Nice Tom Cruise Stories
This post originally ran after the release of The Mummy. Because Tom Cruise has continued to be a nice guy (unless COVID-19 protocols are being broken), we have continued to update this post to include more unsettlingly nice stories.
First things first: We get it. There’s an awful lot of unsettling Scientology stuff (a whole lot of stuff ) around Tom Cruise. But pay no attention to that: Cruise has a new movie out, which means it’s time for the latest round of absolutely gushing stories about Tom Cruise. They’re kind of like Prince stories — always unique and surprising, often exceedingly delightful, if you can ignore the odd feeling in the back of your spine. On a Hollywood press tour, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that Tom Cruise is a super-nice dude.
He taught Zac Efron how to ride a motorcycle.
In 2010, a young Zac Efron sat down with the now-defunct Details magazine for a cover shoot. He was in his post–High School Musical phase, trying to break out of the teen-star shell. Somewhere along the line, Tom Cruise asked him if he knew how to ride a motorcycle. “You wanna learn how?” Cruise asked, inviting young Efron to his house. According to Details, Cruise “taught him how a motorcycle engine works, showed him the hangar with his dozens of pristine bikes — including the Triumphs he rode in the Mission: Impossible movies.” When Details asked him why he thought Tom Cruise would do such a nice thing, he had no idea. “I don’t know. I don’t even want to know,” he said. “It’s just so cool that he gave a shit, the fact that he cared at all. No one else did that.”
He helped Mummy co-star Jake Johnson get in shape.
“Here’s a story that is very anti-Hollywood, but very Tom,” Johnson told Thrillist recently. “He wanted me to work out with him and get in shape for the movie. People have told me in the past, including New Girl, that I need to lose weight and stay in shape. But they don’t tell me how. It’s like, ‘Hey tubbo, fit into these slacks!’” Instead Tom Cruise invited Johnson to his gym (the “Pain Cave”). “He said, ‘You’ll be training with me and my trainers. If you want I’ll put you on a food plan with my chef. The food is great,’” Johnson recalled. When someone on Mummy set insisted that Johnson wait until after Cruise was done working out so the star could have the gym alone, Cruise was furious. “Let me make something crystal clear: I don’t care what anybody on the crew says to you, they don’t know what I’m saying to you,” Johnson remembered him saying. “And I’m saying to you that you are always welcome. I don’t care what I’m doing in there. You’re not other. You’re my castmate. Come in.”
He stayed in touch with the kid who dropped out of Jerry Maguire.
Before Jonathan Lipnicki, there was another kid set to steal the show on the Jerry Maguire set. He spent a few weeks filming, but after a certain point, he “ran out of gas,” Cameron Crowe told Deadline, and wanted to leave the production. The role was recast — Lipnicki stepped in — but Crowe got a call from the mother of the boy who almost took the role. “Weeks later, the mother of the first kid calls the office. I got on the phone and she says, ‘Will you please tell Tom Cruise thank you for the way he has kept in touch with my son, sent him letters and gifts, and just let him know all is well?’ I thought, wow, I had no idea Tom Cruise was doing that,” he said. Crowe continued:
“She said, ‘It really helped my son. He’s over it now, he’s fine, and Tom did a beautiful job helping him transition back to his life.’ I went to Tom, later, and said, you quietly helped this kid through what could have been a terrible transition. Thank you, but why did you never tell any of us? Tom said, ‘I just didn’t want that first actor to go to the movies, look at the screen and think he’d failed. I wanted him to love movies, his entire life.’ That is the quiet way Tom Cruise conducts his professional life.”
He gave Kanye West advice on his fledgling comedy career, but declined a role in Kanye’s HBO pilot.
Once upon a time, Kanye made a comedy pilot for HBO. When Vulture saw the pilot, Wyatt Cenac revealed overhearing a conversation between Kanye and Cruise: “Kanye had been trying to get Tom Cruise to be in the pilot. And he had asked him because they were friendly. And we’re shooting a scene [in the Escalade] and at one point Kanye’s like, ‘Shut the fuck up, it’s Tom Cruise,’ and because he couldn’t get out of the car, he had to take the phone call smashed between people,” Cenac said. “You can hear Tom Cruise laughing [does a Tom Cruise laugh] as Kanye goes, ‘Yeah, man, I’ve been working on the improv stuff, you know, all your suggestions were great.’ [Does another Tom Cruise laugh.] That went on for like 15 minutes. Tom Cruise never did the show and we had to hire a Tom Cruise look-alike that was like five-feet taller than Cruise.”
He’s a good sport on set.
“I think there’s something very right with him in that he cares so much about the audience experience,” his Mission: Impossible co-star Simon Pegg told Jimmy Fallon. “It’s like he’s obsessive with giving people an authentic experience.” Actor-director Todd Field, who acted with Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, said something similar of working with Cruise and Stanley Kubrick: “You’ve never seen [an actor] more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.”
He convinced the Black Eyed Peas to do a song for Knight and Day.
Tom Cruise, a self-described “big fan of the Peas,” was almost done with filming Knight and Day when he, co-star Cameron Diaz, and ex-wife Katie Holmes saw them play over Super Bowl weekend. He was struck with a brilliant idea: “As we were watching, it occurred to me that this is the perfect time, so I called up Will [i.am], and he doesn’t have any time, but I asked, ‘Are you interested [in doing a song for the film]?’” They were, so they did.
He totally did not get mad at Cuba Gooding Jr.’s dad when he asked about his sexuality.
During the filming of Jerry Maguire, Cuba Gooding Sr. impolitely inquired about Tom Cruise’s sexuality. “He gave Tom Cruise a hug and said, ‘I love you, man. Now seriously, are you gay or not?’” Gooding Jr. recalled, years later. “I almost fainted. And thought, Please, lord, let me disappear.” Cruise was so chill dealing with the prying parent: “Tom just laughed and said ‘No,’” his co-star reported.
He gave Kevin Pollock a $500 pen (and then a second pen).
During rehearsals for A Few Good Men, Kevin Pollock noticed Tom Cruise making notes in his script with a ridiculously huge pen. At first, they joked about it. Then, Cruise convinced Pollock to try writing with it. “It’s like an angel wing floating on a cloud. It was a magical pen,” Pollock recalled to the Chive. Even Demi Moore agreed the pen was a total joy to use. When Pollock learned the pen cost $500, he was crestfallen. Later, Cruise’s assistant showed up with a gift: the luxury writing utensil itself. When Pollock admitted to his co-star that he hadn’t used the pen because he felt it deserved a special spot on his mantle, Cruise bought him a second $500 pen — one for the mantle, and one for Pollock’s pocket.
