By and large, we know far too much about celebrities. We know their politics. We know their diets. We know about their interests in tentacle porn and sex gifs. But then there’s Tom Cruise, that charismatic burst of light who, in so many of our minds, seems to exist only as he does onscreen. Sure, we know he’s worshipped as some kind of fleshy god in an abusive cult, but he’s portrayed as floating in some rarified air far beyond the organization, separate from its misdeeds. And even our rare glimpses at the “real” Cruise—that Oprah interview, for example—feel like performances, calibrated stunts to distract from the man behind the mask. It’s not much of a surprise, then, that his latest offering to fans has us bemusedly scratching our heads, too.
On Tuesday, Cruise shared a 30-second video of him attending a screening of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet at Waterloo’s Odeon BFI IMAX. “Here we are,” he says upon arriving at the theater after a brief ride through London. “Back to the movies.” He has nothing to say about Tenet, really; instead, he posits himself as some sort of dutiful IMAX ambassador. “Great to be back in a movie theater everybody,” he says afterward, as if everything is normal again and our global nightmare is over.