the door of an Airbus A400M as it took off. For real. He also did his own motorcycle chase and learned how to hold his breath for six and a half minutes for the underwater document swap.

49. He was back on the bike for Mission: Impossible—Fallout and "when the [safety] rigs didn't work, we just went for it," director Christopher McQuarrie told the New York Times . "Everything that you're seeing Tom doing, he's doing free riding on cold cobblestones. Sometimes there was rain; sometimes there was morning dew. There was always a danger of skidding and wiping out."

Cruise also did his own skydiving along with Henry Cavill 's stunt double, dangled from a rope attached to a flying helicopter, and piloted a helicopter for a mid-air chase scene, getting his certification in six weeks. It normally takes three months, McQuarrie said, but Cruise trained for 16 hours a day to cut the time in half.

"Tom was having the time of his life," the director said.

50. Cruise has social media accounts but they are strictly for un-risky business, and he prefers to not know everything that's happening online. "Sometimes I have to for work, but I keep it very limited," he told E! News in 2016. "I don't spend time doing that kind of stuff."

51. Cruise isn't one to let himself go in between physically taxing roles. "Sea-kayaking, caving, fencing, treadmill, weights, rock-climbing, hiking… I jog… I do so many different activities," he has said.

In fact, he refers to his personal workout space—a version of which he takes with him everywhere—as the "Pain Cave."

"Only the motivated can enter," he explained to the AP at the 2017 premiere of The Mummy . "All you got to do is just be motivated. Anyone can come in, we have the crew come in, and we just make it available to everyone."

As co-star Jake Johnson   revealed: "You start every morning with the daily challenge. So before work starts, you're in there. His hair and makeup team is in there, his crew is in there, so there's about 15, 20 people every day doing their squats and jumping jacks. And then I kinda got into it with him…I wanted to be in a Tom Cruise movie and do it the Tom Cruise way."

That includes, alas, avoiding sugar.

"I love sugar," Cruise assured James Corden  on The Late Late Show in 2018, "but I can't eat it because when I'm training, I'm doing all these movies—so I send it to everyone." And then, "I wait for the calls. Like, 'tell me about it.'"

52. Don't tell anyone, but Cruise is human: Aside from what he did to himself running around in childhood, he threw out his back making Legend ; developed an ulcer while shooting Eyes Wide Shut ; tore his labrum scaling a cliff at Dead Horse Point, Utah, for Mission: Impossible 2 ; and broke an ankle on Mission: Impossible—Fallout .

"It was the easy one where I'm running and I jump from one building to the next," Cruise later described the fateful stunt on  The Tonight Show .

53. But this guy commits . In addition to doing three months of helicopter pilot training in six weeks and learning how to hold his breath like he's David Blaine , he played pool for 12 hours a day to play Fast Eddie Felson's protegee in The Color of Money. He lost 18 pounds and read classic books out loud to work on his diction to play centuries-old Lestat in Interview With the Vampire. He learned German to better embody a World War II-era officer in Valkyrie . He actually spent a year and a half learning how to fly a helicopter for  Mission: Impossible—Fallout  (before his whirlwind certification).

54. "I haven't seen him in awhile, but he has sent me a birthday gift every year since I was 11 years old," Dakota Fanning  said on Watch What Happens Live in 2016 about her dad in 2005's War of the Worlds . "Beautiful gifts, it's really kind. I always think, 'Oh, when I'm 18, he'll probably stop. Oh, 21, he'll stop. But every year."

What does Team Cruise pick out? "It's usually shoes," the actress, then 22, shared.

55. In 1986, he told Cameron Crowe , "Let's face it, I'm not saving lives here. I feel fortunate, but this is just one aspect of my life. I love my work, but my family is very important to me, too. You pick up the paper and see that there are many things happening outside my little world."

Since then, the real-life heroics include, all within a few years in the '90s: He lifted two boys over a barricade to prevent them being crushed at the Mission: Impossible premiere in London; he sent his own yacht's skiff to rescue a family whose sailboat was on fire in the Mediterranean in 1996; he rushed to the aid of a woman who had been mugged in London; and he paid the $7,000 emergency room bill for an uninsured cashier who was injured in a hit and run—an accident Cruise witnessed.

"It's just an impulse," Cruise told People in 2000 about his spate of good deeds. "I was never a Boy Scout, so maybe I'm making up for it now."

Or, as he said in the video of an interview for his church that went viral in 2008, "You can't drive past an accident, because as a Scientologist you are the only one who can help"

56. Though he's the most famous face of Scientology, Cruise is incredibly protective of his beliefs and doesn't say too much about it publicly. But in October 2016, he told ITV at the London premiere of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back , "It's something that has helped me incredibly in my life. I've been a Scientologist for over 30 years. It's something that is, you know...without it, I wouldn't be where I am. So, it's a beautiful religion. I'm incredibly proud."

57. Cruise has been nominated for three Oscars: Best Supporting Actor for Magnolia and Best Actor for Jerry Maguire and Born on the Fourth of July . He has seven Golden Globe nominations and three wins, for those three films.

58. He  returned all three Globes  in 2021 as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association came under fire for its lack of diversity in its ranks.

59. Cruise's movies have collectively grossed more than $11 billion at the box office worldwide, though Top Gun: Maverick  is his first  film to cross the billion-dollar threshold on its own.

Prior to the release of the 36-years-in-the-making, pandemic-delayed sequel, his highest-grossing movie worldwide was Mission: Impossible—Fallout , with $791 million. Domestically, his biggest film was War of the Worlds with $234 million—though adjusted for inflation, it was the original  Top Gun  ($180 million in 1986 vs. $444 million in 2022). Top Gun: Maverick has made $534 million in the U.S.

