Tom Cruise would like to win an Oscar.
It may be a surprise to you, but Cruise has never won one before. It feels like he should have, right? Cruise has been a part of American life — sometimes even a running, grinning avatar for American life — for nearly 45 years since his first big role on our screens as a maniacal, cackling, already terrifyingly intense military cadet in “Taps” in 1981. Pretty much ever since, he has been one of the biggest movie stars on earth. He broke through with “Risky Business” and “All the Right Moves” in 1983, exploded with “Top Gun” in 1986 and worked with Martin Scorsese (alongside Paul Newman!) and Francis Ford Coppola before he was 30. In the past 20 years, he has become the biggest action star in the world. It feels like there was never a time before him.
But he has never won an Academy Award. He was nominated three times for acting: twice for best actor, for “Born on the Fourth of July” (1990) and “Jerry Maguire” (1997), and once for best supporting actor, for “Magnolia” (2000). Billie Eilish was born, grew up and won two Oscars since Cruise was last nominated for acting.
Cruise is clearly trying to change that this year. His new film, “Digger,” directed by five-time Academy Award winner Alejandro González Iñárritu (Leonardo DiCaprio got his Oscar in Iñárritu’s “The Revenant”), is his most ambitious in a long time. The film is a satire about an elderly billionaire oilman (Cruise in heavy makeup) who attempts to save the world after an environmental disaster he caused. The film has not been screened for critics yet — early word from the European premiere this week was mixed — but the choice of such an acclaimed director and unusual role after two decades of running through explosions speaks to Cruise deciding the time is right for him to earn his long-awaited accolades.
His timing makes sense. Cruise is approaching his 65th birthday, and he’s had a good decade. His “Mission: Impossible” movies have been consistent, well-reviewed hits, and in many ways stand as his most lasting artistic statement. 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick” ended up being the biggest hit of his career and was nominated for best picture. At the World Cup final this year, he essentially served as America’s ambassador to the world during a time in which the country is otherwise, uh, not particularly popular. And in a time of stress and waning influence for the film industry, Cruise has become a mascot for the art form itself — sort of a Mr. Movie, the guy showing up to see movies during the covid-19 pandemic, caring about film ratios and motion smoothing and generally being so passionate about cinema that he’ll jump out of a helicopter for it. The public feels warmer toward Cruise than it has in decades.
But part of winning an Oscar is campaigning for it, and part of campaigning for it is talking to the press. And that’s where Cruise has run into problems. Again.
Cruise has become famous for not talking to the press, and there’s a good reason for that. His career was nearly derailed 20 years ago during the press tour for Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds.” You may remember Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey’s couch, berating Matt Lauer over antidepressants, talking incredibly strangely about his connection to Scientology and generally acting like a bit of a lunatic — and not in his fun, jumping-off-buildings lunatic way. It was a disaster for his public persona. But most of us moved on because, hey, he’s a great movie star: We want to like Tom Cruise.
But as Cruise has reentered the public fray, giving his first real (if still carefully curated) interviews in two decades, we have started to see flickers of that scary side of him pop back up. A GQ cover shoot and interview was so obviously structured to avoid asking Cruise anything even slightly interesting that it ended up making Cruise look like a malfunctioning automaton. A podcast appearance with the Kelce brothers featured an anecdote about Cruise using a stopwatch to force his makeup artists to work faster. In Cruise’s brain, that was probably meant to make him look charming, but really it just made you wonder how those makeup artists feel about him. A “Tonight Show” appearance dissolved into Cruise handing out popcorn. He is acting, well, weird again.
And that ought to be understandable. It is difficult to wrap one’s head around how odd it must be to have lived in the public eye for 45 years, to be one of the few humans who everyone on the planet knows, to be Tom Cruise. He has spent the past 20 years hiding in plain sight. But to have a chance at an Oscar, he has to do press — to give us a sense of who he is, to tell us a story of his journey. This is how it works now, even more so than how it worked when Cruise last tried this.
It’s a shame this is the case; ideally, Cruise could just appear in the movie, be great and be honored for it. But that’s not how Oscar campaigns work. So Cruise has to give us a peek behind the curtain. And so far? It hasn’t quite been couch jumping. But we’ve got months’ worth of Oscar campaigning to go. If wanting that Oscar is what made Tom Cruise come out of hiding, I wonder if he’ll end up regretting it.
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