Unless there’s been an underground cloning experiment that I’m unaware of, it’s safe to say there’s nobody quite like Tom Cruise. With a career now spanning 45 years, and with no real falloff in sight — he’s going from wacky method-acting in Digger back to the Days of Thunder racetrack with Anne Hathaway — the actor/producer remains one of the only Hollywood icons who still fulfills the idealized definition of a “movie star.” So you’d think he’d spend his free time unwinding as much as possible, right?
Ha! This is Tom Cruise we’re talking about, people. Decompressing and spending time away from the industry just doesn’t appear to be part of his programming at this point, and his passion for filmmaking remains everpresent. Perhaps the best example of this intense devotion is his answer to the general question “What do you do when you’re not making movies?” When asked this during his GQ profile interview, Cruise simply stated:
I’m preparing for the next.
Which is one of those answers that could be received as impersonal coming from the mouth of so many other people. But with Cruise, it’s extremely easy to believe that there’s more truth to that statement than not.
The article notes his go-to maxim regarding his work-life balance — “Making films is not what I do. It is who I am,” — and there’s a clear throughline there that he hasn’t really strayed from much in the past 15 years or so of his career. (Not that he didn’t hold to that in earlier years, but he seemingly doubled down after his divorce from Katie Holmes.) He can speak to practically any element within the business, from camera specs to the intricacies of stunt work to pulling off the perfect shot.
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Would all of his death-defying Mission: Impossible stunts and his return for Top Gun: Maverick have been so successful without Cruise remaining dedicated to the cause during his off-time? Anything’s possible, but his fans love him for maintaining his own status quo that never has him further than an arm’s length from one Hollywood project or another.
To be fair, Tom Cruise is capable of doing things in his personal life that aren’t directly in service of developing his next project. He’s visiting movie sets like Star Wars: Starfighter, he’s sitting next to Taylor Swift at NFL games, and he’s got quite a talent with motorcycles and piloting smaller aircraft.
For all interview intents and purposes, though, Cruise makes it clear that he’s far more interested in discussing his fascination with the art of filmmaking than he is addressing the fascination that moviegoers have with him and his personal life. Gotta give him props for taking on that approach even before social media made privacy that much harder to come by.
For funsies, I went back to see if I could find Cruise talking in the more distant past about what he did for fun when he wasn’t filming. And I came across an interview with US from January 1993, where he shared this about his (and then-wife Nicole Kidman’s) free time.
We do a lot of things, we’re very active. We go to museums, we read, we skydive, we have a lot of common interests. We spend time with family and friends. We go to movies, to plays.
Of course Tom Cruise was already in his skydiving element at that point. I wonder if he got into it before or after Point Break hit theaters the year prior. Also, how was he not in that movie?
Find Cruise in one of his most unpredictable roles yet with Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger hitting theaters on October 2, 2026.
