The thing about Tom Cruise—and you can chalk this up to movie stardom, Scientology, the general weird-ass shape of what his life looks like from the outside, etc.—is that pretty much everything he does seems to come with a certain vibe of unreality attached. Cruise is so seemingly intense, and so apparently genuine, in every interaction he has with the public that the whole thing takes on a slightly fake vibe. Which leads to otherwise rational brains getting twisted around the axle on questions like, “Does Tom Cruise really love popcorn that fucking much?”
It’s a the single corn-based question most likely to come up in the press tour for Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, which Cruise has been throwing himself at with typical gusto. At a recent press event, Cruise stated that he eats “two big buckets” of popcorn at a movie, which is already kind of spiritually draining to consider. But then, fans snapped video of how he eats popcorn, and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s not the way any human being has ever done the task.
It is, dare we say it, the most performative popcorn devour that we, personally, have ever seen in our lives. It’s worth going play-by-play here: Cruise grabs the corn, then pulls it down, apparently to give his elbow some room to work. Then he snaps it upward, essentially throwing the corn into (or around, because he definitely misses some kernels) his mouth. It looks, for all the world, like Cruise has spent serious time thinking about what the most interesting way to eat popcorn is, and then (mostly) perfected it.
In fact, it looks so practiced that some people are now questioning whether Tom Cruise is actually eating the popcorn, or whether he’s running some kind of bizarre sleight of hand to give the impression of being a regular guy. Per The Wrap, Cruise was interrogated by Darius Butler of The Pat McAfee Show about the hard questions: “Are you actually eating the popcorn, or are you full of shit?” Cruise, apparently very amused by the question, confirmed “Man, I’m eating popcorn.” Anyway, we’re going to spend the rest of the day imagining a date night between him and Nicole Kidman back in the day; him employing his Popcorn-Killing Robot Arm, her whispering about how heartbreak feels good with corn like this. What a magical, entirely human Friday evening that must have been.
