Tom has given an interview to Playboy, here’s a part of it, read the rest at Playboy.com website.
For 20 years Tom Cruise was the closest thing to a sure bet Hollywood had, shining on-screen and endearing himself to studios by working as hard promoting his films as he did making them. He surrounded himself with great filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Michael Mann, and stood toe-to-toe with such vets as Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman. His movies have grossed well over $7 billion, earning him hundreds of millions of dollars.
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As he nears 50, Cruise has put his temporary career crisis in the rearview mirror and is once again among the handful of stars whose participation gets a movie made. Seven years after being on the precipice, Cruise is coming off the biggest box office hit of his career in Mission: -Impossible—Ghost Protocol, a crowd-pleasing film he also produced. It reunited him with Redstone’s Paramount Pictures, for which he just completed One Shot, an adaptation of Lee Child’s popular novel built around Jack Reacher. Cruise continues to take calculated risks: In the books, Reacher is a six-foot-five, 250-pound mass of muscle who towers over the bad guys and tears them apart bare-handed. Cruise is about five-foot-seven and maybe 160 pounds.
In Rock of Ages, which comes out this summer, he plays a decadent 1980s rock icon named -Stacee Jaxx. It’s the first movie in which he sings.
To catch up with Cruise, playboy sent Michael Fleming to the Baton Rouge set of Oblivion, a postapocalyptic sci-fi thriller that was just getting under way. Fleming reports: “For all the adversity he endured the past half decade, I’m not sure I’ve ever met an actor who seems as content and comfortable in his own skin as Cruise. Despite the media fixation on his life, the industry has always loved his work ethic, and his fan base is still there. His life is a lot simpler than many might imagine. He works hard and keeps his family, including his mother and sisters, close to his side. He dotes on wife Katie and his children, Bella and Connor (from his marriage to Nicole Kidman) and Suri, his daughter with Holmes. Cruise flashes his trademark smile often as he talks about what seems like a great life, but he has also learned a lot in the past few years as he rescued his own career.â€
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PLAYBOY: You turn 50 on July 3. It’s a time most men are battling a gut, getting colonoscopies, losing their hair and monitoring their blood pressure. How is it you look about half your age?
CRUISE: I honestly have no idea. [laughs] I work. I’m always with family. I train, go without sleep. I just go hard.
PLAYBOY: You’re not wrinkling up like a lot of your peers. Have you had, or would you get, cosmetic surgery?
CRUISE: I haven’t, and I never would.
PLAYBOY: What does this dubious milestone mean to you?
CRUISE: When I made Taps, really my first film experience, I remember lying at night in the hotel room, thinking, I love this so much. I’d wanted it since I was four, and there I was, thinking that if I did my best on Taps, maybe I could do this for the rest of my life. Turning 50, when I’m still doing this, is okay. On July 3 I’ll be in Iceland, filming on my birthday. My family, my wife, they understand. It’s who I am. I’ve spent many birthdays on a movie set, all great days.
PLAYBOY: What have you learned that you didn’t know 20 years ago?
CRUISE: I’ve always had the same values. Family for me has always been important. When I shoot, everybody comes. When Kate’s shooting, I’m there with her and the kids. We’re always together. I’m always around my mother and sisters. I always wanted to be a father, a husband. And I’ve always had a work ethic. I’ve had paying jobs since I was about eight years old—cutting grass, raking leaves, paper routes, selling Easter cards and Christmas cards.
