Tom Cruise’s very surreal summer has only added to his oddball mystique

Tom Cruise appeared in my fridge last week. There he was, compact and smiling, next to my pesto and cheeses. OK, he wasn’t. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had been. Cruise has spent the summer making cameos where you’d least expect him. He was snapped watching Coldplay at Glastonbury in June. And, a week earlier, at Wembley to watch Taylor Swift. He was spotted boogie-ing at Victoria Beckham’s 50th birthday party in April, and sitting in the Royal Box at Wimbledon in July. At the London premiere of Twisters that same month, he was photographed taking part in an only vaguely eerie movie-star-transference ritual with his heir apparent Glen Powell. Now he’s due to rappel down the Stade de France as part of the closing ceremony at the Paris Olympics. Sounds about right. But why is the world’s most famously unknowable movie star suddenly so keen on leaving the house?

In fact, Cruise does this a lot. He locks himself away for long periods, stewing in his own mystery, then emerges with a grin – the most famous man in the world whom we officially know nothing about. I say “officially”, because we all think “we know” things about Tom Cruise. If anything, we all think we know too much about Tom Cruise. His religion. His family. His sex life. His, well, eccentricities. But I’m not sure we actually do.

Cruise has existed in this strange netherworld between total ambiguity and stratospheric über-fame for more than a decade now, ever since Katie Holmes divorced him and a run of bad press – often related to his outspokenness about Scientology – seemed to convince him to retreat into the shadows. Today, Cruise doesn’t do long-form interviews or speak much at all to the world’s media. Hopes were high that a rare Q&A at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival would shine a light on his life, his dreams or his foibles, but alas. “I feel privileged to do what I do,” he repeatedly stated. He spoke of his love of lighting and camera lenses on film sets. He said he’d looked up the definition of “art” in the dictionary the night before. Writing about it in the aftermath for IndieWire, the film columnist Anne Thompson declared the event a testament to Cruise’s “unflagging ability to reveal nothing”.

That’s sort of what we were used to when it came to his public profile. Cruise would spend his days in parts unknown (maybe Clearwater, Florida, the home of Scientology’s “spiritual headquarters”, but maybe not), then, every once in a while, work on a movie. He’d keep the Mission: Impossible train chugging. Celebrities would talk about how kind he is; how he’d send them coconut cakes in the post. Beautiful women would deny they were dating him, from Hayley Atwell, Olga Kurlyenko and Orange Is the New Black’s Laura Prepon, to Shakira, Lindsay Lohan (!) and, this very week, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter Victoria Canal. The system worked. Cruise as a mystery man. Cruise as a mirage. Cruise as a busy, spiritual, considerate, single-and-on-the-prowl-but-in-a-nice-way movie star.

So why, then, this summer? While Cruise was notably active in the summer of 2022 – appearing at Adele and Rolling Stones gigs and the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, cheering on Lewis Hamilton at the British Grand Prix – he also had Top Gun: Maverick to promote at the time. In lieu of conventional press, it made sense to get his face out there any way he could. This time around, though, Cruise isn’t promoting anything. The next Mission: Impossible isn’t due until May 2025. Rather, this seems to be a press tour for Tom Cruise himself.

His Olympics appearance, for instance, is believed to have come about after he approached the International Olympic Committee personally. It’ll reportedly see him rappelling down the Stade de France in the live closing ceremony broadcast, before cutting to pre-recorded footage that depicts Cruise racing through Paris on a motorbike, hopping on a plane to Los Angeles, jumping off said plane and skydiving in front of the Hollywood sign – an incredibly laborious passing-of-the-literal-torch moment nodding to the next, LA-based games in 2028. The stunt will also serve as a lengthy reminder of Cruise’s unusual mystique and star power. Even when no one’s sure what’s powering it.

Last year, for The New York Times, journalist Caity Weaver attempted to unravel one of the bigger mysteries that surrounds Cruise today, namely where he actually lives. The actor has allegedly called Britain home for years now, with reports claiming he either resides in a six-bedroom penthouse apartment overlooking Hyde Park, a £3m mansion in East Grinstead, or a home in Biggin Hill, Kent. Perhaps all three. Or none at all. Weaver, having flown to Biggin Hill to find Cruise, encountered locals who insisted they’d seen him out and about, and others who had no idea they were potentially living within spitting distance of a superstar. Weaver’s search proved fruitless but revealing in its own way: Cruise embodies a rare kind of post-post-modern fame, where a person can be at the very top of the A-list and talked about with regularity, but also a total void.

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That this is proving to be successful for Cruise is fascinating in itself, particularly when elements of his brand remain so wacky. Cruise’s summer of cameos has coincided with a surge in press coverage of Suri, his once incredibly famous daughter with Holmes. Carted around in front of the world’s photographers as a child, Suri all but vanished in the wake of her parents’ divorce. She has slowly been shuffled back in front of the lens, though, partly because (brace yourselves, olds) she is 18 now and a recent high school graduate, making her instant catnip for paparazzi in New York, her current base with her mother.

Suri and, to a lesser extent, Holmes are persistent reminders of the Cruise of yesteryear – the man who cruelly lambasted the actor Brooke Shields for using antidepressants, who frenziedly leapt on couches on live television, and whose off-screen fame became so elephantine and distracting that his face was deliberately left off the posters for 2005’s War of the Worlds in case it proved a liability. Despite Suri’s return to the headlines, though, Cruise’s modern reputation remains spotless – there seems to be a collective shrug around his dynamic with his youngest daughter, as well as the status of his involvement with Scientology. A handful of tabloid headlines in 2023 alleged that he’d even left the church, but they were never confirmed nor denied and received limited traction at the time. Everything went quiet soon after.

Instead, the focus has strayed to his movie career. A February report in Variety claimed that Cruise wanted “more than action stardom” and had met with Warner Bros to discuss a return to auteur-driven projects – think the films he used to make, such as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. It’s arguable that he hasn’t made a “serious” movie since at least 2008’s Second World War thrillerValkyrie. But he’s lately been linked to films by Quentin Tarantino and Alfonso Cuarón, suggesting some truth to the idea that he’s looking for more than stunts and explosions.

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And he received a surprising mention in another Variety report, published in November, that claimed he had personally stepped in to support his long-time agent Maha Dakhil after she was criticised for referring to Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “genocide”. Dakhil’s comments reportedly sparked internal conflict at her workplace, the Creative Arts Agency (CAA) – one of Hollywood’s leading talent agencies. Variety reported that she was allowed to remain working as an agent, if not co-chief of the agency’s motion pictures department, thanks to Cruise’s backing.

Inevitably, Cruise’s own politics remain a mystery. But it’s all quite compelling, right? This idea of Cruise as a creatively stifled pacifist with thoughts and feelings about Israel and Palestine, who digs Taylor Swift and hangs out at Glastonbury… What a puzzle of a man. It more and more feels like his genius, though. Here’s a movie star who has so skilfully mastered the art of saying absolutely nothing that it makes it impossible for us to say anything about him, either. Scientology? Thanks to the protective shield of people around him, we can’t possibly comment. Suri? Who knows? His slow transformation into a London socialite? Weird, but good for him!

So instead we speculate and wait and watch. For the next surprise appearance. For the next wild stunt. For more of Tom just being Tom.