The soaring value of the US dollar has broad implications for American consumers and the global economy.
The value of the US dollar against other major currencies has reached its highest level since the early 2000s. Even as recession fears mount and the economy shows signs of slowing, the dollar continues to surge.
The dollar, which has been on a steep upward climb for about a year now, equaled the value of the euro this month for the first time in two decades. The Japanese yen has also fallen sharply against the dollar.
A strong dollar can make products imported into America cheaper and make trips abroad less expensive for American travelers. Big companies that operate in multiple countries, such as Johnson & Johnson, have recently complained that the rising dollar could hurt their profits since foreign sales lose value when converted back into dollars and they become less competitive with local companies as their products become more expensive overseas.
Economic policymakers and Biden administration officials have claimed the strong dollar could even help bring down inflation in the United States, which has been running at its fastest pace in four decades. Economists say the impact would be relatively small, but still positive, given that many households are struggling to afford essentials like food, rent, and gas.
A strong dollar also has broad implications for the global economy, devaluing currencies in other countries. The value of the dollar also matters a lot for emerging economies, since it puts those countries at a greater risk of defaulting on their debts.
Here are answers to four key questions you might have about the strength of the dollar.
- Why is the dollar extremely strong right now?
The basic explanation for the strong dollar boils down to this: While things might be weird in the US economy right now, a combination of factors has made the dollar a better bet for investors than most other currencies.
The dollar has been rising in large part because the Federal Reserve is on track to increase interest rates faster than other major countries, said Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard University and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
The central bank started to lift interest rates in March after keeping them at near zero for much of the pandemic, and carried out another big rate increase on Wednesday, raising rates three-quarters of a percentage point. Higher interest rates make the dollar more attractive to investors, since it means they would get a bigger return.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also strained European economies and made natural gas prices skyrocket, making the US economy look healthier in comparison, Rogoff said.
“Everyone’s talking about a recession, but the US economy is doing better than a lot of other economies,” he said.
The dollar is acting as a “safe haven,” said Vassili Serebriakov, a foreign exchange strategist at UBS, an investment bank. As the growth outlook for the world economy worsens, investors have grown more concerned and flocked to the dollar, putting their money into safer assets like US Treasury bonds, Serebriakov said. That in turn has pushed up the currency’s value.
“More recently, it has less to do with the US and more to do with a global downturn,” Serebriakov said.
- What does this mean for Americans?
Among other things, a stronger dollar helps curb inflation by making imports cheaper, said Marc Chandler, the chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex, a trading firm. Foreign sellers are more inclined to drop prices when the dollar becomes more valuable, translating to lower prices for imported products that Americans buy.
But with prices running as high as they are now, that may not provide much relief to consumers. Chandler said the strength of the dollar could shave off 0.2 or 0.3 percent off overall inflation, a small amount compared to the 9.1 percent increase in consumer prices from a year ago.
“Wages are not keeping pace with inflation,” Chandler said. “And so does a stronger dollar really do that much for it? Probably not.”
There are other bright spots. It’s commonly known that a stronger dollar is good for American travelers, who can get more for their money in other countries. Americans are already finding it easier to fund European vacations and purchase luxury goods and fine wines in other countries. Some American buyers are even househunting in countries like France, since the weaker euro means it’s cheaper for them to buy real estate in Europe compared to a year ago.
Although a strong dollar is mostly favorable for American consumers, it can have more negative impacts on companies that operate businesses in other countries because revenue and profits earned in local currencies are worth less in dollar terms and their products become more expensive abroad, reducing demand.
Exports also become more expensive abroad, which could hurt American companies that export goods or services. Workers in industries like agriculture or manufacturing could also be impacted if their jobs depend on exports.
Overall, though, many Americans might not notice the effects of a stronger dollar in their daily lives, said David Wessel, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. Compared to many European countries, the United States is more self-sufficient, producing much of what Americans consume, Wessel said.
Wessel noted that a stronger dollar can make real estate in the United States more expensive for foreign buyers, making those investments less attractive to them. That could help relieve some price pressures in the housing market, a positive outcome for Americans trying to buy homes, he said. But generally, people in other countries are more likely to feel the impact of a stronger dollar than Americans.
“If you go to some other countries, people are fixated on the exchange rate,” Wessel said. “Whereas my guess is, most Americans don’t have any idea whether the dollar is strong or weak.”
