Judd Apatow let loose on Tom Cruise during his DGA Awardsmonologue on Saturday night, roasting the superstar on everything from his height to his commitment to Scientology.
Apatow, hosting the award show for the fourth time, started off the bit by teasing that the “visual effects in [Top Gun:] Maverick were so top-notch I couldn’t even see the stack of phone books Tom Cruise sat on to reach the flight controls.” He continued, “That’s why he’s always jumping out of tall buildings because you can’t tell how short he is from a 100-story building. That’s why when he’s standing on a wing of an airplane he’s always alone, he doesn’t want anyone there next to him for scale.”
The director noted how when Cruise jumped up and down on the couch while on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2005, everyone thought, “‘What a lunatic.’ Now he drives a motorcycle off a cliff and then BASE jumps, and we’re all like, ‘Tom’s fine.’”
“Tom is not fine, something is wrong right now,” Apatow said. “Someone needs to explain something to him called CGI — you don’t need to do the stunts, they look exactly the same when you do them on the green screen.” He jokingly told Cruise that at the end of Thelma and Louise, they didn’t actually drive off a cliff, declaring, “You’re 60, calm down.”
He then shifted to Cruise’s famous relationship with the Church of Scientology, saying, “Every time he does one of these new stunts it does feel like an ad for Scientology, it really does. I mean, is that in Dianetics because there’s nothing about jumping off a cliff in the Torah? The only thing he seems to be afraid of is coparenting and antidepressants,” to some audience gasps. “Do you think if Tom Cruise took antidepressants he’d be like, ‘I’m not jumping off of a fucking motorcycle on a cliff? Why do I even work, I’m rich.’” Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverickdirector Joseph Kosinski (who was nominated for the night’s top prize) and producer Jerry Bruckheimer were present for the monologue, though the star himself did not attend the show after appearing at the Oscar Nominees Luncheon earlier in the week.