You won’t trick Tom Cruise into naming his four favorite films

Cinema diplomat Tom Cruise loves movies, but don’t ask him which ones, because he will not tell you. Cruise spoke with everyone’s favorite film rating site, Letterboxd, on the red carpet for Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, but if you’re hoping he participated in a classic “four favorites,” think again. “Sorry he didn’t do one bestie,” Letterboxed revealed on Twitter. “‘Mission completed,’ but wasn’t accomplished.”

That may be because Cruise doesn’t actually like to tell people what his favorite films are. In a recently resurfaced interview that appears to be circa 2018, the actor refused to be pinned down into naming a single most memorable moviegoing experience. “Boy, that’s hard to say because I can basically look at my whole life in terms of films I’ve seen,” he said in part. “Drama. Comedy. That’s what I love. I love the cinema experience. I prefer it with a packed audience.”

Cruise expressed similar vague sentiments when asked on the MI:7 carpet if he’d be seeing Barbie or Oppenheimer first. The answer is Oppenheimer, but ideally, he’ll see both with—you guessed it—“a packed audience.” In a video posted to Twitter, he explained, “I used to plan my days where you’d start out early in the morning and you’d go to movies all day, and I like doing that. I’d go from one cinema to the next.” Just don’t ask him what he’s seeing!

What Cruise is willing to say is how long he’s been passionate about the business. “I remember being four years old, thinking, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to go make movies. I wanna travel the world, I wanna make movies,” he told Letterboxd. “What’s amazing is that, as the years go on, now I’m working with Paul Newman. I was able to work with [Martin] Scorsese. These legends that I studied their films. That was my education. I knew movies before I started making them.”