Celebrity
Tom Cruise Returns to the GQ Cover After Two Decades
By GQ’s own count, Tom Cruise has appeared on more of its covers than any other star, eight in the United States, yet it has been twenty years since the last. He breaks that silence for GQ Middle East’s October issue, sitting with Zach Baron ahead of his Digger press tour for a rare, wide-ranging interview that GQ calls its largest cover to date, running across twenty markets.
Tom Cruise for GQ Middle East. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti / GQ.
On Intensity
The Rumors Are True
Cruise has never hidden how he works. “Look, I work hard, and people that work with me, they know. I expect a lot and I’m up-front about it,” he tells GQ. “It’s like: the rumors are true. And do you want this?”
The label found him early. “Even when I was a kid, they were like, come on, Tom. You’re so intense. I’m like, I don’t know what to say. I am intense.”
Tom Cruise for GQ Middle East. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti / GQ.
On Fear
The Edge of the Cliff
“I like standing on the edge of a cliff, physically and metaphorically,” he says of a life spent treating risk as an adventure. On death he is just as plain. “Do I fear death? No. I don’t. It’s not that I’m not afraid. I don’t mind the feeling.”
Tom Cruise for GQ Middle East. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti / GQ.
On Speaking Now
A Dead Sprint, Then a Pause
Asked why he has stayed quiet for over a decade, Cruise points to the workload. “I just haven’t had the time, with the amount of things that I set in motion and decided I was going to do.” The pace, he says, was relentless, and only now is there room to talk about it.
The dreams came before any of it. “I wanted to travel the world and I wanted to know people and know life,” he tells GQ of the plans he once wrote on a board on his wall. One private rule has held ever since, “Leave something better.”
Tom Cruise for GQ Middle East. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti / GQ.
For Boujeez
A man who has spent forty years leaping off things chooses his words as carefully as his stunts. What Cruise gives GQ is less a confession than a method, the same discipline that built the career, now turned on the act of explaining it. For a certain kind of star, the appeal was never the noise. It was the quiet resolve to leave the room, and the work, better than he found it. Read the full feature by Zach Baron on gqmiddleeast.com.