In a cast that included Tim Hutton, George C. Scott and Sean Penn, Cruise got his ‘who’s that guy?’ moment as a gung-ho military student who goes out in a blaze of gunfire. “When I made Taps, really my first film experience, I remember laying there at night in the hotel room thinking, I love this so much. I wanted it since I was four, and there I was, thinking if I did my best on Taps, maybe I could do this for the rest of my life.” Said Penn about his mate: “Tom was so, what’s the word, sincere a guy, that I overlooked his talent. I will tell you that I loved him and thought he had no chance in this business. Because he was just so nice, and seemingly naive at the time. Of course, he’s become this force as a professional. As good as he was in Taps, I totally underestimated his talent, the things that came later which are really extraordinary, and he’s really a machine.”

Cruise was a supporting player in the Francis Ford Coppola-directed adaptation of the S.E. Hinton novel, but the actor was envied by every member of this killer cast. This was a coterie of young stars in the making — Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Matt Dillon — and Coppola told Deadline that they were being offered roles in ensemble films. But it was Cruise who’d landed a true lead in Risky Business, the role every one of them wanted. Cruise removed a cap from his front tooth to convincingly play a greaser kid from the wrong side of the Tulsa tracks, and he endured “sugar shock” from three days of cake eating for one memorable scene. Cruise said the film taught him comedic timing, which would come in handy.  

Joel Goodsen was Cruise’s ticket to the A list. Approached for “every killer-murderer part” after Taps, Cruise fought hard to convince Paul Brickman he was right for the precocious affluent high schooler with Ivy League dreams. From sinking his father’s Porsche 928 – “Which one of you is the U-boat captain?” said the mechanic who fished out and fixed the car – to making love on a train (Rebecca De Mornay), to the youthful spirit lip-synching of Old Time Rock N’ Roll in his skivvies, to outwitting Guido, the killer pimp and showing entrepreneurial chops as a brothel owner that gets him into Princeton, Risky Business was a tour de force that put Cruise atop the young actor lists.

Cruise tapped his experience as a high school football player for the sports drama about a youth whose hopes for a college scholarship and a trip out of the steel mill is jeopardized by a clash with his head coach. Drawn to the project by Michael Chapman’s work as the cinematographer of Raging Bull, Cruise began a tradition of doing his own stunts and wound up at the hospital with a concussion. He also used his growing clout to appeal to producers on co-star Lea Thompson’s behalf to have nude scenes cut or altered to the point where she’d be comfortable. Just one of the instances in which he would prove himself a natural leader on set.

Top Gun turned Cruise into one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Everything clicked. “Tony Scott was firing on all cylinders. Simpson-Bruckheimer had just produced Beverly Hills Cop,” Cruise remembers. “It was an exciting time.” Cruise helped the film broaden beyond a domestic hit by throwing himself into the overseas marketing. When he grew up, his mom struggled to make ends meet, and Cruise dreamed of visiting the exotic locations he watched in movies. He pressed studios to let him travel to promote films at a time when overseas revenues weren’t deemed that important. It became the playbook for big stars, but Cruise really just wanted to see the world. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer told Deadline that it became impossible to shoot the actors flying in those jets, because they would vomit every time. Only Cruise was able to spit out lines instead of his breakfast. 

Another important step for Cruise, who got to work with two legends, Paul Newman and director Martin Scorsese. He played Vincent Lauria, the cocky young pool hustler mentored by Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) and rekindles something in the pool player role that helped launch Newman’s star in The Hustler. Cruise bonded with Newman over their love of fast cars. “He was a helluve driver,” Cruise once told me. “I remember one day we were out at Willow Springs, and we brought out some stock cars, some big stuff from NASCAR. Every time we were around each other, we’d race cars against eath other…I remember this one day where I was driving well and thinking, finally, I got the old man. I came off this corner, thinking, I’m going to get him at the finish line, and he ripped past me. And as he went past me, he gave me the finger. And I don’t think I ever laughed so hard.” 