- What does this mean for other countries?
For other countries, a strong dollar pushes import prices up, which can create inflation in those regions. The impact can also be brutal for emerging economies.
When US interest rates are low, global investors tend to invest more in emerging markets, or the economies of nations that are transitioning into developed economies. But when rates start to rise in the United States and the dollar climbs, money starts to flow out of those countries, Wessel said.
Some developing nations are better equipped to handle this, since they have more reserves or their exports are priced in dollars and have been rising in value, but other countries could struggle. Sri Lanka’s economy, for example, is starting to crumble as it deals with a mountain of debt and not enough US dollars to pay for imports of essential goods.
Countries that borrow heavily in dollars could suffer because it becomes harder to make repayments as the dollar rises and their currencies depreciate, said Mark Sobel, the U.S. chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum and a former top Treasury Department official.
“That means the amount of dollars they need to get their hands on to make repayments goes up,” Sobel said.
- Where does the dollar go from here?
Currency markets are extremely hard to predict, so it’s difficult to say whether the dollar will continue to climb or fall in the coming months. Rogoff, the Harvard economics professor, said the dollar could drop if the war in Ukraine “miraculously” ceased, relieving pressure on European economies and pushing up their currencies.
The dollar could also fall if the US enters a recession and the Fed has to cut interest rates to stimulate the economy, which some analysts predict could happen next year. An economic downturn in the United States could also make investing in US assets and companies look less attractive, which could result in the dollar falling, Rogoff said.
On the other hand, if inflation stays stubbornly high and the Fed has to keep raising interest rates more than expected, the dollar could keep rising. It could also climb if the European Central Bank, which raised interest rates for the first time in more than a decade last week, has to backpedal and cut rates, Rogoff said.
“It’s a very uncertain environment, and the exchange rate probably is going to be hard to predict,” Rogoff said.
Anti-aging is the easiest sell in the world.
In late June, I sat in on a conversation featuring three models, all over the age of 50, about aging and beauty. “We need representation of spring, summer, fall, and winter,” one of the panelists, Swedish model Paulina Porizkova, declared. Model Yasmin Warsame spoke about how aging is treated as a sign of wisdom in her birth country of Somalia. The discussion’s moderator, Allure editor-in-chief Jessica Cruel, brought up the magazine’s much-publicized decision five years ago to axe the term “anti-aging” from its pages. “How are you going to be anti-living?” she asked.
The takeaway of the panel, hosted by the Aspen Institute, was supposed to be that women should demand to be seen, regardless of how old they are, and that society needs to accept all versions of beauty, no matter someone’s birth date. But some mild discomfort with the premise was evident. Christie Brinkley mentioned a specific wrinkle that bothers her multiple times and the steps she’s taken to minimize it. All of the panelists acknowledged at least the temptation to get some work done, and the conundrum that you’re “shamed if you do, shamed if you don’t,” as Porizkova put it. I left thinking it’s probably time to start looking into fillers.
We’ve learned to pretend to celebrate older women, but we haven’t learned to accept what happens naturally to their skin. We celebrate older women but not the un-intervened-upon face. This fuels a multibillion-dollar cosmetic and skin care industry dedicated to helping people — mainly women — stay young, or rather, try to look like it. According to data from Euromonitor International, the anti-aging market grew from $3.9 billion in 2016 to $4.9 billion in 2021 in the United States alone. The global anti-aging market went from $25 billion to nearly $37 billion during the same period.
“Anti-aging is probably the most popular and lasting promise of any sort of skin care brand or injectable,” said Jessica DeFino, a beauty writer and author of The Unpublishable, a newsletter focused on the darker sides of the beauty industry. “Youth is the ultimate goal, and obviously very convenient for the industry, because it’s an impossible goal.”
Dermatologists say that a lot of this stuff is a scam anyway and doesn’t work. Many companies fail to back up their claims of reversing the forward march of time, and some products wind up irritating the skin and making it more vulnerable to the elements, not less. But even for the products that actually make a difference, whether it be a sunscreen to try to slow skin damage or retinol to try to reduce some wrinkles, there’s really a limited amount they can accomplish. Marketers know some consumers will spend a lot of money hoping they’ll do anything, and they’ll do so for years.
