I think the only thing funnier than a great meme is seeing the subject of said meme react to it. So, you can imagine how delighted I was when an old interview of Tom Cruise reacting to some A+ memes inspired by the Mission: Impossible movies resurfaced on the internet.
Now, allow me to take you back to 2017. Tom Cruise released The Mummy and American Made that year, and he dropped by the BBC to do an interview about his work. However, more importantly for this story, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation had come out two years before this. So, that provided ample time for the internet to take the scene of Cruise hanging off a plane and meme-ify it.
Tom Cruise got a real kick out of all the memes, too, as you can see in the interview below:
As you can see, about 2 minutes and 28 seconds into this video, the interviewer, Ali Plumb, asked Tom Cruise if he was aware of the “Tom Cruise clinging off things meme.” Well, he wasn’t, and clearly he was quite entertained by this brief educational moment.
Personally, I love that the first meme the Top Gun actor saw was of him hanging onto Free Willy’s tail as he jumped out of the ocean. It was a good starting point, because it only got more chaotic. What followed was an image where four Tom Cruises were hanging onto a jumping cat and a photo of Darth Maul falling while Cruise held on for dear life. However, the real doozy was the Risky Business star hanging off Nicolas Cage’s face.
What makes this even better is the scene that inspired this meme is from one of the best Mission: Impossible movies, Rogue Nation. And every time I rewatch that M:I movie, I’m in awe over the stunt and the fact that Tom Cruise was actually hanging off that plane.
This clip is also great because, as it ages, I’d argue, it gets funnier. That’s because, since 2017, three more Mission: Impossible movies have been released, with the most recent, The Final Reckoning, having come out on the 2025 movie schedule. With each movie, Cruise’s stunts get more intense as he continues to defy expectations by doing things like jumping a motorcycle off a cliff and maneuvering between two planes as they’re flying. So, that juxtaposed with silly memes really cracks me up.
Clearly, it cracks the people of the internet up, too, because despite this interview being very old, it resurfaced on Instagram this year. It went viral too, with the repost from FBOY PROBLEMS garnering over 57.5 thousand likes. So, it’s pretty obvious that fans also find the “Tom Cruise clining off things meme” just as funny as Tom Cruise does.
All this is to say, I adore that Tom Cruise got such a kick out of all these memes. Now, I have to go back and watch Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation with a Paramount+ subscription, and I think you should too.
