{"id":603816,"date":"2026-09-18T01:44:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T01:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/603816\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T01:44:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T01:44:12","slug":"tom-cruises-oddball-interview-left-us-with-more-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/603816\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Cruise\u2019s oddball interview left us with more questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Q: How did this come about? Because, as you noted, Tom Cruise does not do many or any sit-downs.<\/p>\n

Baron: The way it came about was that we asked and he said yes. I know that\u2019s a somewhat boring answer, but that\u2019s what it boils down to.<\/p>\n

Q: When he says yes, do you try to figure out, \u201cWhy is he doing this?\u201d<\/p>\n

Baron: You\u2019ll notice that there\u2019s a part in the interview where I ask about this, and people can listen to his answer and see if it makes sense to them or not. If I\u2019m honest, I\u2019m still not sure if I know the answer.<\/p>\n

Q: Many of us felt that way. You also ask him about turning 64 and, specifically, \u201cDoes that mean anything to you?\u201d He says, \u201cIt means I\u2019m 64.\u201d And when you ask why he\u2019s doing the interview, there\u2019s this rambling answer that includes an odd observation that \u201cwhen people see a movie, you want it to look easy\u201d, and then he\u2019s off talking about going to Prague and China and Dubai.<\/p>\n

Baron: You see me, I followed up twice to get an answer there.<\/p>\n

Q: Zach, I\u2019m going to preface this question by saying your work has always struck me as quite remarkable and well done. That said, this interview drove me a little bonkers, and I know that I\u2019m not alone. And it makes me think: What do you do in a situation where you have this rare opportunity to get time with somebody who doesn\u2019t ever do interviews, but they basically evade your questions?<\/p>\n

Baron: This is maybe a bigger topic than the one you\u2019re writing about today, but you and I both know that journalism has moved toward this style of video interviewing or podcasting, and I actually think in this case it\u2019s really valuable. As a print journalist, it can sometimes be hard to communicate an interaction like the one that you\u2019re describing and the one I experienced. The cool thing about this one is everybody can kind of watch it \u2026 You get a lot of information that isn\u2019t always in the form of a quote, which is how Tom and I are interacting and his body language. What is the pause like? What is his laugh like? What do his face and his eyes look like? This is all, I think, really fascinating.<\/p>\n

Q: So when you\u2019re sitting there doing that, you know you have cameras on, are you at all tempted to say: \u201cTom, let\u2019s just stop right here. You are not answering anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baron: I don\u2019t really think there is a right way for a subject to handle an interview. You can look at me and what I ask and what I don\u2019t ask and the job I do. But you\u2019re asking what I think in that moment. And what I\u2019m thinking is, \u201cThis is how this person is responding,\u201d and I\u2019m not judging it much one way or another. And when I say that, I mean that genuinely. I genuinely respect people\u2019s right to answer how they want to answer. I find the way that they answer questions often as illuminating as what they say. And in the case of Tom, I found the way he answered those questions to be quite illuminating, even if you are correct that there are moments where he\u2019s not directly answering my questions.<\/p>\n

Q: I also saw a post from a journalist who was not happy that you didn\u2019t mention Scientology or his daughter Suri, among other things. I\u2019d also like to hear about Cruise\u2019s feelings toward Trump or anything political. You didn\u2019t bring up any of this. Were you tempted?<\/p>\n

Baron: One of the things I did for this interview is just prepare and read every interview Tom Cruise has ever done. And he\u2019s actually kind of talked extensively about this stuff. I get people\u2019s interest in it. I think that I was trying to have a conversation that was oriented around this modern moment and him as a movie star. Him as a reclusive famous person, him as an object of fascination for a generation. I understand that people kind of want to see him jump on the couch again or have a kind of tabloid moment, where maybe he gets angry or something. I think there\u2019s plenty of moments in this interview where you actually can see him get pretty frustrated. But that wasn\u2019t really the thing I was after.<\/p>\n

Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post\u2019s national arts reporter, covers everything from fine arts to popular culture. He\u2019s the author of \u2018Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Q: How did this come about? Because, as you noted, Tom Cruise does not do many or any…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603817,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[66037,42153,25819,156,1888,5620,101,130,111,139,69,297542,297543,112533,17146,5970,4525,5436,5134,3040,102,1530],"class_list":["post-603816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-chat","tag-cruises","tag-deep","tag-entertainment","tag-first","tag-interview","tag-left","tag-more","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-oddball","tag-oncamera","tag-pitched","tag-questions","tag-really","tag-something","tag-stars","tag-tom","tag-us","tag-with","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}