The minute women hit their 20s (and in some cases, even younger), they’re told they’re in a race against time they’re destined to lose. And still, they’re encouraged to spend thousands of dollars to try to win.
Feel weird about getting older? You are not alone.
The tone of the message around aging from advertisers has shifted over the years. Throughout much of the 20th century, it was delivered with a hammer, a warning — always to women — that the man in your life won’t love you as you age. God forbid your husband appear younger than you do. In recent years, the message has come more in the form of an enthusiastic but ultimately empty hug. As Amanda Hess outlined in the New York Times magazine in 2017, it’s no longer so much packaged as hiding wrinkles but instead is cloaked in language about radiant, brighter, healthier-looking skin. It’s not about denying the passage of time but defying it. You’re supposed to feel empowered to look your best at any age.
Whatever the tone, the goal remains the same: to remind consumers they’re not comfortable with aging and prompt them to spend money accordingly. Repackaging anti-aging in a wellness frame carries the same old price tag — and the same psychological weight.
There are a lot of individual differences in how people age and how susceptible they are to external influences such as ageism and age discrimination, Candace Konnert, a psychology professor at the University of Calgary who studies aging, told me. It depends on who they compare themselves to, how the issue is treated among their families and partners, what media they consume, and their mental health, among other factors. Still, the clear message across generations has been that the beauty ideal is “young, thin, and toned,” she said. “Where did boomer women learn about their bodies? They learned from their mothers, who were raised in the era of Mad Men.”
There is also a stigma around men aging — there’s a growing market for men’s anti-aging skin care too — but it’s historically been to a more limited extent. The older a woman is, the more invisible she becomes, and the more our capitalistic society views her as less productive and less valuable.
Polls show women express concern about looking old when they are quite young, in their 20s and 30s, and begin to take action to combat it. In fact, some surveys suggest older women feel better about their bodies as they age than younger women. That young women start to worry so early helps companies to sell more.
“The target group for anti-aging products has gotten younger and younger,” said Kayla Villena, industry manager for beauty and personal care at market research firm Euromonitor. She noted that now, the target age for anti-aging products — which often aren’t called that anymore — starts at around 25. “That’s for more prevention.”
“Once they sell you on the idea that you need to anti-age, they have a customer for life,” DeFino said. “You always need another product or syringe or surgery.”
It is also worth hammering home that these products are often exorbitantly expensive. NuFace, a cream-and-contraption combination endorsed by multiple celebrities, costs hundreds of dollars just to get started. Even creams you can find in the pharmacy aisle are pricey — the relatively basic suite of skin care products sitting in my bathroom cabinet right now cost me more than $100 to acquire. One survey found that women will spend some $225,000 on their appearances across their lifetimes, a quarter of that going toward their faces.
It’s hard to blame anyone for using a cream, or anything really, to try to look younger and, more importantly, to make themselves feel better if it does. At the same time, as DeFino put it, you feel joy when you do that “because you felt like shit beforehand,” in part because society and marketers said you should. “Beauty culture makes you feel lesser than first, so that you feel better when you have a product.”
There’s no denying pretty privilege exists. That does not mean it is good. It sucks that people looking at themselves so much on Zoom during the pandemic led some to seek out plastic surgery, and that apps such as Facetune have made younger generations paranoid about how they look.
Underlying the cosmetic anxiety is a much more fundamental and human fear of decay and, ultimately, of death. Selling youth is easy, in part, because its decline represents a much scarier prospect.
Good for Jennifer Lopez that she looks young, but maybe not good for society or your wallet
The skin care and cosmetics industry would very much like consumers to at least feel like we’ve moved on to a new, more progressive era, where beauty is celebrated at any age. It holds up examples of women such as Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Aniston as 50-something hotties, and Helen Mirren, Diane Keaton, and Jane Fonda as aspirational septuagenarians and octogenarians. That’s all fine and good, except the thing that those women have in common about their age is that they don’t look it.
“Part of the problem with the marketing is that the models don’t really match reality,” Konnert said. “The new message is: ‘It’s okay to age but not to have a wrinkled face.’”
Martha Stewart has become something of a skin care influencer on TikTok. Should that be celebrated? It’s hard to say. “That’s not better,” DeFino said. “You’re celebrating this 80-something-year-old woman, but you’re celebrating her because she doesn’t look like she’s 80-something. You’re positioning this as age positivity and it’s not.”