60. Of course those are real F-18s and the actors are really flying in  Top Gun: Maverick .  "It is aggressive. You can't act that, the distortion in the face," Cruise explained in a making-of featurette . "They're pulling 7 1/2, 8 G's. That's 1,600 pounds of force."

As he recalled to  Empire , he told the studio before they got started, "'You don't know how hard this movie's going to be. No-one's ever done this before.'" But he was firm about not wanting to do any "CGI stuff."

And in the end, Cruise said, "There's never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don't know if there ever will be again, to be honest."

61. When Tom Cruise wants to tell you he appreciates you, he sends dessert. The White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake from Doan's Bakery  in Woodland Hills, Calif., has become the stuff of holiday-gift-giving legend, sent to the likes of Tom Hanks , Rosie O'Donnell  and, more recently,  Top Gun: Maverick co-stars Miles Teller  and Jon Hamm .

When December comes around, the staff at Hanks' production company Playtone "start eyeing what mail has come in," Hanks shared on the Mythical Kitchen YouTube series  Last Meals . "Is the big box coming in? Are we getting what has essentially been called 'the Tom Cruise cake?'"

Asked about the criticism that he hadn't really played any grown-ups yet, Cruise told Cameron Crowe for Interview  in 1986, "God forbid if I do everything I want to do before I'm 26. When I get to [ Paul ] Newman 's age, I'm looking to still be playing the great characters he plays.

"I hope the public and everyone realize that I'm still growing. I'm still feeling my oats here. I'm working toward the long range of what I can be as an artist. And I work my ass off trying. Because I know what I want to be."

Mission: accomplished.

( Originally published July 3, 2019, at 3 a.m. PT )

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My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise

The action star has gone to great lengths to avoid the press for more than a decade. But maybe our writer could track him down anyway?

Credit... Illustration by Kelsey Dake

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By Caity Weaver

• Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 31, 2023

In an interview with Playboy in 2012, Tom Cruise described Katie Holmes as “an extraordinary person” with a “wonderful” clothing line, and someone for whom he was fond of “doing things like creating romantic dinners” — behavior that, he confided, “she enjoys.” It would prove to be his last major interview with a reporter to date. Despite what may be recalled through the penumbra of memory, this sudden silence was not directly preceded by either of Cruise’s infamous appearances on television: not by his NBC’s “Today” show interview (in which he labeled host Matt Lauer both “glib” and “Matt — MattMattMattMatt”), nor even by his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (in which he reverse-catapulted himself onto Winfrey’s fawn-colored couch multiple times in a demonstration of his enthusiasm for Holmes). Those incidents occurred seven years earlier, in 2005; Cruise emerged from the hex of public bewilderment unscathed. In fact, Cruise gave no indication that the interview, pegged to the musical-comedy bomb “Rock of Ages,” was intended to serve as a farewell address to journalists. At the time he sat for it, another life milestone was hurtling toward him: The month after the article was published, Holmes filed for divorce.

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In the decade since, the amount of verified information we have gleaned about Cruise’s real life could fit on a single flashcard, though it’s unclear why anyone would need to memorize it, since the details mainly consist of anecdotal trifles shared by other celebrities in interviews of their own: From James Corden, we know Cruise once asked to land a helicopter in James Corden’s yard . From Brooke Shields, we know Brooke Shields no longer receives the (by all accounts delectable) white chocolate coconut Bundt cake that Cruise famously sends to many beloved stars each holiday season. From Kyra Sedgwick, we know that there was a panic button under a fireplace mantle in one of Cruise’s homes . (She pressed it out of curiosity, summoning the police.) From Matt Damon, we know that during production of the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie, Cruise had “a safety guy” replaced because he deemed a proposed stunt (in which Cruise scampers over the Burj Khalifa) “too dangerous.” Tom Cruise, Kate Hudson informs us, loves skydiving.

These facts sketch a portrait of a daredevil with a finite budget for cakes, but hardly a recluse. Cruise’s spurning of interviews makes him unique among his cohort — A-list, pathologically charismatic, wrest-butts-into-seats-type movie stars — whose success, it has long been assumed, derives from their ability to appear likable to mortals. They demonstrate this skill, traditionally, by exhibiting their personality in interviews. Every time Cruise turns down an interview request (through his representative, Cruise declined to be interviewed for this article), he makes a bet that just his being Tom Cruise, offering no further details about what that might entail, is enticement enough for people to watch his movies. Lately, more often than not, he has been right.

To see this clearly, perhaps it’s helpful to contrast Cruise’s career with that of Brad Pitt, his co-star in “Interview With the Vampire” (1994) and fellow member of a declining species: Hollywood leading men. Pitt has continued appearing in the kind of films (thrillers, comedies, romances, psychodramas, historical epics, etc.) that he and Cruise starred in throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In the past decade, audiences could find Pitt endeavoring to disappear into roles ranging from abolitionist to astronaut. In the same period, Cruise has starred solely in action films, which have depicted him fighting aliens, terrorists, fellow spies, a mummy and sundry other enemies of the United States. Rather than vanishing into roles, Cruise remakes them in his image. So fully has he melded his offscreen persona with that of the skydiving, cliff-jumping, motorcycle-parachuting pilots he portrays, these characters become mere receptacles of Tom Cruiseness. Cruise’s films tend to perform better than Pitt’s at the box office; his most recent endeavor, “Top Gun: Maverick,” outearned Pitt’s latest by about $1.4 billion. This summer, Tom Cruise will run, drive and jump at top speeds in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” and Brad Pitt will star in nothing.

