Simon Pegg says he has a “simple” friendship with Tom Cruise where they don’t talk about the thing

One of the most interesting things in the world that the vast majority of us will never ever get to experience is having a basic conversation with Tom Cruise. Hell, just being in a room with him would be one of the average person’s top 10 stories, regardless of what anyone in that room does or says (some of us once saw Michael Bay drive by on a golf cart while he was filming Transformers: Dark Of The Moon in Milwaukee and we’re still milking it). Simon Pegg is not the average person, though, as he’s one of the lucky few who gets to be in a room with Tom Cruise with some regularity, and he briefly detailed that experience while appearing on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio show (via Deadline).

Pegg says he has a “very simple and amiable” friendship with Tom Cruise, who he has appeared in five Mission: Impossible movies with, which sounds like the most anyone can really hope for when it comes to an inscrutable person like Cruise, but there might be a secret trick to making Pegg’s simple friendship with Cruise work: They don’t ever talk about Scientology. Pegg figures it would “abuse my privileged access that I get to him” if he were to bring it up.

That is the test that all of us would inevitably fail when speaking with Tom Cruise, since at some point we would all be unable to resist the temptation to say “hey, so what’s the deal with—“ and then we’d get cut off as he sprinted away at full speed and never spoke to us again.

Pegg also says that Cruise is, somewhat unsurprisingly, a person who loves being famous and “really relishes it.” Pegg adds that it’s “all he knows” and that it “energizes him and spurs him on,” which is part of what makes him seem like such an interesting person just to be around. If he lives for fame, what’s it like when he’s not “on”? Is he ever not “on”? Simon Pegg might not even know the answer to that.