Oh boy, Tom Cruise is having a bad PR week, even for him. First up, in an interview with BlackBook, director Mary Harron, reveals that in developing the character of Patrick Bateman for “American Psycho,” Christian Bale found sudden inspiration when he caught Cruise’s soulless but energetic appearance on David Letterman one night while flipping channels:
How did you and Christian Bale develop his character in American Psycho?
It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he was in L.A. and I was in New York. We didn’t actually meet in person a lot, just talked on the phone. We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.
Yikes. But it seems that Bale isn’t the only to have noticed Cruise’s aggressively distant, trying-too-hard and just plain weird persona. In an interview with Balki Bartokomous Bronson Pinchot over at the AV Club, he really tears into Mr. Katie Holmes, talking about his days on the set of “Risky Business” and in particular about Cruise’s strange obsession with homophobic jokes.
BP: We didn’t know it was going to be a big hit. We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth. He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn—we were all very young at the time, Tom was 20, I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names. He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, “You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?” I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, “It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.” Very, very strange.
Years and years later when people started to torment him with that, I used to think “God, that’s really fitting, because he tormented a lot of people as a 20-year-old.”
Actually, everyone should go over and read Pinchot’s entire interview because it’s one of the most hilariously candid celeb chats we’ve read in ages. He also talks smack about Denzel Washington and Bette Midler, and recalls the time he was required to make Mischa Barton cry during a shoot.
Of course, Cruise’s people have responded to Pinchot’s comments saying: “Obviously, this is so far removed from who Tom Cruise is as a person, this must have been said in jest.” Seriously, guys? That’s practically the PR equivalent of saying “Tom isn’t a homophobe because he knows soooo many gay people.” A better response would’ve just been to apologize to anyone who might’ve been offended and chalk it up to youthful inexperience (because everyone is kind of an asshole when they’re 20 years old). Remember when Tom Cruise’s PR machine was one of the most controlled and admired (among Hollywood types anyway) of any of the A-list stars? We really think he should consider hiring back Pat Kingsley, who guided him through the first fourteen years of his career.
Instead of adding to the Cruise pile-on, we’ll sign off this post with a rather sweet and funny interview with Bill Hader on David Letterman talking about his experience working with the actor on “Tropic Thunder.”