Glen Powell and Kate Hudson also think Tom Cruise saved movie theaters: "He Babe Ruthed it"

Glen Powell and Kate Hudson—both huge stars in their own right—recently participated in Variety’s ongoing Actors on Actors series, a conversation which they spent partly on each other’s most recent projects (Korean War drama Devotion and Glass Onion respectively) but mostly on Tom Cruise.

“It took a year-plus to actually shoot the movie,” Powell said of Top Gun: Maverick, in which he played “Navy Draco Malfoy” Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin—at Cruise’s insistence. “Tom’s a perfectionist, and so he was like, ‘We got to get it right.’ And I saw the movie, and then COVID happened, and I was like, ‘Oh, man, we’re sitting on this awesome thing.’”

Kate Hudson agreed: “In true Tom Cruise form, the perfectionist that he is, he always wins. I was in New York and I went to Union Square to see it on the big screen with an audience. It was like, ‘Thank God. These are the movies we need in the movie theater.’”

“They showed us the final cut. I watched that movie and I was like, “I think we did it. Tom called it out—he Babe Ruthed it,” Powell responded. “He was like, ‘This movie’s good enough where we have to just wait for this pandemic to be over.’ But you know how it is.”

While Tom Cruise may have lost his epic battle to “never” let Maverick go to streaming platforms, he was right about one thing: holding the movie’s release certainly put lots of butts in lots of seats (and lots of dollars in Cruise’s pocket).

“Let’s get Tom over with. Because we love talking about Tom,” Hudson said before praising Maverick’s healing powers: “Top Gun, if that wasn’t great, then that would’ve been terrible. It would have been such a bummer. We needed a good Top Gun so bad.”

Stars: sometimes they’re fans—just like us!