The ways that these women have accomplished these age-defying appearances is not accessible to most people, as in expensive procedures, products, and airbrushing. Not to mention that most of how you age has nothing to do with what you put on your face — it’s about exposure to the elements, hydration, drinking, smoking, genes, etc., etc.
“My view is that one product is not going to solve your aging,” Villena said.
Companies know that, which is why they always have another thing to sell you.
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
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Have ideas for a future column or thoughts on this one? Email emily.stewart@vox.com.
How Tom Cruise went from superstar to laughingstock and back again.
Tom Cruise has spent this year flying high, literally.
At CinemaCon in April, when Mission: Impossible 7 screened its first trailer for theater owners, Cruise sent along a video intro that he’d filmed while standing on top of a biplane flying over a canyon in South Africa. It ended with him launching into a barrel roll. When he arrived at the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick in San Diego in May, he flew there in a helicopter he piloted himself, emblazoned with his own name and the title of his film.
He’s also flying high on a metaphorical level. Cruise turned 60 on July 3, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Top Gun: Maverick has made over $1 billion since it came out in May, the first film of Cruise’s career to do so and just the second film to manage the feat since the pandemic began in 2020. (The first was Spider-Man: No Way Home.)
In the pandemic era, a lot of movies are making only the most cursory appearance in theaters before they hit streaming, if they make it to theaters at all. Not Tom Cruise movies. The idea of Top Gun: Maverick premiering on streaming instead of in theaters? “Never going to happen,” Cruise said at Cannes in May, even though the completed film languished for two years before seeing the light of day. When Paramount told Cruise that Mission: Impossible 7 would play in theaters for only 45 days instead of the three months Cruise was used to, Cruise hired a lawyer.
For his efforts, Cruise is being hailed as the savior of the cinematic experience.
“Can Tom Cruise save the old-fashioned blockbuster?” asked the Telegraph.
Empire magazine described Cruise’s fight as “the battle to save cinema,” with “the biggest movie star in the world” at the vanguard.
“Cruise is here to remind us that the industry will not die on his watch. Not if he can help it,” said the LA Times. “And honestly, who among us won’t be thrilled if Cruise triumphs in life as in the movies?”
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Murray Close/Getty Images
It seems clear that Cruise sincerely sees himself as the savior of the big screen, and all the jobs that depend on it. (Or at the very least, he sees himself as the savior of Tom Cruise movies appearing on the big screen.) During the pandemic, he told audiences at Cannes, he called up theater owners to say, “Please, I know what you’re going through. Just know we are making Mission: Impossible, and Top Gun is coming out.” In December 2020, leaked audio footage from the set of Mission: Impossible 7 showed Cruise upbraiding crew members who violated Covid social distancing policies.
“They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us,” Cruise can be heard to shout on the footage. “Because they believe in us and what we’re doing. I’m on the phone with every fucking studio at night, insurance companies, producers, and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies. We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherfuckers.”
“That’s what I sleep with every night,” Cruise concluded: “the future of this fucking industry!”
By now we should know: Tom Cruise is the hero of a movie that never ends. It’s one where he always, always saves the day.
That wasn’t always the case. Cruise’s stock plummeted in the 2000s after Oprah’s couch and Brooke Shields’ antidepressants. Yet today, Cruise is once again considered a bankable and iconic star. He is no longer a publicity liability for a movie studio.
There’s only one thing that Cruise might not be able to save. That’s the nagging, persistent sense that if the movie were ever to stop, when the lights came up, there would be nothing left of Tom Cruise at all.
“Cruise’s own laugh,” concluded Alex Pappademas in the New Yorker this May, “is the best Tom Cruise impression you’ve ever heard.”
But who says the movie ever has to stop?
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Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Tom Cruise saves chivalry
“I like treating a woman the way that she deserves to be treated.” Tom Cruise to Oprah Winfrey, 2005.
Here’s an oddity in the latest spree of killer Tom Cruise publicity: For once, the press is really into the way he’s interacting with women.
