Do we like Tom Cruise?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record on harm to groups and a good name with co-stars, held back by a 2005 on-air attack on a fellow actor's medical choices and the Scientology allegations.
Tom Cruise has been a film star for more than 40 years, with four competitive Oscar nominations and, until November 2025, no wins. That month the Academy handed him an honorary Oscar, presented by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. His speech was pure film-nerd stuff: making movies is not what he does, it is who he is.
The messiest chapter is 2005. On the Today show he told Matt Lauer there was no such thing as a chemical imbalance, after attacking actor Brooke Shields over how she treated her postpartum depression. Shields later wrote that he visited her home to apologise, saying he had felt cornered by Lauer. She said she accepted it. That's the closest thing to a harm mark on his record: an anti-psychiatry rant aimed at a real person, which he walked back.
Then there's Scientology. Leah Remini alleged in 2018 that Cruise gets near-divine treatment inside the church and said she was told he once punished a senior member on David Miscavige's orders. That was secondhand, she said. The church rejected all of it as false and called her interview a publicity stunt. We found no response from Cruise himself, so treat it as an allegation, not a finding.
On the harm test proper, nothing turned up in his own words or acts against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. He has also kept out of politics, so there's no record to judge there. When agent Maha Dakhil copped a backlash over her Instagram posts about Gaza in 2023, Variety reported he made it known he was backing her. Where you land on that depends on how you read her posts, but it is loyalty, not campaigning.
On how he treats people, the picture is mostly warm. Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff and Glen Powell have all described generous gifts and thoughtful gestures from him. The flip side is a temper. In 2020 a leaked recording published by The Sun caught him shouting at Mission: Impossible 7 crew he believed had broken Covid rules, with a warning that a repeat would get them fired. The New York Times and Variety sources said it was him, and reaction split between people who cheered the safety stance and people who hated the tone.
Right now the story is Digger, a big-swing dark comedy that has tanked at the box office. A flop is not a character flaw, and he has stood by the film publicly. The projects we found alongside it did not raise any red flags about the company he keeps.