T om Cruise appeared in my fridge last week. There he was, compact and smiling, next to my pesto and cheeses. OK, he wasn’t.
But I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had been. Cruise has spent the summer making cameos where you’d least expect him. He was snapped watching Coldplay at Glastonbury in June.
And, a week earlier, at Wembley to watch Taylor Swift . He was spotted boogie-ing at Victoria Beckham’s 50th birthday party in April, and sitting in the Royal Box at Wimbledon in July. At the London premiere of Twisters that same month, he was photographed taking part in an only vaguely eerie movie-star-transference ritual with his heir apparent Glen Powell.
Now he’s due to rappel down the Stade de France as part of the closing ceremony at the Paris Olympics. Sounds about right. But why is the world’s most famously unknowable movie star suddenly so keen on leaving the house? In fact, Cruise does this a lot.
He locks himself away for long periods, stewing in his own mystery, then emerges with a grin – the most famous man in the world whom we officially know nothing about. I say “officially”, because we all think “we know” things about Tom Cruise. If anything, we all think we know too much about Tom Cruise.
His religion. His family. His sex life.
His, well, eccentricities. But I’m not sure we actually do. Cruise has existed in this strange netherworld between total ambiguity and stratospheric über-fame for more than a decade now, ever since Katie Holmes.