Cruise still takes part in promotional junkets and convivial late-night-talk-show chats, but his refusal to participate in the sort of in-depth journalistic interviews that (in theory, anyway) reveal some aspect of his true self has coincided, somewhat paradoxically, with an incredible surge in his commitment to infusing cinematic fantasies with reality. For unknown reasons it could be interesting to explore in an interview, reality has become very important to Cruise, who reveres it as a force more powerful than magic. It is vital to Cruise that the audience of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” have the opportunity to witness not a C.G.I. production of a feat, or even a seasoned stunt performer executing a dangerous act, but real footage of him, Tom Cruise, the 61-year-old father of three from Syracuse, N.Y., riding a motorcycle off a cliff.

This fetish for reality has become a keystone of Cruise’s persona, to the extent that many of his public appearances now take place in flying vehicles. Rather than accept an MTV Movie & TV Award in person in May, Cruise filmed his acceptance speech from the cockpit of a fighter aircraft as he piloted it through clouds, politely shouting, “I love entertaining you!” over the engine’s roar. Delivering “a special message from the set of @MissionImpossible” to his followers on Instagram, Cruise screamed while dangling backward off the side of an aircraft, “It truly is the honor of a lifetime!”

But reality does not exist only in movies. What is missing from Cruise’s fervid documentation of ultrarisky, inconceivably expensive, meticulously planned real-life events are any details about the parts of his real life that do not involve, for example, filming stunts for “Mission: Impossible” movies. My own mission, then, was simple: I was to travel to the ends of the Earth to see if it was possible to locate the terrestrial Cruise, out of context — to catch a glimpse, to politely shout one question at him, or at least to ascertain one new piece of intelligence about his current existence — in order to reintegrate him into our shared reality.

Having lately made an effort to scrutinize any article that cast Tom Cruise as its subject, one of the few things that I can say for certain he has done since 2021, besides film two “Mission: Impossible” movies, is order chicken tikka masala from a restaurant in Birmingham, England, and then “as soon as he had finished” (per a tweet from the restaurant ) order the exact same chicken tikka masala “all over again.”

These days, Tom Cruise is hardly ever photographed in any situation other than shooting and promoting his films. (He was filming in Birmingham.) The paucity of paparazzi photos of the apparently chicken-loving actor can be at least partly attributed to his spending much time removed from America’s twin celebrity-entertainment control rooms: New York (where his ex-wife, Holmes, lives with their daughter) and Los Angeles (where, in 2015 and 2016, he reportedly sold multiple homes for a combined total just over $50 million). Years of speculation that Cruise lives or was planning to live in a penthouse apartment a five-minute walk from the “spiritual headquarters” of the Church of Scientology, of which he is a big fan, in Clearwater, Fla., appear never to have been realized, apart from an unsourced assertion published in The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, which mentioned that the audition process for co-stars in Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick” “involved flying down to Cruise’s home in Clearwater. ”

To learn more about the possible activities of Tom Cruise, I turned to the person who, after Cruise himself, his family, his friends, his employees, his co-workers and anyone who has ever met — or, at least, interacted with — him, knows him best: a Brazilian woman who is quite possibly his most dedicated fan in the world. She spoke to me on two conditions: first, that I grant her anonymity; second, that I not identify by name, or characterize too specifically, the publicly available online repository of Cruise-related information she has maintained for over 20 years. Her concerns are both practical and legal: Practically, she isn’t sure if the operation, which may or may not play host to more than 132,000 images of Cruise, could withstand a large influx of traffic; legally, she did not wish to invite the scrutiny and possible copyright claims the attention might draw.

She started the operation when she was 18. Today she is in her early 40s and works as a librarian. More than two decades into the endeavor, a nostalgic melancholy permeates the fan’s reflections. Ten years ago, she said, she was often the first to widely disseminate the latest images of Cruise. Now, because of the superabundance of photo-sharing social media accounts, she must settle for merely having the most complete repository. New additions trickle in sporadically. She’s partial to the theory that paparazzi rarely capture photographs of Cruise in part because he is a real-life “master of disguise,” whom people fail to recognize on the street. Despite years of remote observation, of scrutinizing nearly every single image captured of the man, even she could not say definitively where Cruise lives. She did observe, however, that he appears to spend “most of the time” in Britain.

In fact, there is a strange rumor that Cruise bought a home in a tiny town called Biggin Hill, on the farthest fringes of London — the site of a small private airport that he has been known to use when filming in the region. The legend appears to trace back to an article published in the British tabloid The Sun in July 2021 about the actor’s 59th-birthday celebration. An anonymous source declared that Cruise had “only recently moved to” a house in Biggin Hill (average home price: £590,000), “which feels like it’s practically in the countryside.” The claim would accrue scant new details as it was repeated in British papers numerous times over the following year, apart from one: that Cruise’s residence “is set in 140 acres of stunning rural parkland,” inside a posh gated community near the airport.

Cruise, who has filmed parts of the three most recent installments of “Mission: Impossible” in Britain, has never publicly commented on the rumors. He did, however, confirm that he spends “a lot of time in Britain” in an exceedingly rare interview that appeared, inexplicably, in the September 2022 issue of Derbyshire Life magazine. “I guess I am an Anglophile,” Cruise told Derbyshire Life. “I love being in Britain because everyone is pleasant and will give you a nod or say hello without crowding you too much.” Elsewhere in the interview, Cruise expressed additional enthusiasm for auxiliary British topics, including politeness (“Being friendly doesn’t cost a bean, and I enjoy it”) and Derbyshire, which is, for the record, actually a considerable distance from Biggin Hill (“Wow! Derbyshire — what a fantastic place!”).

