Tom Cruise Is a Machine
Does the movie star want to defeat A.I., or does he envy it?
Last month, Tom Cruise gave a long interview to GQ. The headline was “Hollywood’s Most Elusive Star Speaks,” and in the sense that words came out of his mouth, yes, he did speak. But Zach Baron’s interview was more illuminating for how Cruise dodged even the simplest of questions. While there was likely a list of preconditions from his team on topics, Baron told Matt Belloni of The Ringer that he opted not to get into Scientology or Cruise’s estranged daughter Suri because those were well-worn topics. While I don’t think any actor owes us details of their personal life, Cruise is so guarded that even basic questions like, “What are you doing on a random Tuesday when you’re not on a movie set” received the answer, “You know what? I’m preparing for the next.” Tom Cruise is Movies Only, although you’d be hard-pressed to get him to tell you a favorite.
I can’t stop thinking about this interview because, on the one hand, as Mike Ryan points out in his review of Digger, most of Cruise’s output for the past twenty years or so is what it’s like to be Tom Cruise. And yet, I also thought about his last two Mission: Impossible movies, Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning (a reckoning that likely won’t be so final if the box office tracking for Digger is correct), where the villain is “The Entity,” a rogue A.I. that seeks to blow up the world. At the time, it felt like Cruise was campaigning against A.I. in movies and the rise of streaming, and championing human labor like hanging off a plane rather than outsourcing it to a CGI stuntman. Now, I’m not so sure.
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