Entertainment

How TGI Fridays Helped Tom Cruise In An Iconic Movie Role By Joe Hoeffner Nov. 15, 2025 2:00 pm EST

As America's greatest living movie star, Tom Cruise's career has gone through several phases over the years. Today he's an elder-statesman action hero, in films like "Top Gun: Maverick" and the latter-day "Mission: Impossible" movies. In the late 1990s, he subverted his leading-man persona in auteur-driven films like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" (for which he was shamefully robbed of an Oscar). The late '80s and early '90s marked his pivot to serious dramatic acting with "Born on the Fourth of July" and "A Few Good Men." But throughout most of the '80s, Tom Cruise played an uncommonly charismatic heartthrob in popcorn flic

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