Judd Apatow Bashes ‘Tiny’ Tom Cruise at DGA Awards

Steven Spielberg made headlines recently at the Oscars nominees luncheon when he pulled Top Gun: Maverick star Tom Cruise aside and told him “You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution.” 

Apparently, Judd Apatow didn’t get that memo. The filmmaker used this weekend’s hosting gig at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Awards to turn Cruise into his personal comedy piñata, pummeling him on topics ranging from his height to his religion to his parenting skills. Apatow started hammering right off the top, beginning his monologue with a joke about “visual effects in Maverick were so top-notch I couldn’t even see the stack of phone books Tom Cruise sat on to reach the flight controls.”

Hey-o! The Hollywood Reporter had the goods on Apatow’s litany of roast-eriffic ribs: 

• “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.”
• Apatow reminded everyone about the time Cruise bounced around on Oprah’s couch, leading America to conclude: “‘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. 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 reminded Cruise that Thelma and Louise didn’t actually drive off a cliff. “You’re 60, calm down.”
• “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 co-parenting and antidepressants.” (That one prompted actual 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.'”

How did the notoriously criticism-averse Cruise react to all of Apatow's abuse? Not surprisingly, he wasn’t actually in the room. If Cruise had been present, Apatow might have found himself on the receiving end of a different kind of punching up. (Yeah, that was a short joke and Tom, we’re kidding. We’re kidding!)