Tom Cruise is utterly bizarre. He’s also America’s greatest movie star.
Tom Cruise is a strange human being. This is not up for debate.
Nor is the fact that he’s a great movie star and perhaps the last truly great American movie star.
Cruise doesn’t overplay the working-class persona. He simply embodies the concerns of a terrified father trying to dodge alien death rays.
Even at 64, this genetic anomaly shows no signs of slowing down. Cruise is so monomaniacally devoted to his craft that what he does off-screen should have no bearing on what he delivers on-screen.
Losin' it
Yes, he sold his soul to a sci-fi cult founded by a charlatan and a known criminal. Yes, he bounced around on Oprah’s couch like a toddler who had just inhaled a dozen Red Bulls. Yes, he left a trail of high-profile divorces behind him. And yes, his relationship with his youngest daughter, Suri, has all the warmth of a North Korean prison camp in November.
None of this matters. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyway.
That’s because Tom Cruise is essentially a diminutive delivery system for larger-than-life cinema.
We live in a culture obsessed with dragging actors into the town square to answer for their sins, whether real or manufactured. Audiences demand that stars double as Sunday school teachers. Expecting a guy who scales mountain faces for fun to have a wholesome, normal domestic life is borderline delusional.
As a young man, Cruise briefly considered becoming a Franciscan priest. That didn't work out, but he eventually found a vocation almost as all-consuming.
All the right moves
Circa 1986, Cruise abandoned the real world to become a perpetual entertainment machine. If he wants to spend his days grazing on a handful of almonds, running on a treadmill at 3:00 a.m., and worshiping cosmic conquerors, that’s his business. And in truth, it’s really none of ours. He is an actor, not a member of Congress.
The miracle of Cruise is his ability to play an everyday American while living a life that seems more alien than the creatures he runs from.
Which brings us to Steven Spielberg’s 2005 masterpiece "War of the Worlds." Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a divorced New Jersey dock worker with a rusted V8 engine block sitting on a coffee table in his messy living room.
A man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, who flies private jets around the globe, somehow steps onto the screen and instantly radiates the exact energy of a guy who owes child support and eats cereal straight out of the box. He doesn’t overplay the working-class persona. He doesn’t force a cringeworthy accent. He simply embodies the concerns of a terrified father trying to dodge alien death rays. And he does it superbly.
Far and away
This effortless ability to play an average American sets him apart from his peers. Brad Pitt is a fine actor. But he always looks like a Hollywood A-lister playing dress-up when he tries to portray a normal civilian. Pitt was fantastic in "Fight Club" and "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," but he could never match the ferocious vulnerability delivered by Cruise in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 drama, "Magnolia."
In an ensemble that includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Robards, and William H. Macy, Cruise stands out as Frank T.J. Mackey, an obnoxious, hyper-alpha pickup-artist guru. But when Mackey sits beside the hospital bed of his estranged father, now comatose and dying, the tough-guy facade fades.
The scene had an eerie parallel in Cruise's own life. His mother left his father when Cruise was 12, and father and son didn't see each other again for a decade. They finally reunited when his father was dying of cancer in a hospital — on the condition, Cruise later said, that the son ask no questions about the past.
Cruise, who has described his father as a "bully and a coward," brought some of that history directly into the scene, rewriting the monologue himself. The result is a brutal, believable breakdown that remains one of the finest performances in modern film history.
Risky business
Cruise's range is genuinely impressive, even extending into areas where it really shouldn’t. In the 2008 comedy "Tropic Thunder," Cruise donned a fat suit, a bald cap, and inordinate amounts of fake chest hair to play Les Grossman, a psychopathic, Diet Coke-chugging studio executive. The performance was comedic gold, turning a Harvey Weinstein-esque caricature into a cult-classic figure. The idea of Maverick aggressively dancing to hip-hop while screaming expletives into a satellite phone should never have worked. But it did, with magnificent effect.
The first time I saw Cruise on screen was in Oliver Stone’s 1989 classic, "Born on the Fourth of July." I was much too young to watch it, and my father should really have known better than to let me see it. But he didn’t at the time, and I’m eternally grateful for his questionable parenting decisions.