To determine if anyone who did not work in the British newspaper or chicken-tikka-masala industries had ever encountered Cruise on English soil, I sifted through Facebook posts, typing any permutation of “saw Tom Cruise” I could think of into the search bars of neighborhood groups for all of the Hobbit-ily named localities surrounding Biggin Hill (“Orpington”; “West Wickham”). I joined groups like “Westerham and Biggin Hill News friends Community fun views gossip” and pored over hundreds of responses to posts like “Think I just saw Tom Cruise driving down jail lane that’s impossible.” The flashes of Cruise that winked from the replies were tantalizing — “I’ve seen him blue Ferrari…jail lane…”; “Lives up Cudham drives blue Ferrari” — but there was no way to tell who was reporting accurate details about the comings and goings of Tom Cruise, who was mistaken and who was merely lying for fun. The only way to find out was to do what Cruise himself would do: grab onto the nearest plane and go, for real.

Next to the Biggin Hill Airport, there is a pocket-size hotel built to serve the crews and engineers of the private planes that fly in and out. The hotel, its website boasts, offers “great views towards London” — something just about any place on Earth could offer with the right window arrangement, assuming it was not already in London. The description of the property’s sleek teal-and-toffee-colored restaurant turned out to be even more specifically accurate: The view of the runway at Biggin Hill Airport was without parallel. At the bar, I pulled up a leather stool and ordered (not in these exact words) the worst Shirley Temple of my life, which cost $11. My fellow patrons had long since familiarized themselves with the contours of the small dinner menu; they had been stranded at Biggin Hill for some time, because the private jet of the billionaire for whom they were working had received — you hate to hear this — an estimated $10 million worth of hail damage. I asked a maintenance technician if he thought Tom Cruise really did have a house in Biggin Hill. He replied with unflinching confidence: “I know he does.”

In the same venue, a man so young he might have been a teenager, who at one time worked inside the airport, revealed to me that Cruise had a parking spot there, though it was unclear if he meant for a car or a helicopter. Most of the good people of Biggin Hill, when grilled about Cruise’s living arrangements, seemed genuinely to have no idea what I was talking about. These were the two camps into which, without fail, every respondent fell: Either they had never so much as heard the rumor that Cruise walked among them, or they were 100 percent certain that he did.

Upon reaching Keston Park, the only gated community in the area matching The Sun’s description, I discovered two things: first, that there appeared to be an illegally locked gate obstructing public access to the footpath that cuts through the neighborhood — whether the gate is impenetrable is a matter of ongoing dispute among the Bromley borough council, myself and many other aspiring path-takers who have submitted complaints about the locked gate to the borough website — and, second, that the biggest movie star in the world did not live there. That was evident through holes that carpenter bees had bored into the barbed-wire-topped fences protecting Keston Park from the wider world. The stately houses faced one another too directly. Their trees could drop acorns into another’s gardens. There was nowhere to conveniently land a helicopter.

Oh, well. These were Keston Park’s problems — not mine and probably not Tom Cruise’s. Tom Cruise, as he and I both now knew, was most likely secretly living at another estate I had turned up in my research — one that was even closer to the airport.

The distance between any two points within the general environs of Biggin Hill is insignificant by car, which is probably why I was unable to persuade any taxi driver to transport me between them. It is less insignificant by foot, and even longer, though much more scenic, if one attempts to traverse it by way of the aforementioned footpaths. These meandering trails tended to be spectacularly beautiful, bursting with a vernal lushness that was nearly pornographic. House-high frozen fountains of eensy white hawthorn blossoms shaded dusty walkways. Wild roses as pink as Country Time lemonade exploded from leafy hedges. Fragile sapphire speedwells, fat purple clover tops and buttercups strewn like gold confetti — these were merely the things it was impossible not to step on. The fluorescent green of the meadows recalled the grasses of another royal province — Super Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. Poppies and toadflax sprang out obscenely from stone walls. Tom Cruise would be crazy not to live here , I thought as I stroked the soft, sun-warmed mane of a little white donkey. Let’s all live here .

Except, upon my arrival at the end of an idyllic woodland stroll, I discovered that Cruise did not live there either. There was, in the front yard of this residence, a garden gnome lugging buckets on a yoke, which didn’t seem like Cruise’s style, and the gnome was overturned, lying on its side — definitely not his style. I righted the gnome and ambled on, in search of another public footpath that would, I hoped, lead me to where Cruise actually lived. Instead, I accidentally wandered into what (I learned through being yelled this information) was not a public right of way but a field privately owned by a woman who berated me until I ran into traffic on a nearby road.

That night, with half my allotted exploratory mission time used up, I lay awake in the hotel built for the flight attendants of billionaires’ jets, miserable and panicked at my failure to do anything but incur thousands of dollars in expenses for airfare and one Shirley Temple. Surely this wasn’t all for naught; surely some meaning could possibly be derived from an interaction between a movie star and a magazine journalist — even a brief one, even one in which the movie star had already said (through his publicist) he did not wish to participate, even one in which the star was not present, since some understanding of some dimension of his life could doubtless be gleaned through a study of his surroundings. But what if Cruise has been so successful in removing himself from our world that I would never find any trace of him? What if Cruise had evanesced into a high-octane mist of pure entertainment? Did I have time to just go to every single house in England and check if Cruise was home? How big was this nation? Why was the sun rising now, in the middle of the night? What time was it?! Had I accidentally not gone to sleep all night?

I had one more idea.

