14 DAY TRIAL // Over the weekend, actor Tom Cruise came under heavy fire when excerpts from a sworn deposition, part of the ongoing trial against a celebrity publication, emerged online. At one point, he compared shooting for action movies to serving a tour in Afghanistan but, his attorney is now saying, his words were taken out of context.
The deposition was made as part of the lawsuit Cruise filed against a celebrity glossy which ran a story in 2012 about how he had abandoned his daughter Suri after the divorce from Katie Holmes. As for the Afghanistan comments, they were made within a discussion about how difficult Cruise’s training for a movie is.
Nonetheless, his attorney Bert Fields says in a statement to People magazine, never did he imply that shooting for an action movie was like serving his country, though this is how his comments were interpreted.
“The assertions that Tom Cruise likened making a movie to being at war in Afghanistan is a gross distortion of the record. What Tom said, laughingly, was that sometimes, ‘That's what it feels like’,” Fields says.
He explains that, before the offensive quote, Cruise made it clear that he would not compare his job to that of a soldier’s, but that part never made it in the papers. Fields even says there’s video to prove he’s not lying.
“As the video shows, he and the lawyer were laughing at his answer, and, when asked in the next question if the situations were comparable, Tom said, ‘Oh, come on,’ meaning of course not. Tom is a staunch supporter of our troops and would never say that making a movie was even remotely comparable to fighting in Afghanistan,” the attorney explains.
Cruise also said that, unlike an Olympic athlete, he was required to train harder and to build more resistance because his job required him to do more runs and physically demanding scenes per day than said athlete. Fields doesn’t address this particular part of the deposition.