The following is an op-ed by Norm. The management notes that Norm submitted it unsolicited, formatted, and footnoted, at 6:40 in the morning. Matt was shown a draft and responded "what about Harrison Ford," which is not a rebuttal — it's a different guy.
Let's dispose of the objection first, because I can already hear it through the wall: "Tom Cruise isn't an actor, he's a movie star." This is the false choice of people who have confused suffering with craft. We have decided, culturally, that Greatest Actor means a man gaining forty pounds to play a sad historical figure in a film you'll respect once and never rewatch. Fine. That's one skill. Here is another: being the single most watchable human being ever photographed, for forty-five consecutive years, across every genre that matters, while personally absorbing the physical risk your ticket price implies. One of these skills has been achieved by many people. The other has been achieved by exactly one.
Start with the range, since that's the part nobody credits. In Rain Man, the flashy role wins the Oscar while Cruise does the actual load-bearing work — playing off a scene partner designed to give him nothing, changing by inches, being the entire emotional architecture of a Best Picture winner. In Born on the Fourth of July he goes to the dark, de-glamorized place the Academy claims to worship. In Magnolia he's feral. In Collateral he goes gray, plays the villain, and is so quietly terrifying that you forget he spent the nineties as the smile on the poster. In Jerry Maguire he invents a whole genre of leading man; in A Few Good Men he goes toe-to-toe with peak Nicholson and doesn't blink; in Edge of Tomorrow he does precision comedy while dying two hundred times; in Tropic Thunder he's unrecognizable and the funniest thing in the movie. Drama, thriller, comedy, villain, romance, satire. Show me the "real actor" with a wider verified operating range. Take your time. I'll be here, not aging, like Tom.
Three Oscar nominations. Zero wins. The Academy went oh-for-three on the most reliable performer of the modern era, and then it gave Best Actor to a man for shouting "hoo-ah" at furniture. The prosecution rests.
Yes — nominated three times (Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia), robbed three times. Regular readers know I have a whole separate grievance filed on behalf of Denzel for 1993. The Academy's ledger on this era is a crime blotter, and its failure to engrave Cruise's name on anything is Exhibit A for why I stopped treating that ceremony as evidence of anything.
Now, the part no other name on any "greatest" list can offer: the man does it for real. He climbed the Burj Khalifa — the actual building. He hung off the side of an A400M at takeoff — the actual airplane. He held his breath north of six minutes for the Rogue Nation underwater sequence, HALO-jumped from 25,000 feet, taught himself to fly a helicopter for Fallout, and rode a motorcycle off a cliff for Dead Reckoning — after which the parachute was, I want to stress, still his problem. In London he broke his ankle jumping between rooftops, landed, finished the take, ran on the fracture, and came back to shoot the rest of the movie. That is not stunt work. That is a man honoring the oldest contract in show business — you paid, so it has to be true — with his skeleton.
And when it mattered most, he kept the receipts for the entire industry. In 2022, with theaters on life support and every studio shoveling its slate onto streaming, Top Gun: Maverick made about a billion and a half dollars and single-handedly reminded the human race why the big dark room exists. Spielberg himself told him — at an Oscar luncheon, on camera — that he'd saved Hollywood's, and I quote, entire theatrical industry. When even the most overrated director of his generation concedes the point, the point is conceded.
Greatness in this job is not one transformation; it's the compound interest of showing up at the highest level, in the most genres, with the most on the line, for the longest time, and never once phoning it in — there is no lazy Cruise performance on record. The runtime is a promise, and for four and a half decades every promise has cleared. Greatest actor of all time. Thumb up, arm fully extended, and I will not be taking questions from anyone who owns Fred Claus on Blu-ray.