Star of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has avoided any and all Scientology questions and instead leaned into the role of Movie Savior

There are movie stars and then there is Tom Cruise. Forty years a star, enough classics to make listing even a few here pointless, and, now, someone who can stake a legitimate claim to saving Hollywood (or at least jolting some life into that lazy, bloated monstrosity). Last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, with its millions at the box office, helped rescue the movies and movie theaters from the brink of Covid-19 and streaming. This year’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh and ostensibly penultimate installment of the secret agent series, should reach similar heights. Tom Cruise is as big as he’s ever been — a feat as staggering as any Ethan Hunt stunt.

Because then there’s all the other stuff. The Scientology of it all. The Church’s interminable history of alleged abuses and misconduct and Cruise’s status as its most prominent figure, a high-ranking member with deep ties to leader David Miscavige. Cruise has been a Scientologist for nearly as long as he’s been a star, his introduction to the Church reportedly brokered around 1986 (the same year Top Gun came out) by his first wife Mimi Rogers. A lot has allegedly happened in that time, from the harrowing accusations against the Church itself (abuse, trafficking, forced labor, to name a few, all of which the Church has denied), to the various claims about Cruise’s relationship with it (the alleged arrangement of romantic partners, for one, which the Church has also denied).

And yet, none of it’s ever really caught up with Cruise, let alone dragged him down. Even Alex Gibney, who directed the damning Scientology doc Going Clear (based on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name), admitted to Rolling Stonerecently that he was “surprised” Cruise had avoided any kind of reckoning.

“There are stories about him that, if one could get people to go on the record, would be shocking,” Gibney said. “But they have to be willing to do it. And so far, they haven’t been.” (Cruise did not respond to a request for comment.)

It’s easy to let one’s imagination run wild with known unknowns (just ask Donald Rumsfeld — or don’t, actually); but the thing is, there’s already a lot we do know about Tom Cruise and Scientology. It’s not some nasty secret stashed away. It barely qualifies as dirty laundry at this point. We’ve had years of tell-alls, exposés, memoirs, documentaries, lawsuits, even one unforgettable episode of South Park. At the most recent Oscars and Golden Globes, where Top Gun: Maverick was fêted with multiple nominations (and even won an Academy Award for Best Sound), hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Jerrod Carmichael both joked about it. They weren’t even subtle or winking, like the kind of jokes 30 Rock made about Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein years before the full extent of their alleged transgressions were revealed. Carmichael flat-out said the three Golden Globes Cruise returned in protest of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association should be exchanged for Shelly Miscavige — David’s wife, who hasn’t been seen in public since 2007.

With Tom Cruise, it’s yet to reach the point where we, as a culture, are devastated, disheveled, distraught, screaming, “He can’t keep getting away with it!” He remains deeply beloved, and not even in an unsettling,upsettingway, like some of our other prominent problematic actors. And it has everything to do with the way Cruise has thrown himself completely into his work over the past 10 years or so — the way he’s effectively replaced Scientology with a different public-facing religion: The Movies.

There was a brief window where it was possible the Tom Cruise/Scientology partnership would end in some kind of mutual assured destruction. The man was on an absolute tear in the mid-2000s, railing against psychology and pharmaceuticals, scolding Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants, then doubling down during a contentious interview with Matt Lauer. It was a time when Cruise was willing to sit down with a major publication like Rolling Stone for a wide-ranging, on-the-record interview, and give quotes like: “If you really want to know, get What Is Scientology?, the book, and look at it, because that’s what Scientology is. It’s a very large body of knowledge with tools that are available. It’s ah… it really is the shit, man.”

Shockingly, this didn’t exactly endear Cruise or the Church to the culture at large. A 2008 incident is telling: Hackers obtained and leaked an internal Church video that featured Cruise, full Steve Jobs mode in a black turtleneck, extolling the virtues of Scientology; there was also footage of Cruise accepting the Church’s “Freedom Medal of Valor” and saluting Miscavige. In response, the Church not only tried to wipe the video from the web, but cast doubt on its authenticity, claiming it was “pirated and edited.” By the end of that year, Cruise was apologizing to Lauer for acting “arrogant” and declining to answer interviewer questions about Scientology.

The first half of the 2010s saw more bad press with the release of Wright’s book and Gibney’s doc, as well as the high-profile defection of Leah Remini. Cruise even endured some self-inflicted wounds after filing a defamation suit against the tabloid Life & Style, which had run a story claiming Cruise had abandoned his daughter, Suri, with ex-wife Katie Holmes. In a 2013 deposition, he was forced to admit that Scientology had played a role in his divorce from Holmes, and that Holmes told him she wanted to protect their daughter from the Church. (The lawsuit ultimately settled out of court.)

But by that point, Cruise had weathered the worst of the storm he’d largely wrought upon himself. His M.O. was simple: keep quiet and make movies — and the movies he made were good. Thanks to a creative partnership with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, he revived the Mission: Impossible franchise and also dropped a few fan favorites, like Jack Reacher and Edge of Tomorrow. (The two also worked together on The Mummy, though, so clearly no one’s perfect.)

