What has happened to Tom Cruise’s soul?

At Cannes, we got a muffled version of the usual force-of-nature star. Is our censorious era to blame – and will the old Cruise ever return?

Earlier this week at Cannes, I and around 2,000 other excited souls pressed into the Salle Debussy, hungry to hear the secrets of Tom Cruise’s craft from the great man himself. Around an hour later, we left more famished than when we’d arrived.

Cruise had come to the festival for a special screening of Top Gun: Maverick, but he broke off from the red carpet for what was billed as a “masterclass”. In place of the candour, insight and advice you can usually expect from such events, however, came a virtuoso workshop in saying absolutely nothing of interest.

Over the course of his 45 minutes on stage, Cruise kept circling back to the same small set of observations, regardless of their relevance to the (admittedly very broad) questions he was asked. He talked four times about his interest in how his films played in different countries; eight times about how overawed he felt making Taps, his second film, in which he appeared opposite George C Scott; and 11 times about his career-long enthusiasm for finding out what everyone’s jobs were on set, and how each affected the finished product.

Here he is on lenses: “I got to understand not just lighting, but lenses, and why those lenses and why things looked the way [they did].” And again: “I have a viewpoint where… I want you to see yourself on screen. I want you to understand the lenses.” And again: “When I’m looking at a movie… I looked at the lens, and I was asking, ‘What lens is it?’” And again: “I remember all the moments… I have a thing where I remember every take – you know, it’s just a thing with me. And I know the lens.” And again, in the context of working with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut: “We spent a lot of time talking about different lighting and lenses.”

So the man likes to know about lenses: nothing wrong with that. But it felt less like an interview than watching an actor still fully in character, giving their director multiple takes of the same slim bit of material. There was certainly no jumping on the sofa. Perhaps as a precautionary measure, there wasn’t even a sofa: he and his interviewer were seated on two small, hard chairs.

In a piece I wrote last week on the death of the film star as we know it, I wrote that the kind of wild, off-book eccentricity with which Cruise became synonymous in the mid-2000s was now incompatible with stardom itself. The internet demands content – and there’s an international, smartphone-backed citizen army of paparazzi and snoops determined to provide it, with or without the relevant context appended.

A moment of madness can become a meme that fast turns into a millstone. Social media’s professed love of quirk often struggles to cope with anything more off-beam than Marvel stars larking around at press junkets: for stars of Cruise’s calibre, which these days is basically Cruise alone, the risk of going off-script is no longer worth it. When a recording surfaced of the actor ticking off crew members on the forthcoming Mission: Impossible film for breaching on-set Covid regulations, it felt like a rare and informative (and, for this writer, not even particularly negative) glimpse of the real Cruise. But it’s one that he clearly would have rather kept under wraps.

My main takeaway from the Cruise masterclass ended up coming not from the talk, but the lengthy compilation video Cannes played before it. Extended clips from Risky Business, The Colour of Money, A Few Good Men, Jerry Maguire, Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia reminded me what an excellent actor he is – and specifically of his extraordinary gift for expressing split-second thought processes and emotional shifts in ways that allow the audience to experience them in sync with his characters. He’s the kind of performer who can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up as soon as he appears on the screen. In an earlier era, we might have allowed him to do the same when he entered a room, too.