Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible Co-Stars Say They Are Allowed to Look Him in the Eye

Tom Cruise is one of a number of big-name Hollywood figures who has been dogged by persistent rumors about on-set weirdness over the years. One oft-repeated claim is that nobody on set is allowed to look the Top Gun and Mission: Impossible star in the eyes — something that his Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One co-stars laughed off during a recent interview with The Times of London. Speaking with the magazine, Shaun of the Dead star Simon Pegg admitted that there is an aura of mystery around Cruise, but denied that it was Cruise himself who cultivates it. It was Cruise who called the eye contact rumor one of the oddest things he had ever heard about himself, but Pegg was there to debunk it entirely during the junket for their latest collaboration.

Pegg added that Cruise has a sense of humor about his own outsized celebrity, and that while he typically doesn’t dig into things like Scientology during conversations with Cruise, the two will joke about things like Cruise being able to take over a length of coastline to go swimming with sharks at the drop of a hat.

“I’ve been able to hack my way through all the bizarre mythology that surrounds him,” said Pegg, who joined the franchise in 2006 with Mission: Impossible III (via Variety). “On one side he’s Tom Cruise — this enigmatic film star everyone wants to know about. And on the other he’s just a guy. I like being normal with him.”

In Pegg’s view, being Tom Cruise, with all that entails, is something that energizes and feeds Cruise. Pegg admits he doesn’t think it would have a similar impact on him, noting that there’s a level of celebrity that most people would find really off-putting, but that Cruise seems to have figured out how to live with it, since it’s all he has known for more than 30 years.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One stars Cruise and returning stars Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Czerny, and Vanessa Kirby. New cast members include Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter) and Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy), Rob Delaney (Deadpool 2), Charles Parnell (Top Gun: Maverick), Indira Varma (Game of Thrones), and Mark Gatiss (Sherlock). 

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is coming to theaters on July 12.