Tom Cruise is such a mysterious and personal person. He tends to stay out of the spotlight these days (after a few years of highly publicized scrutiny), and mostly emerges when he is filming a video during a death-defying stunt or promoting his latest blockbuster. Because Cruise’s latest movie Top Gun: Maverick is in the ongoing awards race, however, he is becoming an easy target for award-show hosts. During the most recent Golden Globes ceremony, comedian Jerrod Carmichael took a swing at Cruise for his commitment to Scientology. And Judd Apatow joined the chorus while emceeing the Directors Guild of America Awards over the weekend.
Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski was in the field of directors competing for the DGA on Saturday, and while he lost to The Daniels (for helming the magnificent Everything Everywhere All At Once), his presence opened the door for Judd Apatow to take some well-timed shots at Cruise and his lifestyle. The DGAs are not televised, but Variety ran some of Apatow’s jokes, which started off by going after Cruise’s height. The director/comedian said:
The special effects in ‘Maverick’ were so top notch, I couldn’t even see the stack of phone books Tom Cruise sat on to reach the flight controls.
Tom Cruise often gets discussed for being shorter than his co-stars. Though, the dirty secret about some of your favorite movie stars is that a great many of them are short. Or, shorter than you might expect. Apatow didn’t stop there, however, taking aim at Cruise’s belief in Scientology, and linking that to the harrowing stunts that the 60-year-old actor pulls off on his own. Well, with the help of an enormous support system. Apatow joked:
Remember when Tom Cruise jumped up and down on the couch and we all thought, ‘What a lunatic!' And now he rides a motorcycle off a cliff and BASE jumps and we’re all like, ‘Tom’s fine!' Tom is not fine. Someone needs to explain to him something called CGI. You’re 60. Calm down. But every time he does one of these new stunts, it does feel like an ad for Scientology. I mean, is that in Dianetics? Because there’s nothing about jumping off a cliff in the Torah.
Judd Apatow didn’t reserve all of his jokes for Tom Cruise. The DGA host also took aim at Austin Butler for the way he has stayed in his Elvis voice since filming has wrapped. Then he took dual shots at his longtime leading man Seth Rogen, and legendary director Steven Spielberg, for their collaboration on The Fabelmans.
Steven Spielberg made a deeply personal movie, which just shows you how much you can accomplish once you start smoking pot with Seth Rogen. Spielberg stole Seth Rogen from me, and I’m not cool with it. I’m gonna make a fucking movie with E.T.!
Because Tom Cruise rarely finds himself on the receiving end of harsh jokes, we don’t know how he is taking it. Hopefully he realizes that these jabs all are in good fun. And at the very least, we know that he didn’t storm the stage, Will Smith style, and take out his aggressions on Judd Apatow’s face. So that’s a positive.
