Leftist Hollywood director-producer Judd Apatow mocked Tom Cruise at the Directors Guild of America Awards on Saturday as his hit, woke-free film Top Gun: Maverick aims for Best Picture.
During his opening monologue, Apatow took multiple hits at Cruise, mocking him for his height, his infamous relationship with Scientology, and his anti-psychiatric medication stance.
“The special effects in ‘Maverick’ were so top-notch, I couldn’t even see the stack of phone books Tom Cruise sat on to reach the flight controls,” Apatow told the crowd.
Referencing Cruise’s infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2005 when he jumped up on the couch, Apatow said the movie star has been doing live, dangerous stunts to cope with alleged mental issues.
Judd Apatow kills as host at the #DGAAwards. No one was off limits, including the Daniels and, most notably, Tom Cruise.#EverythingEverywhereAllAtOnce pic.twitter.com/1vHNG6uqNf
— Clayton Davis – Stand with 🇺 (@ByClaytonDavis) February 19, 2023
“Remember when Tom Cruise jumped up and down on the couch and we all thought, ‘What a lunatic!’” Apatow said. “And now he rides a motorcycle off a cliff and BASE jumps and we’re all like, ‘Tom’s fine!’”
“Tom is not fine,” he continued. “Someone needs to explain to him something called CGI. You’re 60. Calm down. But every time he does one of these new stunts, it does feel like an ad for Scientology. I mean, is that in Dianetics? Because there’s nothing about jumping off a cliff in the Torah.”
Apatow then referenced Cruise’s infamous interview with Matt Lauer in 2005 where he strongly criticized psychiatric drugs, describing them as “dangerous.”
“The only thing he seems to be afraid of is co-parenting and antidepressants,” he said. “I doubled my Prozac today just for this. I doubled it! Do you think if Tom Cruise took antidepressants, he’d be like, ‘I’m not jumping out of a fucking cliff. I’m rich!’”
Variety noted that Top Gun: Maverick director “Joseph Kosinski appeared unamused at Apatow’s jokes.”
Apatow’s roast of Cruise comes after director Steven Spielberg, who collaborated with him on Minority Report and War of the Worlds, told the movie star that his film “saved Hollywood’s ass.”
“You saved Hollywood’s ass, and, you might have saved theatrical distribution,” Spielberg told Cruise. “Seriously. Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry.”
Tom Cruise simply smiled and shook his head in disbelief as Spielberg showered him with compliments.
Top Gun: Maverick became a sensation in 2022 after it topped the box office charts for several weeks, garnering favor with both critics and audiences alike. As John Nolte of Breitbart News noted in his review, the movie also stayed clear of woke politics by preserving the character Maverick as a likable protagonist while staying true to the 1980s source material:
Everything that made Maverick one of the most iconic characters of the 80s is still there … and yet it’s not. There’s no air-punching, no cocky grin, no high-fives, no getting into the other guy’s face, none of the physical callbacks you expect. Instead, Cruise internalizes all that. Nevertheless, you still sense that cocky young guy is in there. Now he’s older, seasoned, alone, a little sad about that, and haunted by mistakes. This Pete Mitchell wouldn’t like 1986’s Pete Mitchell, yet Cruise still telegraphs he’s the same guy.
That doesn’t mean Maverick’s been cheapened, which is something that happens too often (and deliberately for political reasons) in these reboots. The easy (and woke) route would’ve been to tear this icon down (especially an 80’s icon) in the same way those dreadful Star Wars sequels tore apart Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. You know what I mean: Maverick’s an aging, embittered drunk living in a trailer, getting into fights, ignoring his teenage daugh— Stop. Just the thought of it’s pissing me off.
The success of Top Gun: Maverick also came after Paramount Pictures chose to hold the film for nearly two years due to the pandemic so that it could have a theatrical release while other titles (such as Greyhound with Tom Hanks or the entire Warner Bros. slate) opted for streaming.