Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio: who is king of Hollywood?
Once upon a time, Cruise was the world's undisputed alpha movie-star. But then he lost his crown to DiCaprio. So just what went wrong for him - and can he get back on top?
There is a story playing out right now in Hollywood that epitomises the perils of fame, the precariousness of success and the dangers of celebrities left unguarded. You can imagine it framed in the blockbuster vernacular, the voiceover delivered in the gravelly, portentous boom that comes as standard in every trailer: "Two men. One dream: to be the king of the multiplexes. But they dared to want more. They dared to want . . . integrity." Then the names and faces of two Hollywood behemoths would flash up on screen. Tom Cruise. Leonardo DiCaprio. Who will prevail?
Barring some dramatic turning of the tide, DiCaprio is now secure in his place as Hollywood's unimpeachable golden boy, while Cruise, the previous incumbent, is in danger of resembling the court jester. On paper, the pair still occupy similar territory. They aren't separated by much more than age (Cruise is 12 years older than DiCaprio) and a few million dollars. With two legitimate recent hits behind him in Shutter Island and Inception, DiCaprio can expect $28m per movie, while Cruise is still able to command $22m a throw. (Forbes magazine notes that "Cruise's career has been rocky lately", but attributes his ongoing fortune to revenue from "a string of older hits that constantly play on TV".) Both men have sought out many of the same directors including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg; DiCaprio is also close friends with Michael Mann, who cast Cruise in a rare bad-guy role in Collateral.
But it is in the management of their image that the stars begin to diverge. DiCaprio has policed himself efficiently, keeping his life largely private and expressing himself through his work. But with Cruise you never know what you're going to get next; and audiences cannot help but drag the baggage of his off-screen life to the cinema with them, which is the worst possible outcome for any actor.
Two revealing Cruise moments, both screened on British television in the last fortnight, testify to the extent to which his image has been corroded. The first was on BBC2's Top Gear last week. Cruise and Cameron Diaz, his co-star in the very poor shoot-'em-up comedy Knight and Day, consented to be interviewed mere metres away from the great unwashed, or Jeremy Clarkson as it says on his passport. To the casual observer, this appearance represented nothing more than a pair of A-listers unafraid to appear to be slumming it if it means spreading the word about their new movie. But to Cruise-watchers, the Top Gear gig was the latest desperate attempt by the star to rehabilitate a persona that has fallen starkly into disrepair over the last five years. He's trying to be seen as the guy next door whose dental work just happens to cost more than your house.
There have been numerous factors that have driven a wedge between the star and his public, but few of them date back to BC – that is, Before Couch. The notorious "couch-jumping" incident on Oprah Winfrey's chat show in 2005 is where the trouble really began. In the wake of a newspaper poll, which had expressed scepticism about his relationship with the actor Katie Holmes, Cruise sought to demonstrate his love for his then-fiancee (now wife, and mother of his daughter Suri) by leaping up and down on the most sacred couch on US television, and generally causing untold distress to Oprah's upholstery.
That brings us to the second Cruise moment of recent days, when appearing on Alan Carr's talk show, David Walliams professed his love for his own bride by performing a personal take on the Cruise episode. So ingrained is Cruise's Oprah appearance in our collective memory that no explanation was needed.
Watch the original clip again and it is clear that Cruise fully believed himself to be staging a winning display of devotion. What the world saw was something else entirely. "What happened, happened," Cruise told Esquire magazine earlier this year. "Afterward, wild things were being said about me, and once they're in the ether, there's nothing you can do about it. It felt like being the new kid in the schoolyard again and the other kids are whispering and whispering about you and suddenly you hear what they're saying, and you think, 'What? That didn't happen. Look at the reality of the situation.'"
At the same time that Cruise has suffered a steep, nosebleed-inducing depreciation, Leonardo DiCaprio has risen to fill the space vacated by him. DiCaprio has never really belonged to the same species of performer. At 36, he is 12 years younger than Cruise; and whereas the Top Gun pin-up always had his sights set on stardom, DiCaprio was an actor first, and a superstar entirely by accident. (Blame Titanic. He does.) However unconvincing some might find him as a grizzled adult in the likes of Blood Diamond and Shutter Island, there is no mistaking his relief now that he has traded in his pin-up status for a face that looks like it has been around the world a few times, even if just on a student visa.
In his earliest films (This Boy's Life, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?), DiCaprio was as full-blooded and fearless an actor as it was possible to find. He was also a natural. The young Cruise, on the other hand, had the motivation to succeed, but not the dramatic alchemy of a DiCaprio. In Richard T Kelly's oral biography Sean Penn: His Life and Times, Penn recalls some illuminating first impressions of the teenage Cruise when they worked together on the 1981 drama Taps: "This was a guy who was ready for his chance, no question about it. He wouldn't have known that himself – he was second-guessing everything all the time. But that didn't stop him from committing when it was time. Cruise was so . . . like he was training for the fucken Olympics. I think he was the first person I ever said 'Calm down!' to."
Cruise went on to do some nimble comic work as a rich kid out of his depth in the bawdy comedy Risky Business, and had a dignified flirtation with the brat pack in Francis Coppola's The Outsiders, but it was Top Gun in 1986 that both ratified him as a star, and eclipsed his potential as an actor. Not that being a star is easy. But for a long time, that's what Cruise was. Learning to be an actor again in films such as Born on the Fourth of July and Magnolia seemed to demand of him the gruelling development of an extra muscle, whereas the daily grind of celebrity – cranking up the charm, gladhanding fans and smooching babies, manipulating his public persona – came naturally.
