What it's like to meet Tom Cruise in real life

Telegraph

21-05-2025

It was the most famous request for seconds since Oliver Twist. When Tom Cruise rocked up at Asha's, a top Birmingham curry house, in August 2021, he was so taken by the restaurant's chicken tikka masala that he ordered another portion as soon as he finished his first. The photo of a well-fed Cruise on Asha's social media accounts went viral.
Nouman Farooqui, Asha's general manager, vividly remembers serving Cruise – not least because he insisted on eating in full view of the restaurant, rather than being ensconced in the private dining room that had been laid on for him. 'On the day, his security came and said, 'Look, Tom has asked to sit with other people in the middle of the restaurant',' Farooqui, a long-time Cruise fan, tells me. 'He didn't want any privacy or anything, he didn't want any fuss. He just wanted a table like everybody else.'
Though Cruise is one of the most famous men on the planet, Farooqui recalls him being impeccably courteous to the waiting team and insisting on chatting to them. Flanked by Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie and three other friends, he wanted to know about the history of Asha's, for instance. 'When you hear about these celebrities – and I had never met anyone as big as Tom Cruise – he was very polite, talking to staff, having conversations,' says Farooqui. 'He's that type of guy: he's a people person.' The following day, having enjoyed his meals so much, Cruise sent 20 of his crew for dinner at Asha's.
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Cruise, 62, has spent so much time in Britain recently, filming the likes of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (which is released in cinemas this week), that such encounters are increasingly commonplace. And some sightings of the lesser-spotted film star have been more spectacular than merely asking for a second curry.
Take the case of Alison Webb from Baginton, Warwickshire, who was asked around the time of Cruise's Asha's trip if she would let a helicopter pilot use her garden to land while the nearby Coventry airport was closed. 'I thought it would be kind of cool for the kids to see the helicopter land in the garden,' Webb said at the time. 'He basically arrived and got out and it was like 'Wow'.'
By way of thanks, Cruise ended up taking her children for a ride in his chopper, while Webb and her partner, Neil Jones, got an invitation to the Leicester Square premiere of Top Gun: Maverick the following year. 'It turned out to be an incredible day,' she said of the episode. 'It was surreal, I still now can't believe it happened.'
'Tom Cruise is in my back garden - it's bonkers' 🤩
The actor, who is in England filming the latest Mission: Impossible film, landed by helicopter in a Warwickshire family's garden. https://t.co/GCNtDBCHPk pic.twitter.com/cobmQ90TG3
— BBC Midlands (@bbcmtd) August 24, 2021
'Surreal' is a word that gets used about a lot of encounters with Cruise. Dean Bartle, a car seller based next to Leeds East airport (formerly RAF Church Fenton), has told how Cruise spent an hour at his dealership talking about his motor collection. Then they looked at Bartle's Harrier jump jet together before the star flew off in his helicopter. 'It was surreal.'
Others have stumbled upon Cruise filming his typical death-defying stunts the length and breadth of the land. During a shoot for Mission: Impossible in Cumbria, Cruise apologised to hikers Jason and Sarah Haygarth for disrupting their walk with their dog, Edward, by landing his helicopter near them before paragliding away. 'See you later, folks,' Cruise called as he ran towards the edge of the fell. Sarah Haygarth described him as being 'cool as a cucumber'.
Adam Wheeler and Lucy Hinch had a similar experience, and waited for about an hour to get a photograph with Cruise. 'He was nice and polite and really humble,' Wheeler said later. 'It was a real pleasure meeting one of the most famous Hollywood celebrity actors out there – one of the richest as well. It was not what we expected while out walking on the fells.'
Someone spotted tom cruise in hyde park yesterday pic.twitter.com/0hkSROVWeI
— Double Dove🕊️ (@D0uble_Dove) June 18, 2024
A colleague attended a performance of Guys and Dolls at the Savoy Theatre in 2016, only to find Cruise sitting two rows in front of him. 'Before the start of the second act he came in early,' he recalls. 'Most people were off at the bar or getting ice creams or whatever but I was still in the dress circle. And I just thought I'll never get the chance to speak to Tom Cruise again. So I went up to him and said: 'So what brings Tom Cruise to London?' We had a longish chat, and he was just so friendly. Adorable really. I contemplated becoming a Scientologist for a week or two after.'