On my first day in town, I had stopped at a pub for lunch. I was told that there was a funeral going on and that there was an hour wait for food, but that if I ordered something simple like a sandwich, the wait would be less, so I ordered a sandwich, which actually took 90 minutes to arrive and was so, no offense, disgusting-tasting that I turned around and asked a middle-aged man sitting at the picnic table behind mine if he would like half a sandwich (no) and if it always took so long to receive a sandwich at this pub (unclear) and if it was true that Tom Cruise really lived nearby. “He’s here,” the man said to me.

“Do you know?” I asked. “Or are you guessing?”

“He’s definitely around here, that’s for sure,” he said. “I know where he is.”

At first, with the cagey pride of one who knows the favored hovering spot of an actual ghost, who acts as self-appointed doorman of the thin place between worlds, the man made a show of not telling me where. But then, on his way out, he materialized at my elbow and proffered three “clues” (his word).

“It’s within two miles of the airport,” he said. “Look for the biggest house. And I mean — ” his voice dropped to a whisper, “ — the biggest .”

“It’s a very famous house,” he said. “The anti-establishment of slavery started there.”

I was aware of this property from my earlier research. It was a colossal butter-colored manor once owned by a prime minister, William Pitt the Younger. I had eliminated it from contention as a possible Cruise residence because it was sold in 2018 (£8.5 million) to a used-car magnate who, at least judging by an article from 2020 that I read in Car Dealer magazine, appeared to be quite comfortably ensconced in it. But it was only a few miles away. On foot, the journey could be completed in just over an hour.

How, exactly, I ended up on the edge of that woman’s privately owned field again, I have no idea. The expedition to that point had seemed to take me through brand-new areas. All of a sudden, I noticed that the path had dissipated into dense forest. This is just like what happened yesterday, when I trespassed in that woman’s field, I thought, then looked up and spotted her house in the distance.

I panicked. I frightened a badger — likewise, babe! — and bolted through the forest as quickly as I could in a new, randomly chosen direction. This deposited me into a vast, previously unencountered field. On all previous paths, vigorously growing cow parsley had stood on slender stems, about shin high. Here, upright hordes of it grazed my shoulders, while fallen comrades entangled my ankles. Needles of true panic pricked my nape under sweaty hair. Statistically speaking, I assured myself, it was unlikely I would be trapped in this field so long that I would die there.

Although — wouldn’t it serve that woman right if I did die in this field, so close to her own, where I was not allowed? “That would teach her a lesson,” I said into the audio recorder I had brought in case I encountered Tom Cruise. Have to “find some way to notify her,” I explained. (Of my death.) Hopefully she would see my picture in a — newspaper! That would be another good thing about dying out here, I told the recorder. It would “serve” the editor who recklessly assigned me this article — who had irresponsibly approved my travel budget — “right.” It would probably ruin his life, or at least his work life. God, would he be fired? Certainly, at the very least, he would get in trouble. You should never have sent her to a small English town . Would our boss tell him not to blame himself? Hopefully not — I am dead because of him! I didn’t want to die, of course — but if it did happen, at least I would die doing what I loved: making people feel bad and be in trouble deservedly. I had yet to clearly develop a mental image of my widowed husband’s second wife when I realized that I had stumbled, midfield, upon a dirt path leading into a neighborhood. I ran down it — in, I was shocked to discover, the exact direction of the used-car dealer’s palatial estate.

The public footpath alongside the property — which, if a man drinking outside a pub at 2 p.m. is to be believed, is inhabited by Tom Cruise — looked like the aisle down which a fairy princess would glide at her wedding. Actually, no, even nicer: It was like the flower-strewn tunnel of light she would pass through following her death (from being viciously yelled at for walking in a private field BY ACCIDENT) on her journey to eternity. It wound beneath protective arches of graceful branches trailing heaps of white and pink blossoms. A gentle, constant wind rippled the flowers just enough to allow dappled sunlight to illuminate a trail through their lovely shade. So vast were the grounds, so lush the foliage, that the home itself was not visible from any vantage point. I listened for the distant throaty cry of a blue Ferrari, but heard only bird song.

The recorded owner of the estate made no response to my later attempts to contact him, to ask if, perchance, Tom Cruise (possibly in elaborate disguise) could be living in his house. Even if Cruise has no connection to the residence, this absolute lack of response serves to further obscure his existence. Not only is it impossible to determine where he lives — it isn’t even possible to determine where he does not live. The distance between Cruise and the average human remains unshrinkable. At a time when social media renders movie stars ever-present in the public field of vision — accessible to some extent through whatever scrupulously vetted personal information they share, but also broadly trackable via webs of celebrity-watching accounts that widely disseminate photos and rumors — Cruise has distinguished himself by becoming a comet. When, between protracted absences, his inscrutable orbit brings him back into Earth’s visible realm, he briefly commands the simultaneous attention of all its peoples: “Thank you to the people of Abu Dhabi,” read a June post on his Instagram account, alongside a photo of him greeting a crowd at a “Dead Reckoning Part One” premiere. (Also appreciated and acknowledged by their servant-sovereign for their attendance at other “Dead Reckoning Part One” premieres: “the people” of Rome; “everyone” in Seoul.)

At the conclusion of this promotional cycle, after Cruise has thanked everyone for allowing him to create world-class summer cinema, he will almost certainly disappear, not to be heard from again until next year, at which point his re-emergence will proclaim the arrival of “Dead Reckoning Part Two.” This vanishing, while perhaps rooted in avoidance of a press corps that asks questions he doesn’t want to answer, is massaged into something like a sacrificial duty to audiences. In disappearing the moment his work is through — always, like Santa Claus, with the promise of return — Cruise retains the mystique that so many Hollywood stars have lost this century. He goes away so that audiences may experience the thrill of his reappearance, and delight in the promise of movie magic he heralds.