Dustin Hoffman won the Oscar playing autistic savant Raymond, and was able to immerse in the affectations and eccentricities of his character. Playing his conniving brother Charlie who kidnaps his sibling to drive to LA to claim an inherence and bonds with his bro on the road trip, Cruise wasn’t nominated. To director Barry Levinson, “Tom had the harder job,” he says. “It was a difficult role because he basically had to drive the movie. Otherwise, Raymond would just be content to sit in a motel. His obligation is to continually drive it and push him, and at the same time not exhaust the audience with a one-beat, ‘C’mon, we’re going.’ It was a very hard role, and he never got the credit he deserved for that film. The two worked really well with each other. I know it sounds like it can’t be true, but it was as good a relationship between the two guys and in terms of what we were trying to accomplish. They were both contributing, and Tom was the one who had to push this movie all the time and I think Dustin would acknowledge that. You keep slowly seeing the changes, as he becomes more emotionally attached to his brother.” Many of the best scenes were ad-libbed, and the Best Picture winner was important in establishing that Cruise had chops to go with starpower. 

Oliver Stone had volunteered to serve in Vietnam, and came back injured and disillusioned, but a filmmaker with a purpose. He found his voice in addressing his war experience in Ron Kovic, the Long Islander who bought into the war, came back paralyzed, went through a fresh hell in a system that neglected wounded vets, and galvanized into an anti-war activist. Stone told me that the film kept falling apart and it crushed him to tell Kovic each time, until Cruise enlisted. “When I met Ron Kovic to write Born on the Fourth of July in ’77, I found somebody … now, I hadn’t done Platoon yet, so I had written Born back in ’77. But when I met him, I said, ‘This guy is more what I think I’m looking for. This is the return home. This is as stark as it can get.’ I went with his return, and that kind of vitiated the need to do my return.” Cruise gave one of his most transformative and emotionally vivid performances, which drew his first Oscar nomination. Cruise would say he was looking for “a real test” to determine if he was truly “any good” as an actor. And he committed to this “defining” moment fully, remaining in his wheelchair as much as possible during post-war scenes and delving deep into the psychology of a hero who felt his country had let him down. “My head was shaved, I’d lost weight, I was exhausted. And I got into that mind-set, and I saw it in Ron’s eyes,” Cruise once said. “You couldn’t fake it. You had to go there. When Ron got angry…he wanted to just explode. And I found it hard to disassociate those moments. It just became the world.”

Cruise didn’t shrink when his JAG lawyer character went head-to-head with Jack Nicholson’s grizzled colonel character in the iconic courtroom scene from this adaptation of Aaron Sorkin’s play directed by Rob Reiner. Said Reiner: “I’d never met a young actor with as much dedication as he had to the process. He worked his ass off in rehearsals. He was not only on time, but early every day, and always had his lines nailed. Never had I seen a young actor with a work ethic like this guy. He may tell you behind the scenes that he was intimidated by Jack, but I never saw it. When Jack came and we had the first reading of the script, he came fully loaded to work, with a performance at the table. In a table read, you’re usually just kind of marking it. And when Jack got into his performance, it just sent a message to every other young actor. Kiefer Sutherland, Tom, Demi [Moore] and Kevin Bacon and Kevin Pollak, everybody involved knew, you better step up here. We’re not messing around. Tom was always right there with it…people don’t realize how great an actor this guy is.”

A huge hit for Cruise, but also intriguing is how his kinship with The Firm director Sydney Pollack was so integral to why Cruise was so gung ho to make Top Gun: Maverick, the film Spielberg said saved the movie business after Covid. “I always wanted to fly and that was one of the reasons I did Top Gun,” Cruise told me for the Playboy Interview. “I just never had the time to learn. Then I met Sydney Pollack. I was 19 or 20, and he was editing Tootsie at the time and I’d just finished Risky Business. I got a meeting with Sydney, it was supposed to be 20 minutes and it ended up being over two hours. Outside of my admiration of him as a filmmaker, we talked about a big mutual interest that we had in aviation because I knew he flew. Sydney became a lifelong friend, and when we finished The Firm together in ’93 or ‘94, he gave me flying lessons as the wrap gift. He said, I know how much you love flying. Take the time, right now, and do it, because otherwise you’ll never get to it. I had two kids by then, and I worked all the time. In a few months I had my instrument rating, and a little while after that I had my commercial rating. I trained mostly in aerobatics, because I wanted to fly the P-51. I was doing rolls, loops, all kinds of aerobatic maneuvers. My first airplane was called a Pitts, and then I flew a Marchetti. That’s a Third World air force trainer they use in the Top Gun schools for air to air combat. This was all in preparation to fly the Warburg, the P-51. I searched all over the world for my P-51 and found it in 2000.”