Playing Ron Kovic, a paralyzed Vietnam veteran, Cruise captures the heartbreak of a young American patriot who was betrayed by the country he served. The performance, which earned him an Academy Award nomination, remains a masterclass in psychological horror.
Yet people still wax lyrical about Daniel Day-Lewis and his much-discussed commitment to method acting, while treating Cruise as little more than a charismatic movie star. The disrespect is almost automatic. Cruise gets lumped in with Jason Statham and Keanu Reeves, as though physicality and box-office appeal somehow disqualify an actor from serious dramatic greatness. That’s the great irony of Cruise’s career. One of Hollywood’s most technically gifted dramatic actors has spent decades being dismissed because he also happens to be one of its biggest movie stars.
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Minority report
At an age when most Hollywood legends are retired or playing roles no one cares about, Cruise instead chooses to hang off the side of an Airbus A400M aircraft at 5,000 feet. He breaks his ankle while jumping between buildings in London, gets up, finishes the shot on camera, and then gets physiotherapy so he can do it all over again. The sexagenarian treats his body like an industrial turbine. He treats his craft with the devotion it deserves. Tom Cruise is an absolute machine, and he has given so many memorable performances.
The obsession with his off-screen antics reveals a sickening hypocrisy in how we consume art. We routinely listen to songs sung by disgusting individuals and admire paintings by violent lunatics, yet we expect our action heroes to be salt-of-the-earth types who adopt African children and fight for Zelenskyy on the front lines.
Cruise traded a quiet life for total mastery of cinema. When you sit down to watch a newly minted sequel to "Days of Thunder," you’re not buying a ticket to a lecture on family values. Instead, you’re paying for two hours of pure, unfiltered adrenaline, delivered by someone who sacrificed his sanity and his physical safety to make sure you enjoy your popcorn. Forget the trampolining on a couch. Forget the celebrity gossip. Tom Cruise is bizarre, but his body of work is damn near unimpeachable.
Dave vs. Dearborn: Comedian Dave Landau tackles Sharia law and Tesla dads
Dave Landau has been arrested more than a dozen times, battled drug addiction, watched his mother struggle with severe mental illness, and somehow lived long enough to become a suburban dad complaining about Teslas.
Naturally, he thinks all of this is hilarious.
'Being a dad, a husband, and 16 years sober is better.'
Sharia lawyer
The Detroit-born comic mines some remarkably dark territory in his new special, "30 Minutes with Dave Landau," filmed at the Creek and the Cave in Austin and produced by the legendary Luis J. Gomez.
Landau has long put the drinking and the drugs behind him; these days, he says “being a dad, a husband, and 16 years sober is better” than the life that supplied him with so much of his material.
But sober doesn't mean wholesome. Over the next half hour, Landau moves from Islamic extremism in Michigan to cocaine washing ashore in Florida, his mother's bipolar disorder, the emasculating effect of electric cars, and being the "only man who can make a Catholic wake sound like a good time."
Take his crack about Sharia law and Dearborn, a Detroit suburb where the Muslim population has exploded over the last two decades.
"My wife got pulled over there," the comedian says. "Not for speeding, just for driving a car."
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Vape 'em if you got 'em
Some of Landau's funniest material concerns becoming a middle-aged dad at a time when dads just don't command the same respect.
“I miss when we drove muscle cars,” Landau says. “I liked when your dad would come home, you'd hear an engine. He'd come inside, smoke a cigarette, maybe crack a beer.”
Today's dad glides silently home in a Tesla — which Landau compares to “driving a cell phone" — before walking inside and hitting a vape.
“So you just smell lavender” until Dad “cracks a White Claw,” he jokes.
The indignity is complete when the children greet him: “How was work, p***y?”
Looking back on his single years, Landau jokes that he would have loved living in present-day Miami, where packages of cocaine occasionally wash ashore.
That's also, he suggests, the real explanation for all those sea turtles found with straws stuck in their noses.
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Going dark
But that's just a warm-up for the really dark stuff, like his father being poisoned by chemical exposure while serving in Vietnam and his mother's severe bipolar disorder and eventual suicide.
Serious bipolar disorder, Landau clarifies. For those who casually describe themselves as bipolar, he has a simple diagnostic question: "You ever wear a wedding dress to your son's wedding?"
