Your mission, Tom Cruise, is to improve at interviews. And please keep sending the cakes

By now, we’ve grown used to watching Tom Cruise excel at everything he does. Running in films? The best. Risking his life in action scenes so preposterously dangerous that audiences need to have their sphincters manually unclenched with a crowbar? Absolutely, none better. Singlehandedly ensuring that theatrical exhibition didn’t go extinct after Covid? The man deserves all the praise in the world for that.

But nobody is perfect. Live long enough and a few flaws will worm their way to the surface. This is as true for Tom Cruise as it is for anyone else. And while I realise that this might do me out of a cake this Christmas, the following really needs to be said: Tom Cruise isn’t very good at interviews.

As you will be aware, Cruise’s new film Digger comes out soon. The film is a risk. It is his first original, non-sequel, non-action film in which he co-stars since 2007’s Lions for Lambs. It is also, if the trailers are any indication, palpably batshit. This means that Cruise has to reintroduce himself to the world as an actor, rather than the guy who just flings himself off a variety of increasingly berserk surfaces. And this means promotion. Until this week, that promotion has involved either World Cup-themed promos filmed in character or interviews where the subject matter was almost exclusively limited to lens choice.

However, yesterday Cruise subjected himself to a rare longform interview opposite GQ’s Zach Baron. On paper, it couldn’t have been easier. Baron was a perfectly chosen interviewer for the job, understanding exactly when to flatter and when to needle. However, Tom Cruise’s defences are foot-thick and watertight, and the majority of Baron’s questions simply bounced off him.

This resulted in a fairly unsatisfactory 30-minute stalemate in which Tom Cruise talked and talked and said nothing at all. No matter how hard Baron probed, he was met with a fat wedge of waffle. The clickbait industrial complex has done its best to pick the bones of the interview for a news peg, but the best it seems to have come up with is a variation of “Tom Cruise admits that he can be intense on set”. Which, well, duh.

Aside from that, we simply got a rehash of all the old talking points from every junket he’s done for a decade. He’d rather talk about cinematography than himself. He is constantly trying to learn new skills. He writes down his dreams and how to accomplish them. None of this is new information. It’s all highly frustrating. But it does make sense. As brilliant as he is on screen, behind the scenes Cruise is a carefully managed enigma. This may well be because, the last time he allowed his own self to parade before the press, it ended with couch-jumping and excruciatingly testy interviews about Scientology. It seems unthinkable now, but that press run went so badly that Sumner Redstone ended up effectively firing Cruise from Paramount over it.

It took Cruise years to build himself back up from that, and the results have been spectacular. The Mission: Impossible films have been some of the greatest of his career. Top Gun: Maverick saved Hollywood. He is now in a position of enormous power and authority. So going back out in front of an interviewer is bound to be a risk for him. But one thing is certain. The Digger promotional cycle cannot just be variations of the GQ interview, because too many opaque soundbites will simply end up boring potential audiences rigid. There will be more interviews – he’s thought to be hitting the podcast circuit soon – so he needs to adapt his strategy.

The good news is that one thing Cruise did say in his GQ interview is that, when he sets a goal, he writes down all the steps necessary to accomplish it. This is exactly what he should do here. If his dream is doing press that will make people want to watch Digger, then he knows he will need to work up some new anecdotes – long enough to filibuster, but twisty enough to entertain – while developing a persona that appears to welcome scrutiny while wriggling out from underneath it.

It can be done. Robert Downey Jr is an actor with many areas of his past he would rather not touch in print, and he has built up an incredibly charming suit of armour that allows him to breezily bat questions away when they get too personal. This is exactly what Tom Cruise should be learning to do. Or perhaps not; after all, he has made hundreds of millions of dollars by revealing scarcely anything about himself for a decade. Maybe that’s an option, too.

But, hey, this is Tom Cruise. When he sets his mind on something, he achieves it. With that in mind, expect a dramatic upward turn in the quality of his interviews from this moment onwards. Thanks for reading. Please still send cakes.