Of course, it is possible that Tom Cruise does not even know that the gargantuan house in the quiet English village exists. But if we assume, perhaps foolishly, that he does live there, I did ascertain one new detail about his reality: He was in the process of having the long private driveway that weaves through the woods and stretches to the unseen manor beyond redone. It looks awesome.

Caity Weaver is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about going on a package trip for youngish people.

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the plane from which Tom Cruise accepted an MTV Movie & TV Award. It was a fighter aircraft, not a fighter jet.

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Kirsten Dunst Still Gets the Famous Tom Cruise Cake 30 Years After 'Interview With the Vampire' (Exclusive)

Tom cruise still gifts kirsten dunst famous cake, 30 years after ‘interview with the vampire’, jojo siwa dropped $50k on new teeth, 'y&r's eric braeden giving health update after cancer treatment (exclusive), missy elliott and ciara react to ‘1, 2 step’ turning 20 ahead of new tour (exclusive), carnie wilson opens up about weight-loss journey and new cooking show (exclusive), morgan wallen appears calm while handcuffed for rooftop incident, alec baldwin accused of being ‘inattentive’ during firearms training prior to ‘rust’ set shooting, sylvester stallone accused of verbal harassment on ‘tulsa king’ set, beyoncé's daughter rumi breaks big sis blue ivy's record with new music milestone, zendaya opens up about having kids and how tom holland handles fame, ‘90 day fiancé’: jamal and luisa reveal they hooked up a ‘couple times’, jonathan scott asks james corden to officiate his wedding to zooey deschanel (exclusive), rihanna on motherhood: son's first word and how many kids she wants to have, drew scott explains why he's keeping baby no. 2’s sex a surprise (exclusive), 'the beach boys' documentary trailer no. 1, inside jessica simpson's family vacation to mexico for spring break, 'american idol' winner chayce beckham reacts to katy perry leaving show (exclusive), brittney spencer calls keeping 'cowboy carter' secret 'overstimulating' (exclusive), 'the voice': reba mcentire fights back tears over toni braxton cover in first knockouts round, former 'bachelorette' charity lawson reveals she underwent breast enhancement surgery, dunst co-starred alongside cruise in 1994's 'interview with the vampire.'.

Just like a vampire's lifespan, Tom Cruise 's famous holiday coconut cake is eternal! Kirsten Dunst sat down with ET's Kevin Frazier to reflect on the 30th anniversary of her hit film,  Interview With a Vampire , where the subject of her co-star, Cruise, came up. 

"Still getting that cake," Dunst, 41, revealed to ET. 

She added of her husband and frequent co-star  Jesse Plemons , "Jesse gets the cakes so we double up on our cakes."

Plemons and Cruise co-starred in 2017's American Made . 

Cruise's holiday cake gift is the dessert of legends with the A-lister reportedly sending the cake to a long list of fellow celebrities each year. 

As for Dunst's thoughts on the classic 1994 vampire film, which also co-starred Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas , she has nothing but positive associations with the film. 

"When I think back I have fond memories. It was a production like nothing I have experienced to this day. The costumes and the sets. It changed the course of my life," she shared. 

These days, Dunst is tackling another kind of horror film with her dystopian flick, Civil War . In the movie, Dunst plays Lee, a photojournalist documenting a civil war happening within modern-day America. Plemons appears opposite his wife and the mother of his two children, playing an extremist militia member. 

"He wouldn't have played a part like this if I wasn't in the film," Dunst shared. "He did a favor for us because that is a really disturbing role to play."

The couple has teamed up on several projects together, including their turn on Fargo , the show where they met.  

Civil War  is in theaters April 12. 

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Kirsten Dunst says she STILL gets a Christmas cake from Interview With The Vampire co-star Tom Cruise - 30 years after appearing together in the film

By Carly Johnson For Dailymail.com and Jason Chester for MailOnline

Published: 19:21 EDT, 11 April 2024 | Updated: 19:34 EDT, 11 April 2024

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Kirsten Dunst says that she still gets a Christmas cake every year from Interview With The Vampire co-star Tom Cruise — 30 years after starring together in the gothic horror film.

Cruise, 61, is famous for sending a delicious white chocolate coconut bundt cake to his A-list pals during the holiday season.

'Still getting that cake,' Dunst, 41, told Entertainment Tonight on Thursday while promoting her new film Civil War.

She also revealed that her husband  Jesse Plemons , who starred alongside Cruise in 2017's American Made, also receives a cake.

'Jesse gets the cakes so we double up on our cakes.'

Kirsten Dunst says that she still gets a Christmas cake every year from Interview With The Vampire co-star Tom Cruise — 30 years after starring together in the gothic horror film; seen in March 

The duo appeared in the gothic horror film 30 years ago

Cruise has the Christmas cakes made and delivered by Doan's Bakery, a family-owned bakery in Woodland Hills, California . 

He reportedly sends the holiday confections to a long list of celebrity friends, including former co-stars like Top Gun: Maverick's Glen Powell and War Of The Worlds' Dakota Fanning.

Jon Hamm, Graham Norton, Rosie O'Donnell and Angela Bassett have also made it onto Cruise's coveted 'cake list.'

Dunst was 11-years-old when she starred as Claudia, a young vampire who is forced to grow in a child's body, alongside Cruise, Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas and Thandiwe Newton in 1994's Interview With The Vampire. It was her breakout role.

Adapted from the 1976 novel by author Anne Rice, Interview With The Vampire was a box office hit following its release on Veteran's Day in November 1994.

The film, directed by Neil Jordan, raked in a worldwide gross of $224million, from an estimated budget of $60million.

During Thursday's sit-down with ET, Dunst said she looks back on that film shoot fondly. 