Over the course of his Top Gun press tour, Tom Cruise has been handed one positive headline after another for his chivalrous habit of taking charge of all ladies present, from Kate Middleton to his co-stars. If there is a woman in the same space as he is, Cruise will escort her up and down stairs and through doorways, present her to the camera, and make sure she is taken care of. It makes for incredible press. In her coverage of Cannes, gossip maven Elaine Lui remarked on how carefully Cruise looked after Top Gun co-star Jennifer Connelly. “I’m told he was never not attentive,” Lui wrote, “always focused on making sure she was looked after, never not ready with a hand to guide her from one place to another, never missing an opportunity to talk about how spectacular she looked, seemingly enthralled by her so that the cameras would pick up on his eyeline and transfer their focus to her.”
This display of “chivalry,” Lui concluded, was “very Tom Cruise.”
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Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures
Chivalry is part of the old-fashioned action-hero masculinity Tom Cruise has long represented: the hero with the square jaw and faultless manners, kind and attentive to everyone around him. It’s also been central to Tom Cruise’s personal mythology for a long time, in both good ways and bad.
On the good side, Cruise used to be in the press on a regular basis for rescuing regular people: saving a family from a burning sailboat; getting the victim of a hit-and-run to the hospital and then paying her medical bills. Every actor who’s ever worked with him seems to have a Tom Cruise story about him making them some impossibly thoughtful gesture or gift.
On the bad side, quoth Elaine Lui, “Remember how he used to ‘present’ Katie Holmes?”
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Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic
Cruise’s 2005 marriage to Katie Holmes was marked by its public displays of affection. Cruise was constantly presenting Holmes to the camera, cuddling up to her in public, proclaiming his love for her in ever more enthusiastic ways. Even before he jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch and sent his career into a precipitous downslide, he told Oprah that he covered a hotel room in rose petals for Holmes, and that he took her on a motorcycle ride on the beach.
“I’m a romantic, okay?” Cruise said at the time. “I like treating a woman the way that she deserves to be treated.”
Romantic or not, that marriage also represented a low point in Cruise’s professional life. In the wake of his couch moment with Oprah, Cruise’s popularity plummeted, his reputation took a hit, and he almost lost the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Then came the enormous and damaging wave of publicity in 2012, when Katie Holmes divorced Cruise. Stories rolled out by the day: that Holmes had planned the divorce for two years in order to make sure she would retain custody of the couple’s daughter, Suri; that she had to orchestrate the whole thing with burner phones and secret laptops and lawyers in multiple states; that she had done it all — developed this whole two-year master plan — because that was how badly she wanted full custody of Suri. Specifically, the story went, Holmes wanted to save Suri from Scientology.
Cruise has since worked diligently to move past the so-called TomKat years. He’s been so effective that all his gentlemanly gestures on his current press tour tend to read as charming, not creepy. But there’s a clear and strong connection between Cruise’s love of chivalry then and his love of chivalry now. They are part and parcel of what appears to be a driving force behind Tom Cruise’s quest to be a hero, win the girl, and save the world: Scientology.
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Left: Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images. Right: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP via Getty Images.
Tom Cruise saves mankind (from thetans)
“That’s what drives me: is that I know we have an opportunity to really help, for the first time, effectively change people’s lives. And I am dedicated to that. I am absolutely, uncompromisingly dedicated to that.” Tom Cruise, Scientology recruitment video, 2004.
The controversial Church of Scientology, founded by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1953, appeals to the sort of worldview Cruise embodies. The world is under attack from evil forces, Scientology teaches, and all that stops them is one good man who’s not going to let petty rules get in his way.
Scientology is also, despite the number of celebrities it boasts among its ranks, a publicity liability. It’s widely suspected of being a pyramid scheme at best and at worse alleged to be an abusive cult profiting from forced labor and human trafficking, according to lawsuits and reports from former members. Its central cosmology, which teaches that human beings are plagued by immortal alien souls called thetans brought to Earth by the galactic emperor Xenu billions of years ago, is ripe for mockery.
The reporting that exists on Cruise’s connection to the church is both lengthy and damning. In September 2012, Vanity Fair published an exposé by Maureen Orth on the way Cruise outsourced management of his romantic life to the church. Tony Ortega, the closest thing there is to a beat reporter on Scientology, has a dedicated Tom Cruise tab on his website. In 2013, celebrated New Yorker reporter Lawrence Wright expanded his existing Scientology reporting into the book Going Clear, which prominently delved into Cruise’s status in the church. In 2015, Going Clear was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO documentary by the director Alex Gibney, again featuring plenty of Cruise stories. The story they told is dramatic, and it plays heavily on Cruise’s apparent understanding of himself as a savior figure. (The Church of Scientology has strongly denied all these accounts, describing them as lies from disgruntled former members and journalists with grudges.)
