DETAILS MAGAZINE UNVEILS POWER 40 LIST

The DETAILS Power Issue Ranks the 40 Most Influential Men on the Planet NEW YORK (November 25, 2008)
— DETAILS magazine’s December issue unveils the DETAILS Power 40 list, ranking the 40 most influential men in the world. These power players—all under the age of 47, not all of them liked—are the ones leading us through this unprecedented time of transformation, and they’re not just the usual suspects.

Tom is #7 on this list, here are some excerpts from the story:

7. TOM CRUISE Leading Man (Age: 46) By Alex Bhattacharji “Listen, I have Suri right here, who’s falling asleep,” Tom Cruise says sotto voce. He wants you to know that he’s not speaking softly to sound intense. Suri murmurs. Something about scissors. “What? You don’t want to get your hair cut?” Cruise is apologetic—he asks, “Do you have kids?” The most powerful star in the world really doesn’t want you to think his cherubic daughter’s feelings about bangs rule his life.

The most quintessentially all-American movie star since John Wayne is donning an eye patch and a prosthetic forearm stump and daring you to root for him in a Nazi uniform. Hell yes, he’s got a motive and you can read as much into it as you want: He intends to make you rethink some fundamental assumptions, like who’s good and who’s evil. “When you make people reconsider something that they’re so certain of … I found it very compelling. It’s the reason I’m doing it,” Cruise says. “When I was a kid, we’d play war, you know, and it was always ‘Kill the Nazis.’ I wanted to kill Hitler.” Cruise laughs. In his new movie, Valkyrie, he plays Claus von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic Bavarian army officer who joins the German resistance and leads an attempt to assassinate the führer and wrest Germany from Nazi Party control. The historical thriller, due out the day after Christmas, was directed by Bryan Singer.

In spite of or perhaps because of his recent self-imposed sabbatical, the Tom Cruise of 2008 is able to operate above the entertainment industry. He’s MI-free—liberated from having to save the day, get the girl, or be Tom Cruise. If he wants to decry political apathy about the war in Afghanistan (and play alongside Meryl Streep and Robert Redford), he can slip into the role of an oily, scheming senator in Lions for Lambs. If he’s in the mood to mock Hollywood, he can take an unbilled cameo as a balding, ball-busting studio exec in Tropic Thunder. “When I was working with Ben Stiller, I said, ‘I want to play this character, but I’ve got to dance,'” says Cruise. “I haven’t danced that much since Risky Business!” And if he wants to make you see the good in something that the whole world views as monolithically evil (Nazi Germany), well, he can do that, too. Do you really doubt he can pull it off? To get Valkyrie made, he had to win over a country that was trying outlaw his religion (…) and refused to let him shoot at the army’s historic Berlin headquarters, the Benderblock. … but the star prevailed. “That was always just a small group,” he says of his German critics. “When there was finally dialogue between us and they realized what it was we were doing with the story, they relented. This was a hard movie to make on many levels—but that was just one challenge.”

He clearly felt a connection to Stauffenberg, his crisis of conscience and his conflicting loyalties. “Certain decisions at points in my life … I absolutely related,” he says. “Stauffenberg went from saying, ‘Someone should shoot that bastard’ to realizing, I’m the only one who can do it. You can’t really know until you’re under that kind of pressure. I’m not saying this in some chest-pounding way, but I do feel I’d have that kind of courage.”

No one would or could script this but Tom Cruise. “It’s about doing the right thing,” he says, “but also about finding out what the right thing is. You know what I mean? I do feel that this movie was the right thing to do … I love movies. Yeah, man, I love movies!”

“Look—she’s out,” he says, back in his whispered voice. “Asleep.” And then he excuses himself to return to his 2-year-old daughter—perhaps the one person who sees him as anything but the most powerful star on the planet.

The full Power 40 List list is available here