Tom Cruise always avoids the eyes of other drivers. Zipping confidently through midday Los Angeles traffic in his blue Porsche Carrera, he obscures himself with a baseball cap and sunglasses. Pausing at a light, a car to his left, he discreetly raises his tinted window.
But he can't avoid himself. On the trip from Fox Studios to downtown Hollywood, he is driving straight toward an enormous billboard for Minority Report, his dark and timely new movie directed by Steven Spielberg, opening this week. Stuck in traffic, he gazes up at his famous profile and laughs. "The kids always go, 'There's Dad!'" he says. "I remember seeing a Risky Business billboard on Sunset. That was pretty exciting."
This year, on July 3 to be precise, the irrepressible young actor who danced in his skivvies in Risky Business in 1983 will turn 40. The braces he has been wearing on his teeth for four months ("My mouth wasn't closing properly," he explains) seem as if they should only add to his preternatural boyishness, but the crow's-feet around his eyes suggest a seasoning and maturity that weren't much in evidence before. After 23 films that have grossed more than $2 billion at the box office, Cruise maintains an uncanny ability to excite audiences. At the same time, he is respected and even well liked by many in an industry where his colleagues almost invariably root for only two things: the L.A. Lakers and one another's failures.
He has handled his career the way he drives his Porsche, moving steadily and carefully forward, idling as little as possible. Since 1996, while enriching the coffers of Paramount and his own production company with the Mission: Impossible action movies (a third, to be directed by David Fincher, is in development), he has stretched himself as an actor and received Oscar nominations for riskier roles in Jerry Maguire and Magnolia. Cruise is famously professional and polite, on time and always prepared, Hollywood's eagle scout. His not-so-secret craving is for control, starting with himself but not ending there. For one crucial scene in Minority Report, Cruise was required to submerge himself in a bathtub, then emit a solitary air bubble from one nostril. "Don't worry if you can't do it," Spielberg told him. "I can do it with [special effects]." Cruise insisted on doing it himself. "I kept practicing," says Cruise, sitting next to Spielberg in an office on the Fox lot. "I had to figure out how to get the air and then just control my nostril." Spielberg interjects with a smile: "This is something that Lee Strasberg can't teach."
But what he seems to have perfected--on film and in life--is the ability to win you over, to be liked without really being known. He is solicitous. He laughs at your jokes. He is curious without being prying. He looks you in the eye. He even asks your advice: before making a U-turn in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, he says, "Should I do it?" You ask, "What do you do when the cops catch you?" He answers, "I hand out a few autographs."