14 DAY TRIAL // Clearly, ever since he jumped on Oprah's couch professing his love for Katie Holmes, and went on the record to blast Brooke Shields for using anti-depressants to deal with post-partum depression, Tom Cruise's star lost some luster. He knows it only too well, he says in an interview with Playboy.
Cruise has a new movie coming out, the musical drama “Rock of Ages,” in which he plays rock god Stacee Jaxx.
For the first time since he started to be vilified for his stance on various hot topics and his affiliation to the Church of Scientology, Tom Cruise gets real: he's made mistakes and he owns up to them and to his faults.
However, some of the things that he's been criticized for were also slightly taken out of context, in the sense that he never meant them in the way they came out in the press.
“I agree with you, and I never meant it that way,” he tells the men's mag of the Oprah episode and the Brooke Shields rant.
“When I go back and look at it, I find myself thinking, I don’t feel that way. I get how it came across, but I don’t feel that way, and I never have. Telling people how to live their lives? I saw how that came across and how pieces were edited,” the actor goes on to say.
He never even imagined that speaking out on such issues would nearly kill his career, which is exactly what happened when fans and the media turned on him.
Cruise believes the only reason he survived and is still here to act another day is because he took responsibility for the things he messed up.
“It was important to me to take responsibility, take a hard look and decide where I go from here. That time was interesting. It was that moment when the internet had really spun out,” he recalls.
“It was a learning experience for all of us, how these things go. All you can do is learn and say, 'This is the way it’s going to go from now on. Here is the line',” Tom explains.
To prove that he's really not the man we all imagined he is, Tom also details his reasons for not wanting to speak publicly about the much hated Church of Scientology, stressing he's not against it if it's for a good cause, which is the case these days.
“What’s interesting is, if I don’t talk about my religion, if I say I’m not discussing it or different humanitarian things I’m working on, they’re like, 'He’s avoiding it.' If I do talk about it, it becomes, 'Oh, he’s proselytizing',” he says.
“Reviewing the whole thing and how things can be edited and misinterpreted, I decided, You know what? Here’s the deal. I take responsibility for what happened, but everyone now knows that if I am dealing with humanitarian things, I will talk about that. When I’m promoting a film, I’m not going to get caught up in anything else, and that includes all my personal things,” Tom adds.
In the same interview, the actor boasts about being able to do most of his stunts for all movies, talks about the hard training he undergoes to be able to do that, and hints he will continue to sue tabloids that cross the line and run offensive stuff about his family.
Here is the entire piece, check it out.