57. Cruise has been nominated for three Oscars: Best Supporting Actor for Magnolia and Best Actor for Jerry Maguire and Born on the Fourth of July. He has seven Golden Globe nominations and three wins, for those three films.
58. He returned all three Globes in 2021 as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association came under fire for its lack of diversity in its ranks.
59. Cruise's movies have collectively grossed more than $11 billion at the box office worldwide, though Top Gun: Maverick is his first film to cross the billion-dollar threshold on its own.
Prior to the release of the 36-years-in-the-making, pandemic-delayed sequel, his highest-grossing movie worldwide was Mission: Impossible—Fallout, with $791 million. Domestically, his biggest film was War of the Worlds with $234 million—though adjusted for inflation, it was the original Top Gun ($180 million in 1986 vs. $444 million in 2022). Top Gun: Maverick has made $534 million in the U.S.
60. Of course those are real F-18s and the actors are really flying in Top Gun: Maverick. "It is aggressive. You can't act that, the distortion in the face," Cruise explained in a making-of featurette. "They're pulling 7 1/2, 8 G's. That's 1,600 pounds of force."
As he recalled to Empire, he told the studio before they got started, "'You don't know how hard this movie's going to be. No-one's ever done this before.'" But he was firm about not wanting to do any "CGI stuff."
And in the end, Cruise said, "There's never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don't know if there ever will be again, to be honest."
61. When Tom Cruise wants to tell you he appreciates you, he sends dessert. The White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake from Doan's Bakery in Woodland Hills, Calif., has become the stuff of holiday-gift-giving legend, sent to the likes of Tom Hanks, Rosie O'Donnell and, more recently, Top Gun: Maverick co-stars Miles Teller and Jon Hamm.
When December comes around, the staff at Hanks' production company Playtone "start eyeing what mail has come in," Hanks shared on the Mythical Kitchen YouTube series Last Meals. "Is the big box coming in? Are we getting what has essentially been called 'the Tom Cruise cake?'"