"I’ve worked with far lesser actors who would leave me to read with an assistant when they’re off-camera."

"But Tom does not play that way at all. At one point, his face was literally smashed against the [side] of the camera, to get in my eye line as much as possible, even if I could only see the corner of his eye. He was like, 'What do you need, what can I do, how can I help you?'" 

Said April Grace, about making the movie "Magnolia" with Tom Cruise, quoted in "Tom Cruise is here to help/For more than four decades, the actor has attained near-mythic status by giving us what we want — including seven ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies." (WaPo).

The article, written by Ann Hornaday, a film critic, continues:

It’s easy to be cynical about Cruise’s messianic energy, his zealotry on behalf of an art form that, when he practices it, looks less like a profession than a holy vocation (is it any coincidence that he once contemplated becoming a Franciscan priest?).

Why be "cynical" about "a holy vocation"?! 

Tilt the lens, and even his most admirable qualities take on the contours of overcompensation: his obsession with satisfying the audience as an extension of him bringing joy and diversion to his mother and sisters after his parents split when Cruise was in sixth grade; reading everything in sight after overcoming dyslexia — with the help, he has said, of the Church of Scientology, which he joined in 1986....

That's an astonishingly long sentence. I'm thinking of making a holy vocation out of diagramming sentences.  

Constantly scraping his environment and audience expectations for data, he adjusts and improves, ultimately achieving the perfect Zen balance of mega-celebrity: near-constant ubiquity and inscrutable remoteness....

Just toss the religions around. He's Catholic. He's Scientologist. He's Zen. But of course, for the purposes of attack, the correct religion to ascribe to Tom Cruise is Scientology. This comes up next:

“I happen to have a huge body of facts, particularly with regard to his and Scientology’s treatment toward women, that for me makes it very hard to excuse his continued adulation,” says Maureen Orth, who wrote a troubling article about Cruise’s relationship with the actress and activist Nazanin Boniadi for Vanity Fair in 2012. “Not just because of him alone, but [because] he’s the second most important person in Scientology, next to [church leader] David Miscavige. … The press has fallen down on its job, too. He always gets a free pass. He never gets asked about this stuff anymore.” Indeed, by the time Golden Globes host Jerrod Carmichael made a pointed joke about Cruise and Scientology this year, the jibe landed but didn’t gain purchase. (Carmichael suggested they trade in the Globes Cruise returned in protest for “the safe return” of Miscavige’s wife Shelly, who has not been seen in public for several years.)

He's so dedicated and successful that the effort to leverage religious bigotry doesn't work anymore. 

Here's the Vanity Fair article from 11 years ago: "What Katie Didn’t Know/In the fall of 2004, an accomplished, gorgeous Scientologist named Nazanin Boniadi was allegedly selected by officials in the organization to be Tom Cruise’s next girlfriend. Her never-before-told story—of the months inseparable from the star (and his watchers), before she fell out of favor—reveals a complex dynamic that also affected Cruise’s relationships with Nicole Kidman, Penélope Cruz, and, now, Katie Holmes. Maureen Orth investigates."

I looked back into my archive to see if I'd blogged that Maureen Orth piece. I didn't, but I see I did blog about Cruise and Holmes in the year 2012. Holmes was fighting for sole custody of their child and, in that context, made an issue out of his Scientology. Except from my post (after a quote from a news article that supported assuming what I assume):

If we assume, for the purposes of discussion, that Cruise follows a religion-based approach to child rearing, involving maximum autonomy, and Holmes now objects to that and wants to raise the child according to more conventional decision-making and discipline by the parent, how much of a factor should that play in determining custody? Should Cruise's ideas about child-rearing have more weight or less weight because they are premised on religion?

That is, imagine Cruise2, a man with the same approach to child-rearing, arrived at through religion-free thought processes — philosophy, common sense, personal experience.... While you're at it, imagine Cruise3, with the same notions of child-rearing, premised on religious beliefs, with a much more conventional religion. Let's make Cruise3 a mainstream Protestant who has come to a serious conclusion about children, individual autonomy, and free choice based on a deep commitment to the teachings of Jesus.