Is Tom Cruise A Covid Warrior Or A Dickhead?

Tom Cruise: “I don’t ever want to see it again, ever! We are not shutting this f***ing movie down!”

That was part of the rant Tom Cruise went on recently when he completely laid into crew members on a movie set for breaking Covid protocols.

The audio recording has been circulating online and people are pretty divided about what to make of it.

What Did Tom Cruise Do?

The seventh Mission: Impossible movie has been filming just outside of London, and this audio recording of Tom Cruise ripping into the crew was recently published by a British tabloid.

Cruise supposedly saw two of the crew looking at a computer, standing within two metres of each other – which is against the current social distancing guidelines.

The recording’s been widely circulated and people have pretty mixed opinions about it.

The Covid Argument

One of the responses has been that in light of how bad the pandemic has been, Cruise was totally justified in how he behaved.

Some people have been defending him, reminding people about just how serious Covid is.

To date, over 1.6 million people have died from Covid, and the Centre for Disease Control have said that social distancing is one of the best ways to avoid being exposed to the virus and slowing its spread.

The ‘Tom Cruise Is A Bully’ Argument

But other people think that despite the pandemic, the way Cruise spoke to people he works with was just totally out of line, which feeds into an ongoing narrative that’s been escalating about a culture of bullying in Hollywood.

Ellen DeGeneres has been in the middle of that discussion, after allegations came out that her show had become a toxic workplace where staff felt bullied, and back in October a report was published that had been investigating discrimination, harassment, and bullying in the whole entertainment industry.

It stated that, “Hollywood has an entrenched and endemic issue with bullying that is exacerbated by the industry’s power imbalances” and that amongst others, women, workers with disabilities, and those working as assistants are all more likely to report being bullied in some way in a Hollywood workplace.

The Pressure Of Hollywood Argument

But there’s another group of people who’ve also defended how Cruise reacted to the Covid protocol breach.

Their argument is more of a sympathetic stance about how much pressure must be sitting on Cruise’s shoulders with this Mission: Impossible movie.

Tom Cruise: “I’m on the phone with every f****** studio at night, insurance companies, producers. We are creating thousands of jobs, you m************.”

The film has already had a rough time. Filming had to stop twice throughout the year and only resumed again back in September.

And outside of just Mission: Impossible, the whole entertainment industry – like many others – is in a pretty bad situation. One estimate is that about 465,000 people working in Hollywood have been out of work in 2020 because of Covid.

Cruise isn’t just starring in the new Mission: Impossible movie, he’s also one of its producers, and other actors like Ricky Gervais and George Clooney have said that they can kind of understand the pressure he’s probably under. Clooney said in an interview that, “if production goes down, a lot of people lose their jobs. People have to understand that and be responsible”.

The Scientology Argument

Then there are people that are bringing up that Cruise is a Scientologist, like this person who tweeted that ‘Scientologists give zero shits about human life’.

Leah Remini is an American actor and former scientologist, and she wrote a public blog about how she thinks Cruise’s outburst had nothing to do with actually caring about anybody’s safety.

She wrote that, “anything you see coming from Scientology and Scientologists, such as mask wearing and supposedly humanitarian efforts, is just a show. It’s for public relations reasons only”.

The Takeaway

The entertainment industry has undeniably suffered because of Covid, and it’s really not hard to imagine that there must be huge amounts of pressure on the few productions that are persevering.

But five crew members on the Mission: Impossible movie have now allegedly quit because of Cruise’s rant, and whether he was right to blow up or not has really divided public opinion.