Author Anne Rice was publicly critical when director Neil Jordan set Cruise to play her most famous character creation. The bisexual vampire Lestat was as charming as he could be cruel, as he turns both Brad Pitt and a young Kirsten Dunst into creatures of the night to form a family. Director Neil Jordan thought of Cruise for the part given parallels between the lives of the character and the actor, who likewise has to “retreat to the shadows” and “live in a spectral kind of world” given his immense fame. Rice changed her mind when she saw the result, and publicly became a big fan of Cruise’s performance, for which he learned to play piano and hung upside down before scenes to help along the creation of their undead looks. “I learned from the Anne Rice scenario,” Cruise told me later in a Playboy interview. “I should have called and sat down with her first, like I did on Born on the Fourth of July. I sat with Ron Kovic and said, I’ve been offered this; how do you feel about it? It was really a job interview.”

The film adaptation of the old CBS spy series might have seemed like just another job, but at closer inspection, Cruise had been an action hero in training since boyhood. He sold greeting cards door to door, cut grass and raked leaves in Canada and Kentucky to buy his first motorcycle at 12, which he crashed doing stunts. A double gymnastic flip left him with a broken ankle (he’d break another on M:I6 leaping between buildings). Cruise became meticulous in stunt planning, but always made his directors and studio execs nervous. “When I was climbing at Mojave for Mission: Impossible 2, Sherry Lansing was running Paramount and I held back sending them until we’d finished the sequence because I love her and didn’t want to give her a heart attack. Then we sent the rushes and normally Sherry would call right away to discuss them. I never heard from her on those. Finally, when I got back it was like, Tom, we’re not even going to talk about this.” Luckily for her, Lansing retired by the time Cruise hung off an ascending Airbus A400 airplane, or scaling the outside of a Dubai skyscraper, 124 floors up. 

It is still hard to even look at photos of Cruise scaling the perimiter of the Burj Khalifa, 124 floors high in Dubai. Cruise shugged when I asked him about it, saying that if he’d done the stunt 20 floors up and fell, he’d die. Why not an extra 100 floors? But the truth is that it was a nail biter of a day for Cruise, director Brad Bird, and the stunt team. But their meticulous attention to detail won the day. “I want it to be better than my director Brad Bird designed it, but I don’t have the level of blood flow through my body and I’m getting lightheaded because my body’s not getting enough oxygen,” Cruise told me in the Playboy interview. “And I’m hitting the side of the building. I rehearsed it in knee and elbow pads and a helmet the night before, but I couldn’t wear pads for the shot.  So I’m going off, and I’ll never forget; the sun is going down and we’re we’ve convinced the building now to knock out not just two windows but I think 27 windows. Originally they were worried about what it would do to the structure of the building, the pressure differentials through the building. But we’re like, C’mon, man, we’re making a movie! It’s Hollywood. And by the end of that day they were just ripping windows out. I was worried the whole time. The height is what it is, but is the cable gonna hold me if it gets kinked? Holding onto the building gave me a level of false security, but now I’m pushing away from the building, and I immediately realize, shit, I’ve got crosswinds. We’re so high that even a light crosswind would change my trajectory as I’m jumping across. I’m arching back trying to make it look good, but I’m facing out and I have no reference to the building. I have to know when to swing my legs around or it ruins the shot. I want to hold position as long as I can, and then at the last second catch the building. But I’m swinging in a pendulum arc, couldn’t sense the building and man, I slammed right into it at high speed and almost knocked myself out. Luckily I caught it right at the last second with my foot and came in with my elbow and knees. I try finding visual references, but it’s the highest building around and if my head’s looking down, it changes the trajectory of the arc. So I just had to start feeling when am I at the apex, when to adjust right at the last second and have enough energy to snap my body around to catch myself into the side of the building. It was one of those things where you just have to will it to go right.”