It doesn't look so natural now. The more Cruise tries to avert continuing disaster, the more vulnerable he appears. After a series of damaging PR disasters, he is in danger of becoming a laughing stock. Knight and Day was a relative flop on its recent US release, pulling in just over $20m on its opening weekend – a fraction of its $107m budget. It's the lowest gross of any of Cruise's action films since Days of Thunder 20 years ago, and an unambiguous sign either that audiences are growing weary of the star's extravagant confidence, or that his extra-curricular tomfoolery has undermined his formerly palatable on-screen persona.
Meanwhile, DiCaprio is riding high. Christopher Nolan's Inception, in which he plays an "extractor" who enters the dreams of others, has dominated the world box office since its release last month; at the time of writing it has amassed a worldwide total of $363m and shows no sign of waning, with research indicating that audiences are making repeat visits to untangle its mysteries, however threadbare. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, DiCaprio admitted that he hadn't acted in the nine months since completing the film – he simply hasn't found the right project yet. And while he is scheduled to play J Edgar Hoover in a forthcoming biopic directed by Clint Eastwood and scripted by Dustin Lance Black (the Oscar-winning writer of Milk), he doesn't need to lift a finger until he's good and ready.
Cruise, on the other hand, hasn't got a moment to lose. Last month, David Thomson wrote in this paper that Inception was the sort of film that Cruise might have made a decade ago. And while the age difference, and disparity in acting styles, between the two performers means that they can't often have been rivals for the same parts, it's true that Cruise had his shot at Inception-style material with Vanilla Sky (a remake of the Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes) and Minority Report (a philosophical thriller far superior to Inception). But thanks to the decline in his image, he now lacks even the gravitas to solicit an audience's goodwill for an undemanding blockbuster such as Knight and Day.
The couch-jumping incident may have contributed to being dropped by the studio Paramount, which made the Mission: Impossible trilogy, but the general mistrust of Cruise has long been bound up with his vehement promotion of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard's extra-terrestrial-based religion. "As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal," said Sumner Redstone, chairman of Paramount's parent company Viacom, when news broke of the studio severing its ties to the star in 2006. "His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."
That euphemistic phrase "recent conduct" covered not just the couch-jumping but Cruise's messy public spat with Brooke Shields (the star of the 1981 film Endless Love, in which Cruise had an early, supporting role), during which he berated her for fighting post-partum depression with psychiatry and anti-depressants, both bugbears of any card-carrying Scientologist.
He later apologised to his former co-star, but other rapprochements were longer in coming. Shortly after his outburst at Shields, he got into a verbal tussle about Scientology with US television host Matt Lauer on The Today Show. Part of Cruise's delayed damage-limitation campaign in recent times has involved returning to The Today Show to reflect on his behaviour. "I went back, and looked at [the interview]," he told Lauer in December 2008, "and it was interesting . . . I came across as arrogant. . . I didn't communicate it in the way I wanted to communicate it. Also, that's not the way I am. That's not the person I am."
Cruise has since resolved not to discuss Scientology in interviews – "I think there's a time and place for it," he told Lauer – but there is no disentangling him from the subject. In any word-association game, you will invariably find that the words "Tom Cruise" are followed by "Xenu, dictator of the Galactic Confederacy." His PR representatives seem to have been disappointingly slow to realise that, if you're an actor hunting for widespread approval, you don't do Scientology.
Even here, on the subject of public proclamations, DiCaprio has the edge over the older man. Where Cruise has been aggressive and passionate only in his promotion of his chosen religion, DiCaprio reserves his soapbox moments for selfless causes that most of us can get behind – he has campaigned on environmental matters (he co-produced and narrated the environmental documentary 11th Hour), worked with orphaned children in Mozambique, given $1m to relief efforts in Haiti. Cruise couldn't look much worse if he were to speak out against composting, or be snapped in a clinch with Sarah Palin.
Despite all the strikes against him, Cruise still has certain things in his favour. On the plus side, he isn't Mel Gibson. And he has plenty of chums willing to spring to his defence. "He's a friend of mine and I find it very unfair," James Mangold, director of Knight and Day, said recently. "I think there are wildly unrealistic expectations placed upon him. Tom's an intense guy. He's very physical but there's something really funny about him and joyous and also, to be honest, something eccentric about him; how hard-working he is, how intense he is . . . The part of it that is most concerning for me is I just think he's a phenomenal actor and some people deal with him as if he's a lightweight. The reality is that he has delivered some of the best performances in movie history."
The pressing question is how can Cruise recast himself in the public imagination, and can he recover his Hollywood crown? He has tried to kill off his old persona before, notably in Cameron Crowe's film Jerry Maguire, which began with the sports agent played by Cruise undergoing a humiliating sacking. Even Knight and Day seems to acknowledge that the days of the old Tom Cruise are numbered; in his first scene in the movie, he is shown at the controls of an arcade game which tells him: "You're dead."
When he appeared in a cameo role as the monstrous studio boss Len Grossman in Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, audiences responded enthusiastically to the spectre of a star renowned for his seriousness ditching his looks and lustre to play an outlandish comic caricature. His recent reprise of the role at the MTV movie awards, where he danced lasciviously in-character with Jennifer Lopez, preceded an announcement that Grossman would get his own spin-off movie. Even those of us who feel that the potential comedy of Cruise as Grossman is undercut by the actor's transparent need to be seen to have a sense of humour would be hard pressed to argue against this strategy.
Simon Pegg, who starred in Mission: Impossible III told me last month that he is rooting for Cruise. "It all started with that couch-jumping thing, didn't it? It just seems so stupid. Having worked with him, I know he's a very friendly and professional guy. I hope people give him a break. I want to see him carry on making movies for a long time to come."
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