Winfrey and Cruise: Candid?
(Harpo Productions, via AP)
Was Tom Cruise groveling on ‘Oprah’?
What happened
The final installment of Oprah Winfrey’s two-part interview with Tom Cruise aired on Monday, and left some critics wondering if the actor had gone overboard in his efforts to restore his public image after months of negative publicity surrounding, among other things, his appearance in a leaked Scientology video.
What the commentators said
Tom Cruise was “groveling before Oprah Winfrey this past week,” said Tom O’Neil in a Los Angeles Times blog. And why did he “so eagerly gobble up a dozen humble pies”? Because he knows “he’s in trouble and facing what might be a real mission impossible: to win back the respect and awe of America and one of its small towns: Hollywood.”
It’s not like Oprah wasn’t in on it, said Alonso Duralde in MSNBC. This was a meeting between “two of pop culture’s most sincerity-challenged media titans,” and Cruise is “one of Oprah’s pets.” “Cruise talking to Oprah is like Dick Cheney sitting down with Fox News—an exercise in spin and softball questions.” And Cruise couldn’t come off as “a regular Joe” if he tried—his “P.R. mode always smacks of the guy who’s trying to sell you a timeshare.”
What did you expect him to do? said Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. “Cruise employed his charm—and taut stagecraft in an effort to rehabilitate his reputation.” And he was “alternately earnest and eager, sober and good-humored.” But “the encounter was less like a movie star interview than like a news conference with a political candidate seeking to undo a gaffe.”
