Inside Film

Action replay: Why Tom Cruise is contemporary cinema’s Peter Pan

With the 20th anniversary re-release of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ this month and the new Top Gun movie next year, Geoffrey Macnab looks back on the career of Cruise, who at the age of 57 continues to play the same action roles as he did more than 30 years ago

Thursday 31 October 2019 16:18 GMT
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Cruise was cast against type as a neurotic husband in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ but he returned to action films as if he had never been away
Cruise was cast against type as a neurotic husband in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ but he returned to action films as if he had never been away

According to Box Office Mojo, Tom Cruise’s films as an actor have grossed an astonishing $4,446,011,914 in the US and Canada alone. That figure doesn’t take into consideration the many hundreds of millions of dollars these films have earned elsewhere, or the films he produced but didn’t appear in. The tally is bound to continue rising. The one-man cash register will be back on our screens in Top Gun: Maverick next year and has two more Mission Impossible movies in the pipeline.

What is most startling about Cruise isn’t just his longevity in a business that generally favours youth. It’s the fact that, at the age of 57, he continues to play the same action roles as when he was first on screen, more than 30 years ago. His face is a little more lined and he is more thickset than when he made Top Gun in 1986, but the energy, the wraparound smile and the physicality are all undiminished. It’s instructive to compare him with his brat pack co-stars in Francis Ford Coppola’s teen rebel movie, The Outsiders (1983), one of his breakthrough films. At the time, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe were bigger names, but he has outlasted them all. Over four decades, his status has hardly diminished at all. What is less clear, though, is how far he has evolved as an actor.

Cruise isn’t just the biggest star of his era. He is the most elusive and paradoxical. Ever since the start of his career, he has managed to seem both rebellious and conformist, ingratiating and sometimes very creepy. He is the clean-cut, all-American who has given some of his best performances playing delinquents and outsiders. Everyone thinks they know him and yet he gives little away. Like the sports agent he portrayed in Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996), he has the knack of seeming high minded and unscrupulous at the same time. He doesn’t seem to have much versatility as an actor, but he has appeared in a huge variety of movies. He has done teen comedy (Risky Business), gothic romance (Interview with the Vampire), sports films (The Color of Money), hard-boiled crime thrillers (Collateral), sci-fi (The War of the Worlds), character-driven ensemble pieces (Magnolia), and dramas based around autism (Rain Man). He is known as a control freak who takes over the movies he works on, and yet, he has collaborated with many of the most powerful directors in Hollywood (Oliver Stone, Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg among them).

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