Cruise enters the scene and stalks up to his father with exaggerated cheer. He reverts into his offensive position — the hands-on-hips macho stage pose — but Cruise lets his nerves slip: he’s breathing too heavy, baring his teeth, and tapping his foot loudly just out of frame. Then the hurt rolls in like a fog. Cruise puts his superhuman body control to work. His lips purse; he shakes imperceptibly and clasps his hands together so hard that the knuckles turn white. Just as he vows, “I am not going to cry,” Cruise tilts his head to the ceiling, perfectly placed so the light catches a tear seconds before it spills across his face. As he collapses into sobs, a vein pops in his forehead, his face turns painfully red, and by the time he hollers, “Don’t go away, you fucking asshole!” Cruise is heaving like a hurt animal. The whole arc happens in just under two minutes, and it’s arguably the best two minutes of acting in Cruise’s career.
“The whole time with the character, I was skating on the edge,” acknowledged Cruise. The personal parallels between him and Mackey were closer than he cared to admit. In a strikingly candid 1992 interview with GQ, Cruise described his final moments with his father and presaged the same struggles Mackey would face seven years later. “When people can’t forgive someone, my question always is, ‘What have you done in your life that you can’t forgive this other person?’” asked Cruise. “The things you’ve got to take responsibility for in your life, it makes forgiveness quite easy. And it also brought me a lot of understanding about him and the pain he was in.”
But by the time Magnolia earned him his third Academy Award nomination, Cruise had clammed up about his father. Back on the awards circuit, and this time all but certain that the Oscar was his, he wanted to build protective distance between himself and the script. And why risk voters thinking he wasn’t really “acting”?
Again, Cruise lost. He’d ripped his life open for a tightly crafted, stunningly raw performance. And it still wasn’t enough. Cruise was done chasing Oscars — now it was time to have fun.
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