Tom Cruise stars along Cameron Diaz in James Mangold’s Knight & Day, DVD & Blu-ray is out on release this week. With rumours that his wife Katie Holmes is pregnant with their second child, perhaps we can already anticipation the inevitable publicity stunt to ensure widespread media coverage. After all, Tom Cruise’s life may be a media circus, but he is the ringmaster.  Joe West rounds up the Hollywood star’s best efforts.

Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible III, Valkyrie) has never been one to shy away from the limelight, and in the last decade he has been involved in some of the most memorable and moderately mad publicity stunts in the history of Hollywood. In some cases his behaviour has alienated and shocked his fans, but he has proved that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and continues to make millions at the box office. Here are five of his most significant publicity stunts, ordered chronologically.

1. The publicity stunt for which Tom Cruise will always be remembered occurred during the spring of 2005. His appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s chat show has been described as amongst the most surprising moments in TV history, and will live on in infamy. Cruise repeatedly declared his strong feelings for then-girlfriend Katie Holmes whilst literally bouncing around the studio and eliciting waves of gasps and laughter from the audience. His most flamboyant and subsequently iconic action was jumping up onto the guests’ sofa while expressing the depths of his love.

On the surface this may sound like a genuine act caused by infatuation and a life lived in the spotlight, but afterwards many people believed that Cruise was exaggerating his behaviour in order to drum up interest in War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005), which launched a few months later. If this was indeed his intention, it worked wonders as the film took nearly 600 million dollars at the box office, and parodies of his behaviour rippled across popular culture.

2. Less than a year after the Oprah event Cruise was back on top of furniture in the name of love and publicity. He scaled a chair to once more express his enduring adoration of Holmes, this time in front of an audience of executives at search giant Yahoo! By this point Holmes was pregnant with the couple’s first child, which might explain the enthusiastic arm-wrestling competition that he entered into with members of the audience at the same event. These two odd acts did not make the same impact as his original Oprah appearance, perhaps because people had begun to expect this kind of thing, and so Cruise had to step up the publicity for Mission Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006) to the next level.

3. The Cruise-related publicity stunt that partly ensured the success of M:I III occurred at the US premiere of the movie. Taking place in New York, Cruise decided to take six different modes of transport to arrive at the premiere venue, including a sports car and a speed boat, along with the slightly more pedestrian options of a subway and a taxi. This plan went slightly awry when it was replicated for the LA premiere. Cruise attempted to drive a Bugatti Veyron up to the red carpet, but was forced to pull a wide three point turn in front of thousands of fans due to the vehicle’s limited turning circle. This was hardly a fit entrance for a super spy action hero, but Cruise managed to brush it off with his whiter than white grin. 

4. One of the strangest stunts that Cruise has ever pulled came during the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, at which he donned full prosthetic makeup and a fat suit in order to dance onstage with Jennifer Lopez. He was portraying Les Grossman, his eccentric movie producer character that appeared as a cameo in 2008’s ensemble comedy Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr.) The reasons for this exhibitionist performance, in which Cruise showed off the dancing talent that has not shone since Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983) has never quite become apparent, since Tropic Thunder had long since left cinemas and arrived on DVD and Blu Ray. This has since marked the stunt as perhaps the most perplexing in Cruise’s career, but it certainly adds to the intrigue of the man behind the brand.

The latest…

Tom Cruise’s next movie release is comedy action caper Knight and Day (James Mangold, 2010), in which he partners with the ever-charming Cameron Diaz (Shrek Forever After, The Box) Whilst courting the US media in Spain, the pair exhibited their abilities to cope with movie stunts without the need for doubles, and in the process scared several reporters half to death. On a closed street in Seville, Diaz and Cruise got behind the wheel of a car and larked about with journalists strapped in beside them, performing evasive manoeuvres and over the top donuts that both delighted and petrified the gathered hacks. The confidence of the stars was clear, as they were appearing live on TV in the US at the time of the stunt. Watch this space for the UK premiere.