Cruise joined the Church of Scientology during his first marriage to Scientologist Mimi Rogers, after Top Gun had already made him a star. According to now-defected former church officials, allegedly he began to drift away from active practice during the ’90s and his marriage to Nicole Kidman, only to drift back as that marriage foundered in the late ’90s. The clincher came, those former Scientologists say in Going Clear, when Cruise said he wanted to tap Kidman’s phone, and the Church of Scientology obliged.
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Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Keeping Cruise happy apparently became a priority for the Church of Scientology. When Cruise needed a new love interest, the church reportedly recruited a young member for the job, gave her a makeover to Cruise’s specifications, and then broke up with her for him after he tired of her. When the woman told a friend what had happened to her, the church reportedly sentenced her to months of menial labor in punishment.
Around the same time that Cruise was making his grand return to the church, he fired his longtime Hollywood publicist, allegedly because she told him to stop talking about Scientology so much when he was on the publicity trail for The Last Samurai. He brought on his Scientologist sister to manage his image instead.
As Cruise was becoming more and more committed to the church, the tabloid industry was beginning to go rabid. By 2004, Us Weekly had gone from monthly trade magazine to weekly gossip rag, pitting itself against People magazine. In Touch Weekly, Life & Style Weekly, and OK! had all emerged. These magazines thrived on an endless diet of outrageous celebrity soundbites, and as Tom Cruise made the publicity rounds for The War of the Worlds, he kept offering them up, one after another.
“Some people, well, if they don’t like Scientology, well, then, fuck you,” he told Rolling Stone. “Really. Fuck you. Period.”
Citing Scientology’s distrust of psychiatry, Cruise criticized Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression, and then told Matt Lauer he was being “glib” when Lauer suggested he might have overstepped his bounds.
Cruise’s public behavior became more and more erratic. On the same War of the Worlds publicity tour, Cruise infamously jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch, enthusiastically declaring his love for Katie Holmes.
Holmes seemed to be getting caught up in the Scientology swirl herself. A W magazine profile of Holmes saw her conduct an interview with a “Scientology chaperone,” who prompted Holmes with phrases about how much she adored Cruise when she seemed to fumble for words.
The spree of outré quotes took their toll. In 2006, one report found that between the spring and summer of 2005, Cruise fell from 11th most-liked celebrity in the US to 197th.
Fox News predicted the end of Cruise’s career. “It will be all but impossible now for a new generation of film fans to see past his erratic public behavior, the Oprah couch shenanigans, the decrying of psychiatry and now the rejection of Catholicism for a religion invented by a science-fiction writer,” they opined.
Cruise, seeing the writing on the wall, veered away from talking about his religion during his movie publicity tours. But for the next 10 years, Scientology would continue to haunt his public image.
In 2008, a video leaked to the press that was reportedly a Scientology conversion effort, filmed in 2004. It featured Cruise glassy-eyed and grinning in a black turtleneck, talking about all the ways Scientology has changed his life. “Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anybody else,” he explains. “You know you have to do something about it.”
“Let me put it this way,” said Gawker, which broke the news of the video: “if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.”
In 2012, the Cruise-Holmes divorce cracked open the door of Tom Cruise Scientology stories. A host more came pouring out — and not just in the tabloids, but in legacy print magazines and prestige cable shows: Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the Village Voice, HBO.
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NY Daily News via Getty Images
According to former Scientology officials, the Church has continued to manage Cruise’s life. Reportedly, it’s granted him the full benefits of its more unsavory enterprises, including the Church’s alleged use of slave labor.
Former Scientologist John Brousseau says the church has custom-built luxury vehicles and sound systems for Cruise and provides the staff who manage his many homes. Because this labor is provided by the Church, it’s done through Sea Org, the Scientologist association that’s been accused of human trafficking and forced labor. (The Church has described these claims as “both scurrilous and ridiculous.”) According to Ortega, Sea Org members who worked on Cruise’s property “were paid only about $50 a week by the church, even though their hours could reach 100 a week.” Cruise has a net worth estimated at $600 million.
