There really is no press tour like a Tom Cruise press tour – which is why there have not really been any Tom Cruise press tours for a very long time indeed. We’re now at the stage of this one where even the interviewers have been forced on to the interview circuit to defend their interviews.

Anyway: Cruise. The guy has one child with ex-wife Katie Holmes who dropped his surname as soon as she was legally allowed, and two Scientologist children widely reported to be effectively estranged from their mother, Nicole Kidman. The divorces from Kidman and Holmes were clearly deeply strange and traumatic events for both women, and have remained shrouded in unusually watertight and presumably contractual secrecy. Yet you can currently find Tom Cruise promoting his latest movie not being asked about any of this stuff, or indeed any of his other extensive “stuff” – as always – but instead doing things like giving Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast a lecture on the benefits of VistaVision. Hate to say it, but a woman could never.

At some level, you have to admire the mad image-industrial complex that labours to keep “the last movie star” from having to talk about the things all the other movie stars are required to lay on the line in order to promote their wares. Only a few weeks ago, Kidman was on the cover of Vogue being required to pick over her two marriages in what was otherwise the most saccharine of interviews.

Meanwhile, the world is obliged on pain of death to........

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