Tom Cruise slammed for saying nothing about Suri — or anything ‘at all’

In case you missed the significance of Tom Cruise’s friendly, luxury-box get-together with Taylor Swift at Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs game Monday night, the famously elusive mega-star is in the process of trying to re-introduce himself to the world.

Cruise needs to garner headlines right now because he has an important new movie coming out, so he made sure to be photographed with one of the most famous women in the world. But unlike another “Mission: Impossible” installment, his new film, “Digger,” presents the 64-year-old star with his biggest professional risk in a long time. The black comedy, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, represents his first original, non-sequel, non-action film since 2007. That means he has to remind people that he can also be a serious artist worthy of a best actor Oscar, not just “the guy who just flings himself off a variety of increasingly berserk surfaces,” as The Guardian writer Stuart Heritage said.

For that reason, Cruise sat down for his first long-form-style interview in some 20 years, and GQ magazine and its writer Zach Baron gave him ample opportunity to let the world know what he’s all about these days. But, as it turns out, there’s not much there to Cruise other than some of the things things we’ve been hearing about for years: that he’s intense, driven and cares a lot about making movies. Cruise “talked and talked and said nothing at all,” Heritage said.

Presenting GQ’s October global cover star: Tom Cruise.

It’s been 20 years since @TomCruise last appeared on the cover of GQ, and, in some ways, he’s living like it’s 2006 again.

He’s taking his riskiest creative swing in decades in #DiggerMovie—and delivering GQ a rare… pic.twitter.com/EIsfeAO7MK

— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) September 15, 2026

Of course, it’s not surprising that Cruise would be guarded and that he would avoid going anywhere near any of the sensational allegations that have been made about his personal life in the past two decades, including in a 2012 blockbuster Vanity Fair report and in the Emmy-winning 2015 documentary, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.” Those claims cover the demise of his three marriages; published reports that he worked to alienate his two adopted children from his second ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, because she didn’t want to become a Scientologist; and his estrangement from Suri, his once-adored non-Scientologist daughter with Katie Holmes, who is his only biological child. Above all, there are the accusations that his personal choices have been driven by his alleged complicity in the cult-like practices of the Church of Scientology.

The last time Cruise got personal in interviews, during his mid-2000s courtship of Holmes, things went haywire. He infamously jumped on Oprah Winfrey’s couch and got testy in interviews when promoting his Scientology beliefs. His press run during “War of the Worlds” went so badly that he alienated Steven Spielberg and Sumner Redstone “effectively fired him” from Paramount, Heritage also said.

But just as Cruise didn’t want to get personal in this cover story interview, he wasn’t pushed to do so by GQ or the writer. Critics of Cruise and of the interview suspect that GQ and Baron only got the interview because they agreed to not ask the actor about Scientology, his marriages or 20-year-old Suri, who has reportedly stopped using his last name.

“There’s a deep dark hole early in the interview that everyone sidesteps,” said Sarah Marrs, film critic and co-editor of the Lainey Gossip site. She noted that Baron tried to get something more profound from Cruise by asking him several times why he had agreed to sit down for this kind of interview after so many years. But Cruise wouldn’t allude to any of his past missteps — like his couch jumping or his lecturing women about postpartum depression. He instead rambled on about how he’s been busy, caught up in “the magic” of making movies or in his own, ongoing process of self-improvement.

The interview prompted Marrs to say, “I would love to hear what his ex-wives and children think about this, especially Suri, who has maybe probably dropped ‘Cruise’ from her name.”

“He’s skirting around Xenu here; self-improvement is how they get people in the door of a Scientology center,” Marrs continued. “And the obvious follow-up is that there IS a wake of destruction in his past. There’s an estranged daughter; there are two other children whose relationship with their mother was irrevocably altered because of him, there’s whatever private hells Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes endured while married to and divorcing him.”

Another journalist, who has covered Scientology’s alleged abuses, was even more blunt in his criticism of GQ for giving Cruise this platform.

On X, Yashar Ali wrote: “GQ has chosen to give the cover of its latest issue to Tom Cruise, who is second in command of Scientology, a brutal and dangerous borderless totalitarian state and cult of personality, and who abandoned his daughter Suri because he believes being connected to her in any way will impede Scientology and might lead him to get cancer or some other sort of illness.”

“Disgraceful doesn’t begin to describe it,” Ali said.

In response to Ali’s post, some people defended Cruise as being a great movie star who has given cinema fans years of entertainment, while he also has successfully championed the theatrical experience of the art form. Others say Cruise has a right to not talk about his personal life or his religious beliefs.

But others disagreed.

“I watched the video interview (GQ) did,” one person said. He proclaims this deep love for people of all types. Except for, you know, his offspring.”

Someone else said, “It is enraging to me that no one asks him any questions about this. Why? Just because he’s a movie star? It’s absurd. Scientology is abusive, it destroys families and Tom Cruise is its golden boy. He should be held accountable.”