Mission: Impossible's Tom Cruise Addresses The Rumored No Eye-Contact On-Set Rule

Odd rumors are bound to follow you around when you're as big a star as Tom Cruise. But the actor and those around him are proud to report that the strangest rumor attached to his name is completely false.

Speaking with The Times in July 2023, "Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1" director Chris McQuarrie explained that the first time they met, he asked Cruise what the strangest bit of scuttlebutt Cruise had ever heard about himself was. Cruise declared that it was the ongoing story that he bars people who work on his sets from looking him in the eye. The long-held falsehood about his behavior reportedly mystified the actor.

Since Cruise himself seems to find the notion pretty darned absurd, that rumor's pretty solidly debunked as wholly untrue. The tall tale about Cruise is over a decade old and goes back to shooting for the film 1999 film "Magnolia." In the film, Cruise plays Frank, an intense motivational speaker who has been bitterly estranged from his father, who abandoned him to care for his dying mother but is now dying himself. That's the kind of role that'd make anyone look inward for personal guidance.

In any event, Cruise's co-stars are willing to back up his behavior on the record as wholly human and not diva-like in the least.

A number of Tom Cruise's co-stars have spoken up about his on-set behavior. Simon Pegg, who's appeared in a number of "Mission Impossible" films as Benji Dunn, spoke up for Cruise in the same The Times roundtable. 

Explaining that he's spent happy social time off the set with the actor on numerous occasions, including ziplining and other activities with the "Dead Reckoning" crew, Pegg said, "I've been able to hack my way through all the bizarre mythology that surrounds him. On one side he's Cruise – this enigmatic film star everyone wants to know about. And on the other, he's just a guy. I like being normal with him." 

Pegg also defended Cruise's filmed outburst on the "Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1" set, where he lost it on a crew member who was alleged to have broken COVID-19 protocols. "Everything that Tom cares about, in terms of his job, was at stake due to the pandemic. For him, there was a danger this virus could wipe cinema off the face of this earth," Pegg explained. 

But while some of Cruise's co-stars are willing to back up his nice guy behavior, at least one other co-star swears an on-set legend about him is true.

All held gazes aside, at least one co-star has declared that Tom Cruise refuses to do one more thing on the set of his films — run beside them. Co-star Annabelle Wallis, who worked with Cruise in "The Mummy," told The Hollywood Reporter in 2020 that she had to coax the megastar into sprinting at her side. 

"I got to run on screen with him, but he told me no at first. He said, 'Nobody runs on screen [with me],' and I said, 'But I'm a really good runner.' So, I would time my treadmill so that he'd walk in and see me run. And then he added all these running scenes," Wallis said.

While the actor might have indeed been initially reluctant to run beside Wallis on that particular shoot, all one has to do is take a look at Cruise's filmography to see that he's been willing to sprint beside previous co-stars.  For example: in recent years, Cruise can be seen running side-by-side with Cobie Smulders in 2016's "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back." The moment occurs early into the movie. Smulders even told the press she had to learn how to match Cruise's pace and speed, copying his signature style. In any event, it seems the actor is much more approachable than rumors would have it.