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Monday, May 5th, 2008

Part 2 of Tom Cruise on Oprah aired today. In celebration of Tom Cruise's 25 years "in the business," Oprah delivered taped messages from a bunch of random star friends of Cruise - actors Will Smith & Jada Pinkett-Smith, Renee Zellweger, Dustin Hoffman; soccer player David Beckham and singer Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham; director Steven Spielburg. They all praised him as an amazing actor, but above all, a "good," "real" human being.

You've got to hand it to Tom's new PR outlook: how could any of us have poked fun at this family man who takes the time to chat with movie set caterers, professes love for his in-laws, dresses up as Santa Claus, still dreams to work with Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro, has a blue-eyed baby and a beautiful wife who "makes sure to have cupcakes" around (all pastelled and fluffy, noless) whenever company is coming? In fact, "sugar" and cupcakes were how wife Katie Holmes first won over his children from his first marriage (with Nicole Kidman), Tom revealed.

On Friday, Oprah visited Tom's mansion in Telluride, Colorado, where Winfrey calls his ginormous brown kitchen - a supersized, monochrome version of an untouched store display - "so normal!" (We were thinking "why so barren?" so O didn't perform very well as the stand-in for the viewer.)

There was little, if any, of the hard-hitting journalism one might have hoped for in this two-day Tom Cruise series. The leaked Scientology video was dismissed by Oprah as being heavily edited before she even finished the question (and stolen and out of context, Tom added).

Tom told O that he regretted how the Brooke Shields / antidepressants comment came out, insisting he was mad because he didn't want the children of today medicated (regardless of the facts that Brooke was not a child, was suffering postpartum depression, and children are not usually prescribed Paxil). The infamous couch jump was in the moment, Cruise defended, and he doesn't know if he'd take it back. The Matt Lauer appearance was touched upon, but the "glib" portion left as the elephant in the room.

One of the strangest moments was the answer to a simple question from an audience member: if you had a day without anything on your schedule other than time with the family, how would you spend the day?

"We would definitely...you know, start the morning out and crawl around with the kids, hang out," Cruise said. "Uh, we'd play games...I'd go for a flight in my airplane, come back, go for a picnic, you know, maybe go to the beach. Hang out, dinner, watch movies, and we would play games. We like riding motorcycles, going for a hike, something like that, that's how we like to spend the day."

Gawd, what an exhausting regular old day! But Oprah interjects: "Yeah. They're very normal. Very family, lots going on at the same time." We hate to say it, but somewhere around the way, Oprah lost touch with "normal" herself.