Cameron Crowe’s film about a sports agent who finds his conscience in an existential crisis journey has many classic lines that could have become groaners. But it was the last scene that gave Crowe the biggest fear he might cross the line, until Cruise begged for a shot at pulling it off. “Oh, Tom couldn’t wait for that scene,” Crowe says. “I was a little nervous about some of the lines, like, ‘You complete me.’ It’s a slippery slope; if you lean wrong into a line like that, it’d probably be the first thing you cut. But he said, ‘I want to say I love you in this movie, and I want to say it with that line.’ And by the time he got to it, it was two in the morning, at the end of a long week. Tom surprised the women because we didn’t tell them that he would be there to do the scene with them that day. In he comes, and in the most loving way, this heavyweight was ready for the knockout. He gently crushed it. The ladies were crying. The crew members were crying. And Renée [Zellweger] was a mess. He just took great pleasure in being able to deliver a line that he knew I was on the fence about. He’d said, ‘Just give me a shot, man. You’ll see if I got it, or if I didn’t.’ And, you know, I’m still just so proud of it.” Crowe also recalled the courtesy Cruise showed to the youth who first had the role made famous by Jonathan Lipnicki, but who’d felt too much pressure and bowed out. Cruise stayed in touch with the boy and when Crowe later asked why, he said, “I just don’t want that guy growing up, looking at movies and feeling disappointed about what happened. I want him to love movies.” Wow.

Cruise set a Guinness World Record for longest continual film shoot 15 months shooting the Stanley Kubrick film. He did it to work with then-wife Nicole Kidman, but also to immerse himself in Kubrick. He played William Harford, a Manhattan doctor drawn into a sexual underworld following his wife’s admission of dissatisfaction in the bedroom, finding that Kubrick played mind games with him and Kidman in order to draw the most out of their performances. The filmmaker made them confront real personal issues in joint therapy sessions and prevented them from communicating during production, blurring the line between reality and fiction. The stresses of the process reportedly led Cruise to develop an ulcer, though he wouldn’t let it distract him from this opportunity to work with a filmmaking icon. “I didn’t like playing Dr. Bill. I didn’t like him. This guy’s holding everything in for such a long time. And he never broke out,” said Cruise. “It was unpleasant. But I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn’t done this.” Many believed this was an apprenticeship toward Cruise moving to the director’s chair, but that hasn’t happened yet. 

Cruise found a character like none other on his resume in Frank T.J. Mackey, a vulgar motivational speaker teaching men to “Seduce and Destroy,” In Paul Thomas Anderson’s surreal mosaic of Southern California stories. He came to inhabit the ponytail-wearing purveyor of phrases like “Respect the cock, tame the c**t” as a fan of Anderson’s Boogie Nights who responded to the script’s strange comedic bent. “I like humor. I thought it was dark and funny,” he said. “And that’s what I focused on, working on…the bitter humor of that.” But if Mackey was an outlandish type, he was made human by a pain regarding his relationship with his father, which led up to a staggering deathbed scene. Cruise landed another Golden Globe and Oscar nom for his work.

While Steven Spielberg initially looked to direct Cruise in Rain Man, he found his long coveted first opportunity to work with the actor on this noirish sci-fi actioner based on a Philip K. Dick novella. It was Cruise who brought the story to the filmmaker, viewing it as a vehicle to meditate on the emergence of Big Tech and its reach into society in “very cinematic” fashion. He stars as John Anderton, a police chief living in the year 2054, who oversees a department known as Precrime, which is able to identify and arrest future criminals before they’ve done a single thing. All is well, of course, until Anderton, himself, is accused.

Cruise delivered a performance of potent emotional depth in the Ed Zwick-directed drama. Nathan Algren was a veteran haunted by his participation in both the Civil War and the American Indian Wars who comes to a deep reverence for the Japanese after being sent overseas to help westernize the army of the Meiji Restoration government. Cruise looked at the project as his epic adventure film in the vein of Lawrence of Arabia, not only studying American and Japanese history for the role, but also learning the Japanese language and how to wield a sword and packing on over 20 pounds of muscle for scenes in heavy armor. “I spent a year training six hours a day, seven days a week to be able to handle the sword, and do it on uneven terrain because I didn’t want to blow my knees out. You’ve got to build the body up for impact. I remember trying to put my shirt on at one point and couldn’t, my forearms had gotten so big.” Cruise’s dedication had much to do with the samurai’s codes of honor. “This movie has a lot of adventure and battle scenes, but I wouldn’t have made it if it didn’t explore the samurai’s code. The purity of that is stronger than any battle scene we could have dreamt up.”

“Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars and a speck on one in a blink — that’s us,” says an existentially-minded Cruise in this Michael Mann-directed action thriller. In one of his most memorable villain roles, he here plays Vincent, the gray-haired hitman who brings Jamie Foxx’s unsuspecting Los Angeles taxi driver Max along for a ride he’ll never forget. Max something in the sociopath that leads to the assassin’s spiral, but not before some memorable action scenes including a tour de force in a nightclub, where Cruise’s character adapts to a chaotic crowd situation to take out his mark. “What Tom did, those are real techniques and there was a lot of training with my friend Mick Gould, who was the head of close-quarter combat training for the British SAS,” Mann said. “The scene in the alley, there’s no cut in that scene… It came down to doing the work. There was nothing he was doing that wasn’t established close-quarter combat moves that came from months of training. That included blending in. Obviously, people know Tom, but I wanted him to feel what it would be like to blend in, to mix with people and have conversations. He went to Central Market and trained to be a FedEx delivery guy. He said to me, ‘They’re gonna know it’s me.’ I said, ‘No, they’ll see the sign that says FedEx, and you’ll wear sunglasses and a cap and carry that portable computer that drivers used to have when they made deliveries.’ Tom went in and delivered something to a liquor stand and sat down and struck up a conversation with a couple people and insinuated himself into the lives of others. There was a lot of psychological training he did. Tom is a dream. He sees the adventure in what we do, just the way I do, and I imagine other directors do. He just goes for it.”

Reteaming with Spielberg on this sci-fi action thriller based on the novel by H.G. Wells, Cruise here returned to hero mode as Ray Ferrier, a Brooklyn longshoreman who does whatever it takes to protect his children in the midst of an alien invasion. Commonly discussed as a response to the terrors of 9/11, this film sparked the enthusiasm of the filmmaker-actor duo, to the extent that they pushed work on other projects — Munich for Spielberg and Mission: Impossible III for Cruise — to make War their priority. The Paramount title scripted by by Josh Friedman and David Koepp brought the latter his biggest opening weekend up until Top: Gun Maverick came around.

The actor brought the basic premise of Groundhog’s Day into a sci-fi action world as Major William Cage, a military PR officer caught in a time loop until he can fend off the advances of an alien race, starring opposite Emily Blunt in Warner Bros’ adaptation of the Hiroshi Sakurazaka novel All You Need Is Kill. Director Doug Liman had the actor wearing tactical outfits so heavy, he’d have to be suspended by chains in between takes to protect his joints. Cruise responded to the dark humor of the material, joking with regard to his character, caught between life and death, “It’s fun coming up with new ways to kill yourself.” Said McQuarrie: “They were extremely heavy, cumbersome, took 10 minutes to get on and off and was too heavy for him to sit in between takes. He would get out of the armor and go, we’re wasting all this time, me getting in and out of this suit. So, Tom gets this idea that, between setups, it would save time if, instead of getting in and out of his suit, we converted a child’’ swing set into something with hooks that he could hang from, in between setups.”

On the first Top Gun, Cruise was the only cast member who didn’t lose his lunch while filming dialogue scenes inside those roaring jets. Mindful of that unpleasant experience, he made it his mission to make sure the new crop of actors playing Top Gun pilots in the sequel fared better.

“We learned on the first one,” said producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “He was the only one we got good footage on; we couldn’t use the footage on the other actors because he was the only one who didn’t throw up. So, Tom designed a flying program for all the actors this time. It took months to do this. First, they went up in a single engine prop plane, just to get a feel for flying. Then, an aerobatic prop plane, and then a jet, and once they were comfortable in that jet, he put them in the F-18. Tom designed [the process] himself to acclimate the actors to the G forces they would experience.” He also was a mentor to the hotshot young actors who probably reminded him of himself during the original Top Gun. 

“I remember one day on the carrier, when Tom was sitting with these young actors, most of them just starting their careers,” director Joseph Kosinski said. “Miles Teller has a lot under his belt, but the rest were new. For them, every day was like a master class, and he would make time for them every day. He would sit down and have these impromptu sessions with the actors, either to talk about the scenes we were shooting that day, the technical aspects of shooting an aerial sequence, or broader advice, like how to build a career. I remember Tom asked Glen (Powell), what kind of career do you want? Glen said, ‘I want your career, Tom.’ So, Tom said, ‘How do you think I got that?’ Glen said, ‘By choosing great roles.’ And Tom said, ‘No. That’s not how I did it. I did it by choosing great films. Then, I took the roles and made them the best I could.’ That advice blew Glen’s mind. If you look at Tom’s career, that’s exactly what he did. He chose great films and directors he admired. Regardless of the size of the role, especially on a movie like Taps. And then he created something with it, made the role his own. That’s something these younger actors hadn’t thought about and can only get from someone who spent 30 years as a movie star.”