Starring Tom Cruise as (Desperately Defying) Aging Action Star (original) (raw)

Starring Tom Cruise, S Redmond (ed.), 2021

Abstract

Tom Cruise’s most recent films prominently feature him performing ever-more outlandish stunts and ever-greater physical exertions. In a period of star decline, Cruise’s stuntwork remains a marker of undiminished authenticity and star performance in Hollywood. This chapter uses on-set news, gossip and publicity, and promotional materials from a number of recent films, including three Mission: Impossible films—Ghost Protocol (Bird 2011), Rogue Nation (McQuarrie 2015) and Fallout (McQuarrie 2019)—and The Mummy (Kurtzman 2017), to interrogate enduring narratives about Cruise’s very particular “spectacular” stardom. It argues that these narratives invoke competing discourses about stuntwork, generating a steady impression not only of the action spectacle each film will deliver, but Cruise’s professional intensity, commitment and ‘crazy’, ‘death-defying’ feats. In so doing, both Cruise’s conspicuous physical-star labor and the on-set injuries he has laudably overcome now evidence anxieties about undeniable aging rather than its undaunted defiance.

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