Tom Cruise is at once the last of his era and an entirely modern screen personality: a hard-working, seemingly ageless action man from the producer-driven 80s who still takes to Twitter every now and then to connect with his almost seven million followers.
Now Cruise may have inadvertently filmed 2020’s most relevant piece of short footage, by simply documenting his journey to a London cinema to catch Christopher Nolan’s troubled blockbuster Tenet.
After all, if any star’s going to pull off the death-defying stunt of sitting in a stuffy room with about a hundred other strangers during a global, air-borne pandemic, it had to be Tom Cruise. He’s even joined by his Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie, who could be scouting for new ideas on how to plunge the actor into cinematically dangerous situations.
Captioned simply and abruptly ‘Big Movie. Big Screen. Loved it.’, the video barely goes for half a minute, but it packs in plenty of weird celebrity moments that might make you sit back and freak out at the machinations of worldwide fame.
Firstly, there’s Cruise getting recognised by pedestrians when his taxi briefly stops by the side of a road. “How does that happen?”, he grins. “I’m wearing a mask.”
Big Movie. Big Screen. Loved it. pic.twitter.com/DrAY5tRg5P
— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) August 25, 2020
Then there’s Cruise’s vented face mask, which Twitter commenters were quick to point out may actually be spreading traces of Cruise’s famous bacteria into the fairly packed movie theatre every time he breathes. A nice lil bonus for cinephiles in the audience!
Oh, look, it's Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie in a London screening of Tenet that looks way too crowded given the circumstances.
For bonus points, Tom is wearing a mask with a valve filter on it. pic.twitter.com/329BBNuHbM
— Mathew Buck (@FB_BMB) August 25, 2020
Applauding the film as it ends, Cruise leaves the cinema, his exit lit by a huge white spotlight. He blesses everyone in attendance with a downright mayoral, “Great to be back in a movie theatre, everybody!”
Judging from the sound of the applause and the already-considerable amount of moviegoers we can see in frame, the general public seems to be in agreement. Whether you think going to the cinema in a packed theatre is safe right now or not, it’s evident that large swathes of movie fans, and even some movie stars, are keen to get their butts back into multiplex seating at any cost.
For what it’s worth, I’m just salty his face mask wasn’t a hyper-realistic Mission: Impossible-style full-face latex extravaganza. Go hard or go home, Cruise.