'When I think back I have fond memories. It was a production like nothing I have experienced to this day. The costumes and the sets. It changed the course of my life,' Dunst explained.

Cruise, 61, is famous for sending a delicious white chocolate coconut bundt cake to his A-list pals every holiday season; seen in 2023

She also revealed that her husband Jesse Plemons , who starred alongside Cruise in 2017's American Made, also receives a cake; the couple seen April 2

She's made several references to her time filming Interview With The Vampire as well as her working relationships with Cruise and Pitt.

Last week on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the Marie Antoinette star revealed that Cruise looked out for her as a child actress and how he 'put a Christmas tree in my dressing room.'

Cruise, who played immortal vampire Lestat de Lioncourt in the film, surprised Kirsten with the thoughtful holiday gift as they filmed on location at Buckinghamshire's Pinewood Studios. 

Dunst gushed about Pitt in a recent interview with  The Telegraph .

She told the outlet that the Oscar-winner 'was like an older brother' while filming - despite her previous criticism of a 'gross' scene in which the significantly older star, who was 30-years-old when he accepted the lead as enigmatic vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, kisses a then-11-year-old Dunst.

Dunst recalled being 'treated like a princess' by her male co-stars - most notably Pitt.  

'Yes, it was a virtually all-male set, but everyone was very gentle and kind, and nothing ever felt weird. Brad was like an older brother to me.'

Speaking to ET shortly after the film's 1994 release, Dunst admitted that she 'hated [the Pitt kiss] so much' because it was 'kind of like kissing your brother.'

Dunst, who was 12 at the time, acknowledged that it was 'weird' for her to be kissing 'an older guy' on the lips.

That same year she touched on the controversial scene again while promoting Little Women with co-star Samantha Mathis, telling interviewers: 'I love Brad, he's so nice … it was just, like, it feels awkward.

Dunst was 11-years-old when she starred as 'Claudia' alongside Cruise, Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas and Thandiwe Newton in 1994's Interview With The Vampire. It was her breakout role

During her sit-down with ET, the mother-of-two said she looks back on that film shoot fondly

'I mean, I'm 12. And he's, like, 31, and it's like, he's a man. So why would I enjoy kissing him?'

Mathis, who was 24 at the time, cut in to admit she wouldn't turn down a kiss with the heartthrob, adding: 'Maybe you're not into kissing boys yet, so I can relate.'

Replying to the quip, an unimpressed Dunst shot back: 'Well, especially because Brad is 31. I mean, he's not exactly a boy.'

During a later appearance on Conan in 2014, she added: 'I thought it was disgusting. I was 11, it would've been weird if I was like 'this is amazing.''

In 2021 she told Vanity Fair that kissing Pitt and biting the neck of a co-star who was apparently sweating profusely at the time were her least favourite memories of the shoot.

'That was the worst thing I did and also having obviously to kiss Brad Pitt at that point,' she said.

'I was a little girl and he was like a brother to me and it was very weird even though it was a peck. I was very not into it.'

• Kirsten Dunst Still Gets the Famous Tom Cruise Cake 30 Years After 'Interview With the Vampire' (Exclusive) | Entertainment Tonight
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When Kirsten Dunst revealed the special gift Interview With a Vampire co-star Tom Cruise sends her every year

Kirsten dunst and tom cruise share a love for coconut cakes and he sends one to her every christmas.

Actor Kirsten Dunst is back on the big screen with her latest release Civil War. Over the years she has starred in a bunch of popular movies such as the Spider-Man series, Marie Antoinette and other but she began her acting career very young. One of the earliest movies she starred in was Interview with a Vampire (1994). She starred with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the movie and once revealed how the former still stays in touch. (Also read: Kirsten Dunst reveals that her son ‘does not care’ about Spider-Man )

'Cruise Cakes'

During her appearance on The Graham Norton Show in 2016, host Graham Norton asked Kirsten if 'Tom Cruise kept in touch since then.'

View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Graham Norton Show (@thegrahamnortonshowofficial)

She replied, “Yeah, he gives me a cake every Christmas. We call it the Cruise cake at my house. It's just as coconut cake. It's the best coconut cake I've ever had in my life from Doan's bakery in the valley so sorry everybody, in England you can't have it unless you go to California. It's really good. And yeah, we get it every Christmas. Like all our family's like Cruise cake is here, it's like a major thing. That night we're like oh, thank you Tom. Yum love it.”

Kirsten and Tom's sweet beginnings

In 2021, Kirsten spoke to The Cut about how he was brought onboard the film with Tom's help. "Well, we're both from New Jersey. And we had this screen test where he had to pick up each little girl."

"I was the tallest one, and he was like, 'Tuck in your legs,' so that I looked really tiny in his arms," she explained to The Cut. "He was trying to help me out since Neil Jordan, the director, wanted to see how each girl looked when Tom picked us up because they wanted the character to look like a bit like a doll, a little girl."

Interview with the Vampire follows Louis, a 200-year-old vampire recounting his life story to a reporter. Turned into a vampire by Lestat, Louis struggles with his humanity, thirst for blood, and immortality. Their journey is complicated by Claudia, a child vampire with a mature mind, leading to conflicts and tragedies. The narrative explores themes of loneliness, morality, and the essence of human nature, set against a backdrop of different eras and locations.

About Civil War

Civil War, directed by Alex Garland of Ex Machina and Annihilation fame, revolves around a team of military-embedded journalists who embark on a risky journey across a dystopian future US to reach Washington DC before rebel factions attack the White House.

Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Nick Offerman, the film will hit Indian screens on April 19.

