Ten years ago, Tom Cruise’s public image was dangerously close to self-destructing. In January of 2008, a nearly 10-minute-long video of Cruise solemnly discussing Scientology wound up on the now-deceased Gawker. “We are the authorities on the mind,” Cruise says in the clip, as a riff on the Mission: Impossible theme plays in the background. “We are the authorities on improving conditions.” In the video, Cruise alternates between uproarious laughter and stern lecturing, extolling the power of his religion—whose members, he says, have the power to stop crime and rescue auto-accident victims. Cruise’s affiliation with the group was never a secret, but the video made his devotion all the more clear. “You’re either on board,” he says, “or you’re not on board.”
At the time, plenty of people were decidedly not on board with Cruise, then stuck in what can now charitably be called his “Weird Tom” era—which had been brought about, in no small part, by the internet. It had begun in May 2005, when Cruise showed up on for an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, where audience members screamed maniacally for the actor, leading a keyed-up to Cruise to scamper about the set and, briefly, wind up atop Winfrey’s couch. If the incident had occurred a few years earlier, it likely would have been forgotten—but Cruise’s couch-trip took place just a few months after the introduction of YouTube, and at a peak era for ’00s meme culture. It didn’t take long for someone to add some Return of the Jedi-style Emperor-shocks to Cruise’s appearance, just one of many online responses hinging on the idea that the always-steady Cruise was somehow out of control.
That perception only grew, thanks to a Today Show appearance soon after. During the multi-segment talk, Cruise lectured Matt Lauer on the evils of psychiatry—a practice Scientology abhors—and criticized Brooke Shields, who’d recently disclosed a battle with postpartum depression. Videos of the exchange seemingly commandeered the entire internet, where Cruise was vilified as a bully. The off-putting back-to-back appearances didn’t hurt Cruise’s War of the Worlds (which remains Cruise’s highest-grossing film). But a year later, Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone severed the actor’s long-running production deal with Paramount, the studio behind the Mission: Impossible films, citing the actor’s behavior as “not acceptable.”
By the time Gawker released the widely-seen Scientology video in 2008, Cruise was already in a delicate position. It only grew more precarious when millions of people saw the actor straight-facedly claiming to possess heightened powers, and laughing like he’d just landed a Reebok sponsorship for Rod Tidwell. And the video wouldn’t go away, even after the church tried to pull it from the web, ultimately leading to a war of the words between the organization and Anonymous. Oprah, The Today Show, the Scientology tell-all: The three videos only added to the belief that Cruise was either completely out of touch, or completely out of his mind—possibly both.
So Tom Cruise did what he always does when he’s in trouble: He ran.