Tom Cruise as father and son

In a career spanning almost forty years, it is unsurprising that Tom Cruise has played a variety of characters with distinct familial identities, chief among them sons and fathers. By examining the choice of roles he has undertaken, his oeuvre can arguably be read as both a reflection of his personal reckoning with his complicated familial dynamics and as a cultivated staging of performative sonhood and fatherhood in bot a literal and figurative sense through an analysis of Cruise’s various portrayals of characters who are sons or fathers and his own familial relationships as both a son and a father. In doing so, I will argue that Cruise’s complex performances of masculinity, both in front of the camera and in the world outside of the cinema, have been shaped by what appear to be complicated relationships with his own father and daughter Suri.