Tom Cruise reflected on more than four decades at the forefront of global cinema as he joined BAFTA for a special A Life in Pictures event on Monday 21 September.
In an in-depth conversation with Edith Bowman, the award-winning actor and producer looked back across a career spanning 47 films, sharing stories from behind the camera as well as in front of it and discussing the craft, collaboration and creative choices behind some of his most celebrated work.
The conversation explored films including Risky Business (1983), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire(1996), Magnolia (1999), Collateral (2004), Top Gun (1986) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022), alongside the Mission: Impossible franchise (1996–2025) and his latest film, Digger (2026).
His latest role in Digger marks his first collaboration with award-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, in a film Cruise has described as unlike anything he’s tackled before.
Reflecting on his experience upon first reading the script for Digger, Tom Cruise said: “It’s the most outrageous character I’ve ever read!… I swear to you, I have never read a movie [like this], it is the most original film, and one of the most moving films I’ve ever seen. And this character, what a joy!“
Later, commenting on the shared experience of creating a film, he added:“The beauty of making movies, and I think the beauty of living is that you don’t do it alone. It’s all of us. And the beauty of making a film, we all know, it’s every single one of us together trying to create this story that we’re going to entertain the world.”
From his breakthrough role in Taps (1981), Tom Cruise has gone on to become one of Hollywood’s most enduring and versatile leading men. Over four decades on screen, he has continually redefined himself – from Oliver Stone’s Vietnam epic Born on the Fourth of July (1989), which earned him a BAFTA nomination for Leading Actor, to Rob Reiner’s courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992), Thomas Paul Anderson’s Magnolia(1999), Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) and Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (2014).
That same commitment to his craft has shaped Cruise’s work as a producer and champion of the theatrical experience. He produced his first film, Mission: Impossible(1996) and has gone on to produce almost every film he has starred in since, including Top Gun: Maverick (2022), which earned four BAFTA nominations and became one of the highest-grossing titles of all time.
In 2005, he was honoured with the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film by BAFTA North America.
The event was supported by BAFTA’s Official Screen Partner, Samsung, the Official Screen Partner to BAFTA.
BAFTA: A Life in Pictures is a long-running series of in-depth interviews in which some of the world’s leading film and television talent share unique career insights into the experiences that helped them hone and develop their craft.
The series has previously hosted figures including Baz Luhrmann, Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Craig, Emma Thompson, George Clooney, Helen Mirren, Hugh Grant, Kate Hudson, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, Kristin Scott Thomas, Margot Robbie, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Penélope Cruz, Quentin Tarantino, Russel T Davies, Sam Mendes, Tom Hanks and Viola Davis.
