TOM’S WORLD

He’s one of the most famous people alive,but the stars of mission: Impossible — Fallout' keeps his private life a mystery. That may just make him the last movie star.

FFirst, last and always, there is the smile. A summer storm is bearing down on Washington DC when Tom Cruise arrives at the National Air and Space Museum for the July 22 premiere of Mission: Impossible— Fallout, but against a blockbuster grin, foul weather doesn’t stand a chance. As usual, Cruise, who turned 56 on July 3, has arrived three hours early to greet hundreds of fans, signing autographs and taking selfies. And then it will be on to the main event, which is watching him do what no-one does better: leaping from skyscrapers, dangling from a mountain cliff and skydiving from 25,000 feet above Paris. “I’ve wanted to make movies since I was 4 years old,” Cruise says, talking with a WHO reporter in his intense, intensely winning way. “To be able to entertain an audience, that was my dream. And here I am.”

Here Cruise is again, promoting another enormous movie at a pace that a friend calls “exhausting and exhilarating.” When it is over, he will have visited seven cities on three continents, done Mad Lib Theatre with Jimmy Fallon and performed a surprise over-the-top stunt for the benefit of James Corden. And he’ll manage it all by being very personable— while never getting particularly personal. In an age when stars relentlessly expose themselves on social media, he has a different playbook: Cruise may be universally known, but he remains unknowable. “He’s a mysterious figure in many ways,” says his Fallout co-star Simon Pegg. “People speculate about him and decide the truth about him. He doesn’t really do anything. He steps back from all that. To actually get close to him and see him be just a person, it’s very interesting.” It’s also a rare

privilege. Cruise hasn’t granted an extensive interview in years, and those who know him well (that circle is fiercely loyal and airtight) don’t expect that to change—ever.

There are aspects of Cruise’s persona he’s happy to expose for mass consumption. “I’ve studied athletes and their regimens,” he says of pulling off eye-popping stunts at fifty-something. “I like to climb. I like to ride motorcycles, drive cars and fly my aeroplanes. It’s just the stuff I do.” More sensitive topics are another matter. Back in 1986, when he was making The Color of Money with his friend and mentor Paul Newman, the star—then only five years older than Cruise is today—advised him never to pay attention to Hollywood gossip and to focus on making movies. Cruise’s 2012 divorce from Katie Holmes, which fuelled rabid speculation about his private life, confirmed his belief that there is zero benefit to hashing out such questions with strangers. That may only add to his mystique. For a man whose religion is opposed to the practice, Tom Cruise may be the subject of more armchair psychoanalysis than any human being in history.

More than ever, Cruise’s life is relentlessly defined by his career. With brief interruptions, he has made at least

one movie a year for the past 20 years. ( When he took on the role of Ethan Hunt, the hero of Mission: Impossible, in 1996, Pierce Brosnan was still 007.) The franchise has made more than $US2 billion, with no diminution of demands on its star. While filming Fallout, Cruise stumbled leaping from one building ledge to another and fractured his right ankle. “I knew instantly my ankle was broken,” he later told the BBC’S Graham Norton. “I really didn’t want to do it again, so I just got up and carried on with the take. I said, ‘It’s broken. That’s a wrap. Take me to hospital.’ ”

It’s a commitment that has required sometimes monk-like discipline from an actor who pondered joining the priesthood as a teen, and it takes a toll. Cruise has spent most of his life in (admittedly luxurious) hotel rooms, on film sets and in editing rooms. His physique is formidable, but he’s not always gung-ho about working out, jokingly calling the gym “the pain cave.” After three public divorces, he’s gone on dates but hasn’t been in a serious relationship for the longest time in his adult life. “I spend all my birthdays on a movie set or finishing a movie,” says Cruise. “There’s a little cake, and then they’re like, ‘Back to work.’ ” But that is what he lives for. “You can’t half-ass life and get to be Tom Cruise,” says Pegg. “He gives it 100 per cent, 100 per cent of the time.”

If the frightening focus is a bit of a Cruise cliché, he has another side— a movie dork who loves burgers, dancing and telling outrageous stories about his scrapes as a young actor. “He’s serious but also a lot of fun,” says Fallout director Christopher Mcquarrie, who relocated to the UK to make several films alongside Cruise and became a close friend. During Fallout’s filming, the star punctuated stunts by bellowing Russell Crowe’s line from Gladiator—“Are you not entertained?” Co-star Rebecca Ferguson nicknamed Cruise and Mcquarrie Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum because of their silliness. “I can’t stop laughing [around them],” she says. “And Tom is very good at a cockney accent.”

But work comes first, often in London, a city Cruise fell in love with while making the film Legend in 1984. He is gracious to fans when spotted at West End restaurants, but he is very rarely seen. (Bella, 25, Cruise’s daughter with Nicole Kidman, also lives in the city with her husband.) He no longer lives in LA, because after a decade of owning a Beverly Hills mansion he was so seldom there. Instead he has bought a two-storey penthouse in Clearwater, Florida, a global hub for the Church of Scientology, of which he’s a committed member. He’s been spotted strolling there with Scientology staffers.

“When Tom is here, he’s surrounded by people, but he really seems very happy,” says Donna Li, who works nearby. “He’ll wave and smile, but he doesn’t really engage in conversation.” The state has become the clan’s home base. Connor, 23, Cruise’s son with Kidman, also lives in the area, and the star is close to his sisters Lee Ann, 59, Marian, 57, and Cass, 53, and is a doting uncle to their children, hanging out and playing sports with them when he is in town. Cruise’s mother, Mary Lee South, died at 80 in February 2017.

Scientology is at the centre of Cruise’s life.

Whatever the church’s controversies, he believes it helped him find success after a difficult childhood and a struggle with dyslexia. “It is a search for how I can do things better,” he told Playboy in 2012. “If I don’t talk about my religion, if I say I’m not discussing it or different humanitarian things I’m working on, they’re like, ‘He’s avoiding it.’ If I do talk about it, it becomes, ‘Oh, he’s proselytising.’ ” He has let these last words on the subject stand but remains friends with the church’s leader, David Miscavige, and devoted to its causes. Discussion of Cruise’s beliefs inevitably leads back to his controversial divorce from Holmes and questions about his relationship with his youngest daughter, Suri, now 12. Neither Cruise nor Holmes, who has custody of Suri, has discussed the situation publicly. (Cruise also does not talk to the media about Connor or Bella.) “He loves all his children,” says a source. “And each of them has a right to their own story.”

In some ways Cruise’s very public marriages were aberrations in a life marked by both iron determination and discretion. “Relationships are hard,” he told Rolling Stone in 1986. “People are more prone to stay together for the security, which is something in my life that I have not really done in relationships or in business. If something’s not working, you’ve got to face it and move on.”

In ways that have not always been easy, Cruise has held on to that. He is singularly dedicated to doing what he loves for as long as he can. At his Washington premiere, he reflects on his singular passion. “I remember when I was making Taps,” he says—the 1981 film that was his big break. “I couldn’t believe it was happening. I couldn’t believe I was making a movie.”

He still feels that way. “I remember even back then saying, ‘Just do the best you can.’ That was my mantra,” he says. “All I can do every day is do the best I can. And learn.”

By J.D. ■ Heyman. With reporting by Mary Green, Philip Boucher, Pernilla Cedenheim, Steve Helling and Dan Wakeford