Cruise is even utterly charming to people annoyed with him. A friend of a friend tells how, not realising they lived by the star, they knocked on his door to complain about repeated late-night noise. When Cruise – to her surprise – answered the door, he was apologetic for his vigorous nocturnal workouts, sent flowers to apologise and took them on a helicopter ride to make up for the disruption.
Other encounters cast Cruise as the sort of real-life hero that would not be out of place on the big screen. While on a yachting holiday in Capri in August 1996, Cruise helped save the lives of five people whose own boat had caught fire before sinking. A few months earlier, Cruise saw a 23-year-old woman get knocked over by a hit-and-run driver in California. After following Heloisa Vinhas's ambulance to hospital, he footed the $7,000 bill for the treatment on her broken leg and bruised ribs after discovering she did not have insurance. Pat Kingsley, Cruise's former publicist, once said: 'If I ever get in trouble, I hope Tom Cruise is nearby.'
Much of what we know about Cruise these days comes from the largely banal vignettes of when the superstar comes into contact with civilians, as he has for more than a decade swerved the newspaper and magazine profiles to which even the biggest Hollywood A-listers subject themselves. Cruise's publicist politely declined a Telegraph request for an interview with him.
There is, it seems, to be no repeat of the infamous 2005 episode when he started jumping on Oprah Winfrey's sofa on TV as a result of his apparent enthusiasm for his new squeeze (and later wife), Katie Holmes. In retrospect, this was the moment when a line in the sand was drawn, and Cruise focused on being the world's most-loved action movie star, rather than a heart-on-his-sleeve eccentric or a full-time spokesman for the Church of Scientology.
While Cruise still indulges parts of the media, such as short talk-show chats or TV junkets to publicise his films, he no longer allows himself to be scrutinised publicly (perhaps to avoid awkward questions about his religion or romantic relationships). Instead, rather than let people know about his true self, he seems to have decided to let his films do the talking. Cruise is now something of a paradoxical, almost mythical, figure: at once totally approachable and yet unknowable. A pair of actors – Jeff Meacham and Joel Johnstone – launched a podcast called Meeting Tom Cruise to hear what it is like to work with him. Their quixotic quest to meet him themselves, however, did not succeed.
Tom Cruise has been talking to the employees at AMC Lincoln Square for 15 minutes now pic.twitter.com/lDxvOyUjeK
— Mike Ryan (@mikeryan) May 19, 2025
Despite the mystery surrounding much of his personal life, what we can say with reasonable certainty is that Thomas Cruise Mapother IV of Syracuse, New York, loves Britain and the British. Cruise first worked on these shores four decades ago, when he came to film Ridley Scott's Legend in 1985. He recently revealed that he only got cast in Rain Man after introducing himself to Dustin Hoffman at a London takeaway.
Cruise kept coming back, and he apparently fell for the UK when he and his then-wife Nicole Kidman spent more than a year living in London to shoot Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick, another American who transplanted himself to the UK. It is said that the couple were here for so long that their children picked up English accents; their daughter, Bella, now lives in Croydon and runs a beauty brand.
Before the publicity machine for the last Mission: Impossible film cranked up in earnest, earlier this month Cruise wrapped filming in the UK on an as-yet untitled Alejandro González Iñárritu film that may herald a return to more cerebral roles. 'I just love the city. I love making movies there,' Cruise said of London in a 2016 ITV interview. 'I love spending time there and it's been my home-away-from-home.'
And Britain loves Cruise back: so much so that he has just had a British Film Institute fellowship bestowed upon him. 'I am truly honoured by this acknowledgement,' Cruise said in March. 'I've been making films in the UK for more than 40 years and have no plans to stop.'
