Tom Cruise plays hero in film ‘Minority Report’
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – When Tom Cruise was a boy he played with GI Joe, the doll that not only conquered every enemy in the toy box but also parachuted magnificently. Even then, Cruise had a vivid imagination and more than his share of daring. “I tore the sheets off my bed and I dragged the monkey bars over to the garage and tied the sheet around me and jumped,” he says, laughing at the reminiscence while sitting at a white-clad table in a sunny Beverly Hills hotel room.
“I remember I was hanging onto the gutter, trying to pull myself up to get my other foot in. I’d gone all the way up there, tied the rope around this sheet and jumped off the garage roof. We were living in St. Louis at the time, so I must have been 3 years old. And I knocked myself out. I was laying there, looking at stars, because I always wanted to parachute.”
With movies like “Mission: Impossible,” “Rain Man,” “Jerry Maguire” and now Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” to his credit, Cruise, 39, doesn’t need parachutes to give him thrills.
As the hero in the exciting “Minority Report” – which opens June 21 -he gets to test his mettle as a man who must combat a complex world he helped create. This is not unlike Cruise’s real-life situation – because along with his superstar status comes the relentless glare of fame, a covenant he made at the beginning.
Most of the time, Cruise doesn’t want to talk about himself or his personal life. Today he openly confesses that his divorce from actress Nicole Kidman last year produced the most difficult time in his life.
“That was the toughest time ever,” he says, shaking his head. “But I’m not the kind of person who – I mean, it is what it is. I have a blessed life. I really do, and I know that. I have the opportunity to do something that I love and to keep doing it, so I’m not someone who talks about stuff like that. Really. To anyone. Or dwells on it or complains about it. My kids are healthy. Nic is healthy. My parents are healthy. But I have never been under that much pressure as I was (then). …”
He and Kidman have two adopted children, Isabella, 9, and Connor, 7. Since their breakup, Cruise has been dating actress Penelope Cruz. Their courtship is constant tabloid fodder.
He’s in love with Cruz, he confesses, after a long pause. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be with her. She is a lovely and wonderful person and I am enjoying the time we have together. But we have no plans for marriage right now,” he hastily adds, saying that reports to the contrary were fabricated.
“I am a romantic, you know? I probably will definitely get married again at some point. I know it, because I enjoy that relationship … and I believe it can work. Despite everything that happened, I don’t have regrets with Nic and me.”
He and Cruz co-starred in last year’s lackluster “Vanilla Sky” and started out just friends, he says.
“We spent a lot of time on the phone. Relationships just evolve. You enjoy each other’s company and you see where it goes. You date.”
Cruise and his ex share custody of the children, but he declines to say how much of the time they are with him. “Nic and I decided we’re not going to discuss that part. But they spend a lot of time with both of us. We’re both raising them – together.”
Cruise himself was the child of divorce. It was a time that he remembers vividly. “I was at that age – 11 or 12 years old – and it was very, very painful for me. It was a summer I will never forget. But I also felt it was the right thing. I felt it was absolutely correct. And my mother ended up raising us. I have a tremendous amount of admiration for her. Especially now, being a father,” he says, his blue eyes widening.
“Sometimes you take that for granted – that time you have with your mother. And now I realize how hard she worked and yet still had time (for us). You know, my life has been an adventure, ever since I was a little kid. And I’ve always seen it that way. … My mother is an adventurous woman who has never been afraid of life and didn’t make me afraid of life. As I said, when I was climbing the trees and stuff, she wasn’t sitting there saying, ‘Oh, my God, you are going to die!’ And so now, being a parent, I see some of that.”
With the divorce, his mother “needed a job,” he says. “That’s why I ended up going to this seminary school my freshman year, because we didn’t have any money. It was a really good education and we couldn’t afford for me to go to high school, the high school that I wanted to go to. The next year I was old enough and I got a paper route and I went and paid for my own education from the paper route.”
Moving so often (Cruise attended 15 different schools) had a profound effect on him, he thinks. “When you are traveling like that and you are always moving around … you see different cultures and how other people live. You learn very early on about prejudice. You know, if you don’t have the right color shoes. … I remember seeing that and at first being very confused by it and then realizing this is the world. … It really helped to form who I am.
“As an actor you play different characters. When I was in Kentucky I wanted to pick up that Southern accent. When I was in Canada I had that Canadian accent. And eventually you realize that when school is out, that is the world.”
(Luaine Lee writes entertainment profiles at Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail 102404.1356(at)compuserve.com.)