Why exactly did Tom Cruise go crazy on Oprah’s couch?
Love can do strange things to people, and the biggest stars in Hollywood are hardly immune from it, either. Professing adoration for a significant other is something that happens all the time in a variety of different ways, but when Tom Cruise did it, it became one of the earliest viral sensations.
It’s easy to forget that the actor was tasked with promoting Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster adaptation War of the Worlds when he rocked up onto Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in 2005, with any mention of the sci-fi epic being comfortably dwarfed by his unhinged enthusiasm over his budding relationship with Katie Holmes.
He’s been one of most famous people on the planet since the 1980s, but Cruise remains an enigma to this day. It’s clear that the man has a deep-lying affection for and knowledge of cinema that few can ever hope to match, and he’s happy to put his life on the line in the name of entertaining audiences the world over through his latest death-defying antics on-camera, but he’s also a closely-guarded secret.
Everybody knows about the Scientology link, but after several highly-publicised incidents that generated intensely negative headlines, he keeps that sort of talk to himself. In fact, it’s been widely reported that whenever Cruise is doing interviews or making the press rounds for his latest project, any questions regarding his personal life are under explicit instructions to be kept off-limits.
He knows how to work a crowd, he radiates megawatt star power, and he’s one of the smoothest salesmen the industry has to offer, but a definite distinction can be drawn between Cruise’s public perception pre and post-couch jump. Before that, he was more open and available to the people who got to quiz him on his life both on and away from the screen, but ever since then, he’s been much more of a persona than a person.
Jumping up and down like a hyperactive toddler and telling the whole world how deeply in love he was with Holmes shortly after their public debut as a couple, Cruise then vanished backstage to awkwardly drag her out onto the stage, too. She didn’t look particularly thrilled about it, but when one of the most powerful people in Hollywood comes bounding directly towards you with a glint in his eye so sinister it inspired Patrick Bateman, then there’s not much that can be done about it.
Why exactly did Tom Cruise go crazy on Oprah’s couch? Because he was in love, plain and simple. It’s the way he went about it that left so many people perturbed, though. Remember, this was the most recognisable A-lister in Tinseltown behaving as if he’d never even had a girlfriend before, and it also marked the last time he’d be witnessed outside of his natural habitat being so disturbingly unrestrained, which isn’t a coincidence.