Landau even reaches back three decades to recount a prank in which he and his friends apparently convinced people that an innocent stranger was responsible for one of their buddies ending up pants-less on a pile of garbage.
It's the kind of story that could seem less funny if you stopped to consider what might have happened to the poor guy afterward.
That's essentially Landau's approach to the whole half hour. Addiction, arrests, family tragedy, mental illness: Look too closely at any of these, and “30 Minutes with Dave Landau” could get awfully depressing. Fortunately, Landau's barrage of laugh lines never gives you that much time to think.
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CALIFORNIA IDLE: Iconic reality show ditches Hollywood after 24 seasons
After nearly a quarter-century, one of the world's most successful reality franchises is leaving Los Angeles.
It's the series that introduced America to Kelly Clarkson, helped turn Simon Cowell into an international celebrity, launched Carrie Underwood and Jennifer Hudson, and made Randy Jackson a household meme.
'Every major production category in LA is going under water.'
It premiered when George W. Bush was president and survived a cancellation, a network change, countless judging-panel shake-ups, and the end of the monoculture that made it a phenomenon in the first place.
But apparently it couldn't survive California.
No golden ticket
"American Idol" will move production to the Atlanta area for its 25th season, ending a left-coast run that dates back to its 2002 debut, according to Deadline.
And the reason for the move makes the timing particularly awkward for the Golden State.
California has been desperately trying to stop film and television productions from fleeing to states such as Georgia and New Jersey. Last year, lawmakers dramatically expanded the state's film and television tax-credit program and, for the first time, opened it to a new category: large-scale competition shows.
You'd think “American Idol” might qualify; it didn't.
Under California's expanded incentive program, a “large-scale competition show” can qualify for tax credits if contestants compete over multiple episodes for money or another prize, with winners selected by judges, an audience, or another competitive mechanism.
That certainly sounds like “American Idol.” But California's rules also exclude “traditional reality, game shows, talk shows, or docufollow television programming” from the new category, and Deadline reports that “Idol” did not qualify for the state's credit.
Georgia presents a considerably more attractive proposition. The state offers qualifying film and television productions that spend at least $500,000 in Georgia a 20% base tax credit, with another 10% available under certain conditions. Unscripted and reality productions can qualify.
For a sprawling production such as “American Idol,” that's real money.
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'Masked' mandate
And “Idol” isn't the only reality show California has lost.
“The Masked Singer,” another long-running competition series, announced earlier this year that it would move production from Los Angeles to New Jersey for its 15th season.
New Jersey offers a tax credit of up to 30% for qualifying television productions, including unscripted shows.
California, in other words, is now competing not merely with Georgia — which has spent years building itself into a major production center — but with states across the country willing to make Hollywood productions a better offer.
The departures come at a particularly bad time for Los Angeles.
A July report from FilmLA, the nonprofit organization that handles film permitting for Los Angeles and several surrounding jurisdictions, found that permitted on-location production fell another 12.7% during the second quarter of 2026 compared with the same period last year.
Out of tune
Compared with the five-year average, the numbers are uglier still.
Feature-film shoot days were down roughly 40%. Commercial production was down about 46%, while television overall was down nearly 49%.
Reality television — the category that includes shows such as “American Idol” — was down nearly 63% from its five-year average.
TV drama was down 16%, while TV comedy was down roughly 67%.
And those weren't merely unfavorable comparisons against the five-year average. Each of those major categories also declined compared with the second quarter of 2025.
There were a couple of bright spots. TV pilot activity was up 40% against its five-year average, while FilmLA's catchall “Other” category increased 10% year-over-year.
But overall permitted on-location production was down 35.9% from the five-year average.
Those numbers don't capture every movie or television show being made in California. FilmLA measures permitted on-location filming in the jurisdictions it serves, meaning soundstage production and filming elsewhere in the state aren't necessarily included.
Still, California itself plainly recognizes the larger problem.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed a major expansion of the state's Film and Television Tax Credit Program last year, increasing the amount available annually and widening the range of productions eligible for incentives. The state says the expanded program is already attracting billions of dollars in projected economic activity.
The effort may yet help reverse California's production decline. But when it came to keeping “American Idol” in Hollywood?
That's gonna be a no from them, dawg.
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