Action flicks have always been a core component of the Cruise oeuvre; but after a versatile first 20 years as an actor, his focus narrowed on them in the 2000s, and since then, that focus seems to have only hardened into a raison d’être. There’s little doubt Cruise loves these kinds of movies and the work that goes into not only doing the stunts, but building the characters and stories to make those set pieces worthwhile. But “Tom Cruise, Action Hero” is also an appealing prospect and PR win: If you’re an organization beset by controversy and accusation, why wouldn’t you want your poster boy constantly saving the world?

But action flicks have suited Cruise similarly well in this era of muted public association with Scientology. Amidst the ceaseless rise of green screen tech and CGI tricks, and the Marvel-ization of blockbuster cinema, Cruise remains one of the crazy, blessed few still willing to throw himself out of a plane in service of the noble causes of storytelling and entertainment. That willingness to fully embody Ethan Hunt or Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is a great way to make people not necessarily forget, but stop worrying so much about L. Ron Hubbard, or Xenu, or Shelly Miscavige. Or from wondering, when was the last time Tom Cruise saw his daughter?

It certainly helped, too, that whenever Cruise went out to promote one of his new movies, he was never asked about any of that. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation came out just a few months after Gibney’s Going Clear in 2015, and there’s nothing in the press cycle to suggest the doc was ever broached with Cruise on record. (One reporter got a very generic comment from Cruise the following year at the London premiere of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the actor calling Scientology a “beautiful religion” and “something that has helped me incredibly in my life.”) Instead, in these heavily moderated interviews and red carpet chats, he mostly talked about The Movies — his current movie, his next movie, his old movies, other people’s movies, and, maybe his favorite topic of all, the process of making movies.

Cruise would’ve probably kept chugging along like this, but Covid-19 added a new dimension. When audio leaked in late 2020 of Cruise upbraiding Mission: Impossible crew members for not following pandemic protocols, the overall reaction was less shock, more awe. His dedication to making this movie was absolute, imbued with a clear-eyed understanding of the existential threat Covid-19 posed to the film industry. He backed up those words with the fight to keep Top Gun: Maverick off streaming and ensure it safely landed in theaters. He was handsomely rewarded with box office receipts, rave reviews, and respect from his peers. “You saved Hollywood’s ass,” Steven Spielberg told him at an Oscars luncheon earlier this year, “you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously.”

Even at the height of his public association with Scientology, The Movies were like a kind of religion for Cruise. In 2002, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences needed someone to validate the existence and value of film and the film industry after 9/11, it called on Cruise, and he delivered. You can see shades of it as far back as 1984, two years before his introduction to Scientology, in the way he discusses movies as a vehicle for betterment and serenity: “I’m interested in my personal growth, what’s going to make me happy. Not how much money am I gonna make, not what film is gonna really make me more visible.”

But without the pandemic, Cruise’s embrace of The Movies as his public-facing religion may not have reached such a full expression. What he says about The Movies hasn’t really changed that much, but now it’s shot through with the aura of the savior. With that irrepressible conviction and charisma, he has that preacher’s ability to turn repeated platitudes into mantras or prayers. (Seriously, his reliance on the bit about how, ever since he was four he wantednothing morethan to make moviesand travel the world, has arguably surpassed Lady Gaga/100-people-in-a-room levels of ridiculousness — and yet it’s still kinda charming). And what other way is there to look at Cruise’s stunt work than the fearless devotions of a man willing to martyr himself for the thing he loves?

This is not to argue that The Movies has supplanted the Church of Scientology in Cruise’s private life, too. Despite the public distance, there’s no evidence that Cruise has recently drifted from, left, or ever intends to leave the Church. And therein lies the obvious complication: Tom Cruise, Action Hero was already a reliable way to take people’s minds off Tom Cruise, Scientologist; Tom Cruise, Action Hero and Savior of The Movies, is even better. The benefit to Cruise is clear — the continuation of his career and copious amounts of goodwill. You can even speculate as to the benefit for the Church itself: After all the bad press, investigations, and lawsuits, with membership reportedly declining, Cruise’s success may still be a beacon for those in it, a totem to clutch and claim only they understand its true value and power.

As for the rest of us, we seem to have reached a cordial stalemate with Cruise. We’ve delayed his reckoning — maybe forever, maybe only for now — allowed him to float above the level of a Mark Wahlberg, or worse, a Mel Gibson. And that’s because, as much as Tom Cruise, Action Hero and Savior of the Movies is good PR, it’s also who he is, who he’s always been. Despite everything else he believes, he still believes in The Movies.

There’s a famous tidbit about how Thomas Cruise Mapother IV spent a year in seminary school as a teenager before he started acting. Tom Cruise has always insisted Thomas Mapother was never actually close to becoming a priest, but the episode still encapsulates the zealous streak in his character, an irrepressible yearning for knowledge and understanding, his belief in, or need for, a higher calling or power. And before he found an outlet for all that in Scientology, he found it in acting and making movies. It’s still there. The proof is everywhere, even when he’s just looking a camera dead in the eye, smiling, and saying, “I love my popcorn. Movies, popcorn.”