You hear a lot of stories about Tom Cruise.  He makes weird jokes about “gays in there”, he showed up to watch football at Jimmy Kimmel’s house toting both his mom and a box of cupcakes, etc., etc.  The common thread seems to be that he’s nice, but borderline-autism level weird.  But since Scientologists don’t believe in autism and Tom Cruise is really rich, they elected him Dalai Space Llama or something.  Anyway, there’s an excerpt from Rob Lowe’s autobiography in Vanity Fair talking about meeting Cruise while shooting The Outsiders back in 1983, in which he implies that Tom Cruise is a robot, but in the nicest way possible.

During the first round of auditions in Los Angeles, Lowe writes of meeting Tom Cruise, then a houseguest of the Sheens: “He’s open, friendly, funny, and has an almost robotic, bloodless focus and an intensity that I’ve never encountered before.” In New York for the second round of auditions, Lowe finds that Cruise is “already showing traits that will make him famous; he’s zeroed in like a laser.” “We check into the Plaza Hotel. I am taken aback at the luxury and spectacle of the lobby…. The front desk tells us we will be sharing rooms,” Lowe writes of the actors’ arrival in the Big Apple. “In a flash, Cruise is on the phone to his agent, Paula Wagner. ‘Paula, they are making us share,’ he says…. The rest of us are staggering around like happy goofs….. ‘O.K., then. Thank you very much,’ he says like a 50-year-old businessman getting off the phone with his stockbroker. ‘Paula says it’s fine.’ ”

“She assured me that there won’t be any gays in there.”

Lowe remembers hanging out with Cruise and the other actors in a gymnasium on set, when Patrick Swayze—who, Lowe writes, “makes Tom Cruise look lobotomized”—“begins to teach us a standing backflip…. When it comes to flips, I’m a pussy. I don’t flip. I don’t even dive into a pool—straight cannonball for me…. No, thanks. Cruise, not surprisingly, is all over it. ‘How about this!’ he says, almost pulling it off without even being spotted. He wipes out, but tries it again immediately.”

Benicio Del Toro later said of working with Swayze, “He flip you.”

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After much anticipation and whining (mostly by me), Rickey Gervais’ The Invention of Lying finally has a trailer.  It’s set in a world where everyone tells the truth all the time, until Ricky Gervais accidentally invents lying.  It’s basically the opposite of Liar Liar.  Besides starring, Ricky Gervais also wrote and directed (with Matthew Robinson), and it co-stars Rob Lowe, Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Louis CK, Jeffrey Tambor, Christopher Guest… pretty much every comedy actor ever.  I looks promising.  Then again, I might just hold out for the American remake starring Steve Carrell and act surprised whenever anyone mentions this one, just to help hipsters feel more smug at cocktail parties.\

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