The picture painted of Cruise by former members of the church is not flattering. They tend to describe Cruise as a well-meaning man who, fundamentally, is not curious, and who is happy to have beautiful things handed to him without looking at their cost. Scientology is attractive to Cruise, in this account, because it makes his life easier while simultaneously flattering his ego with the belief that he is a hero.
But as damning as those stories are, they have largely faded out of public memory. In the 10 years since his divorce from Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise has been working hard to change the narrative.
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Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures
Can Tom Cruise save Tom Cruise?
“People can create their own lives. … I decided that I’m going to create, for myself, who I am, not what other people say I should be. I’m entitled to that.” Parade, 2006.
Cruise is currently experiencing a late-career renaissance. Cannes Film Festival feted him in May, awarding him an honorary Palme d’Or and marking the occasion with a red carpet air show. The press loves him again. Top Gun: Maverick is a major success, and the next slew of Mission: Impossible films are bound to be as well.
He’s even rumored to have a new girlfriend. If, as the tabloids claim, Cruise actually is (or was) dating his Mission: Impossible co-star Hayley Atwell, she would be his first public girlfriend since his divorce from Holmes 10 years ago.
So did he do it? How did Tom Cruise go from America’s 197th favorite celebrity to a bankable superstar once again?
The answer seems to be deceptively simple: He kept working, and he stopped talking — about Scientology, and about almost everything else too.
Cruise’s PR nadir came during a period of oversharing. Since then, he’s become known for his intense desire for privacy. “When was the last time paparazzi captured Tom Cruise on the street or anywhere but a film set or premiere?” wondered the New York Post in May 2022. He heavily restricts the questions journalists are allowed to ask him before he agrees to an interview, and both his religion and his family life tend to be off-limits.
Meanwhile, Cruise has kept making movies. Tropic Thunder in 2008 and Rock of Ages in 2012 together proved he had a sense of humor. Edge of Tomorrow in 2014, which saw Cruise ceding much of the spotlight to co-star Emily Blunt, proved he knew how to share the screen with another star. And the Mission: Impossible franchise has churned out hit after reliable hit. “I can attest that I am alarmed at the extent to which I suddenly love Tom Cruise,” admitted GQ entertainment editor Ashley Fetters in 2015, as Cruise publicized Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.
Cruise has also benefited from the current cultural shame surrounding the tabloid culture of the 2000s. As the world agrees that tabloid targets like Britney Spears were hard done by in the heady, tacky days of Y2K, everything from the era has been painted with the same shade of remorse. Vilifying Tom Cruise for jumping on Oprah’s couch can feel like the same toxic impulse that led to a decade of mocking Spears for having her mental breakdown in public, even though what Cruise has been accused of abetting within the Church of Scientology is far worse than anything Spears has ever been accused of.
In most ways, this strategy has been successful. The tabloid spectacle of Tom Cruise, Scientologist has been covered over by four decades of hard work from Tom Cruise, one of the last great movie stars.
But it’s not clear that Cruise can ever again reach the heights of public adoration he enjoyed in 2003. There’s a persistent strangeness around Tom Cruise’s image that has never quite resolved itself, a sort of falseness that he’s never been entirely able to weed out. It’s a falseness that’s rooted not in his Scientology but in his movie star core. From the beginning, the world has refused to believe Tom Cruise when he breaks out his giant movie star smile. It especially refuses to believe him when he laughs.
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In an early pan of 1983’s Risky Business, Cruise’s breakout film, New York magazine took aim at the young star’s mannerisms. “Cruise has a slight, undeveloped voice and a nervous smile, which he relies on whenever the script reveals one of its innumerable holes,” the review ran.
In HBO’s Going Clear, footage of Tom Cruise laughing in his Scientology recruitment video plays while one ex-Scientologist declares, “Scientologists are all full of shit.”
A 2004 Rolling Stone profile devoted paragraph after paragraph to the oddness of “the famous Tom Cruise laugh.”
“It comes on just fine, a regular laugh by any standards. You will be laughing too,” wrote Neil Strauss. “But then, when the humor subsides, you will stop laughing. At this point, however, Cruise’s laugh will just be crescendoing. And he will be making eye contact with you.”
It’s as though there’s a hollowness at the center of Cruise’s image, some sort of vacancy that he is forever restlessly seeking to fill. As though if he can only save enough people, enough industries, enough worlds — maybe then, at last, he can finally be whole. But can anyone, even Tom Cruise, do that much saving?