Cameras are not just filming Cruise for the big screen: many of the UK's biggest public occasions in the past few years – from the King's coronation to David Beckham's 50th birthday parties and Glastonbury to Wimbledon's royal box – have seen high-profile Cruise cameos.
But despite his apparent happiness to be seen publicly living it up in the UK, there is still much we do not know about Cruise: most obviously, where he actually lives. The keen pilot was said to have bought a pile near Biggin Hill Airport in South London, but that has never been confirmed – with the mystery so tantalising that The New York Times spent thousands of dollars sending a reporter to the village in an attempt to verify the claims, only to come back with more questions than answers. Cruise is also said to have once lived in East Grinstead, West Sussex, near the Church of Scientology's British headquarters.
The impression one gets about Cruise's life in the UK is one of a man who wishes to live under-the-radar (his Valkyrie co-star Kenneth Branagh recently said that he has a 'handy line in Cockney rhyming slang' and likes sitting in the quiet corner of pubs), despite the obvious trappings of fame and wealth. That does mean he will, say, ask James Corden if he can land his helicopter in the garden of his London home.
What cannot be doubted is Cruise's unusual (for a Hollywood megastar) devotion to his fans – especially since the pandemic, when he seems to have been cast, Ethan Hunt-like, as the only man who can save cinemas.
Dave Pearson, a blogger who writes under the moniker of The Yorkshire Dad, recalled how Cruise patiently spent hours taking photographs with queuing fans as he filmed in the sleeping village of Levisham. When Pearson and his daughters finally met the star, 'there wasn't much talking, though I did greet him with an 'Ay up Mr Cruise, 'ows tha doin', nice to meet you,' and he seemed a little bamboozled at first by the Yorkshire dialect', he wrote. 'But he replied with a, 'Really nice to meet you too.'' Like so many others, he called the experience 'surreal'.
Cruise's passion for theatrically-released films is sincere: he shared a photograph of himself recently at a Cineworld multiplex, proudly holding a ticket to Ryan Coogler's Sinners and describing it as 'must-see'. It is rare for Hollywood stars like Cruise to use their significant clout to publicise films in which they have no financial interest.
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Those who have worked with and seen Cruise up-close say this is just what he does. Ben Winston – the super-producer who has worked with Cruise on Corden's The Late Late Show and cast him in the handover ceremony between Paris and Los Angeles at the last Olympics – recalls how the last Mission: Impossible premiere in Rome was delayed by more than 90 minutes because he wanted to give his fans what they wanted. 'There were so many people who had queued all day in the sun that Tom insisted he had to meet every single person outside,' Winston tells me. 'Every single person he wanted to thank for coming, shake their hand and have a photo with them.'
That friendliness is extended to his colleagues, no matter how seemingly lowly compared with the man who is always number-one on the call-sheet. 'He just wants everything to be great, but also is the most giving man. This is really important: he cares about every single person on set. When you're shooting with Tom, you need to leave extra time for him to have conversations with everybody,' Winston adds. 'I haven't really seen it before. If you're thinking, 'Oh, we can shoot this in 10 minutes,' you've actually got to allow for 20 minutes, because he's going to want to chat with the makeup artist, with the drivers, he's going to want to know what's up with the security team.
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'He realises that a film doesn't happen unless every single person is doing their job brilliantly. He will want to spend time with every single person and make sure he understands what's going on, how they are, but also what they need from him. He really wants to make sure that they are able to do their jobs and he knows that they could do their jobs better if they have a relationship with him.'
By Winston's telling, this is the secret of late-stage Cruise and is all part of a virtuous circle that leads to so many people describing their surreal experiences with one of the most famous men on the planet and – yes – ordering a second curry in the middle of a busy Birmingham restaurant.
'Even though he's the biggest star in the world, I don't see an ego at all with him: I see a man who simply cares about the audience in their seats having a great time,' Winston adds. 'He feels like it's his duty to make sure they enjoy that movie, in the same way he wants to chat to them in a restaurant or on set. It's the same thing.'