By and large, we know far too much about celebrities. We know their politics. We know their diets. We know about their interests in tentacle porn and sex gifs. But then there’s Tom Cruise, that charismatic burst of light who, in so many of our minds, seems to exist only as he does onscreen. Sure, we know he’s worshipped as some kind of fleshy god in an abusive cult, but he’s portrayed as floating in some rarified air far beyond the organization, separate from its misdeeds. And even our rare glimpses at the “real” Cruise—that Oprah interview, for example—feel like performances, calibrated stunts to distract from the man behind the mask. It’s not much of a surprise, then, that his latest offering to fans has us bemusedly scratching our heads, too.
On Tuesday, Cruise shared a 30-second video of him attending a screening of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet at Waterloo’s Odeon BFI IMAX. “Here we are,” he says upon arriving at the theater after a brief ride through London. “Back to the movies.” He has nothing to say about Tenet, really; instead, he posits himself as some sort of dutiful IMAX ambassador. “Great to be back in a movie theater everybody,” he says afterward, as if everything is normal again and our global nightmare is over.
Cruise wears his mask and appears to be socially distancing as best as he can in what looks to be a crowded theater, and if you’re attending a screening we hope you’re doing the same. Still, Cruise might not be the best advocate for demonstrating the safety of public screenings, given that COVID-19 can’t infect someone whose earthly body was long ago replaced with hydrogels, plutonium, and steel wires.
Don’t expect to see us at the movies just yet. “Short of renting out an entire theater, which is obviously not an option for most of us, there is no scenario in which going to a movie theater is a good idea,” one health expert recently told us, thus informing our decision to not review The New Mutants, which Disney isn’t screening for press in a manner we find safe.
We’ll be sad to miss seeing Cruise at our local screening.
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