Dedicated professionals who write about cinema and television in all their vibrancy. Expect views, reviews and news. ...view detail

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Kirsten Dunst Says Brad Pitt 'Was Like an Older Brother to Me' on Interview with the Vampire Set

"Yes, it was a virtually all-male set, but everyone was very gentle and kind, and nothing ever felt weird," Dunst told 'The Telegraph'

Gilbert Flores/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty; Rebecca Sapp/Getty

Kirsten Dunst had some major support early in her career.

Speaking with U.K. outlet The Telegraph amid the upcoming release of her new movie Civil War , the actress recalled her Interview with the Vampire costar Brad Pitt being "like an older brother to me" on the set of the 1994 gothic horror film.

"[I was] treated like a princess," said Dunst, 41. "Yes, it was a virtually all-male set, but everyone was very gentle and kind, and nothing ever felt weird."

As for their costar Tom Cruise , Dunst had similar praise for his treatment of the then-child actress, who later earned rave reviews for her breakout role in the film.

"One morning, around Christmas , I remember going into my dressing room at Pinewood and he’d set up a beautiful tree in there for me, covered in ornaments," she shared.

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Francois Duhamel/Sygma via Getty

Based on Anne Rice 's book of the same name from a screenplay by the late author, Interview with the Vampire starred Christian Slater as a young journalist named Daniel interviewing Pitt's character Louis de Pointe du Lac, decades after the start of the movie.

It also featured Cruise, now 61, as Lestat, and Antonio Banderas as another vampire, Armand. Dunst earned a Golden Globe nod for best supporting actress in a drama, for her performance as newly turned child vampire Claudia.

During a 2019 appearance on the  Late Show with Stephen Colbert , the host asked if she remembered feeling how big of a deal it was to act opposite Cruise and Pitt, now 60.

“I did, but I was also very innocent,” Dunst said of starring with the heartthrobs as a preteen. “I feel like I watched Brad in  A River Runs Through  and Tom was in  Far and Away , which I loved."

She continued, "They treated me like a little sister . It was very sweet, I was a very innocent 12-year-old. I was just doing my job, and they were very sweet to me.”

Francois Duhamel/Sygma/Sygma via Getty

Dunst had to kiss Pitt in the film, and she was asked about it while she was promoting the movie back in 1994. More recently, the actress was shown a clip of her reacting to the kiss by  Entertainment Tonight   — and she stood by her initial reaction.

“Yeah, it was gross! I stand by that. It would have been so much creepier if an 11-year-old was like, ‘It was great.’ You’d be like, ‘There’s something wrong with this child,' ” she told the outlet in August 2019, after watching the video of her younger self saying the kiss was “gross.”

“They were so sweet to me,” she added of Pitt and Cruise. “I mean, listen, that production, that film, was like nothing else I’ve ever experienced — maybe   Marie Antoinette ,  because of where we shot. Other than that, they just don’t make movies like that anymore.”

In a more recent interview with Variety , published Wednesday, the Oscar nominee was asked about getting to kiss Pitt for Interview with the Vampire — to which she quipped in response, laughing, "How about Brad Pitt got to kiss me?"

Civil War is in theaters April 12.

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Lewis Hamilton is producing a Formula 1 movie with Joseph Kosinski starring Brad Pitt.

The British racing star could have worked with the filmmaker on Top Gun: Maverick had it not been for his conflicting work schedule.

In a new interview, Hamilton revealed he lobbied Tom Cruise to star in a possible Top Gun sequel before the 2022 film was made.

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“Firstly, I hadn’t even had, like, an acting lesson,” he said. “And I don’t want to be the one that lets this movie down. And then secondly, I just really didn’t have the time to dedicate to it. I remember having to tell Joe and Tom — and it broke my heart. And then I regretted it, naturally, when they show me the movie and it’s: It could’ve been me!”

Although he didn’t have the opportunity to work with Kosinski in Top Gun: Maverick , he will now work with him in the Formula 1 film.

“My point was: Guys, this movie needs to be so authentic,” Hamilton said. “There’s two different fan groups that we have — like, the old originals, who from the day they’re born hearing the Grand Prix music every weekend and watching with their families, to the new generation that just learned about it today through Netflix.”

He continued, “I felt my job really has been to try to call BS. ‘This would never happen.’ ‘This is how it would be.’ ‘This is how it could happen.’ Just giving them advice about what racing is really about and what, as a racing fan, would appeal and what would not.”

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Kirsten Dunst Still Gets Tom Cruise's Famous Christmas Cake 30 Years After 'Interview with the Vampire'

Kirsten Dunst is one of the lucky celebs to get Tom Cruie ‘s famous Christmas cake!

If you didn’t know, the 61-year-old Top Gun actor sends his famous friends a white chocolate coconut bundt cake made by Doan’s Bakery every Christmas season.

In a new interview, Kirsten , 41, reveled that she still gets the “Tom Cruise cake” 30 years after they shared the screen in 1994′s Interview with the Vampire .

Keep reading to find out more… “Still getting that cake,” Kirsten shared with Entertainment Tonight .

Kirsten also revealed that her house gets two cakes from Tom every year because he also send a cake to her husband Jesse Plemons , who co-starred with Tom in 2017′s American Made .

“Jesse gets the cakes so we double up on our cakes,” Kirsten added.

While Tom sends his famous friends the cake every year, we learned that one celeb has been removed from the list and no longer gets the cake .

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Tom Cruise Still Sends Kirsten Dunst Famous Cake, 30 Years After Interview With the Vampire

Posted: April 9, 2024 | Last updated: April 9, 2024

Kirsten Dunst revealed to ET that her former ‘Interview with the Vampire’ co-star, Tom Cruise, still gifts her his famous cakes. ‘Civil War’ hits theaters April 12.

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