Starring Tom Cruise

The contributors work hard to unpick the tightly woven image that Cruise has cultivated over his career, seeking to reveal his repressed anxieties and trying to come to terms with the complexities underneath his desirability.

~Andrew Key, Los Angeles Review of Books

Finished reading Starring Tom Cruise today. I highly recommend it to scholars working in star/celebrity studies. Each essay in Redmond's collection offers new approaches to thinking about Tom Cruise's stardom. The approaches used include focus on his masculinity, aging body, queerness of his stardom, and his importance as part of IP focus of Hollywood. Redmond's collection offers a model which scholars working on stardom/celebrity could use to develop future projects.

~Brian Faucette, Twitter

Sean Redmond’s first-rate edited collection offers detailed consideration of the most important roles in Cruise’s successful decades-long career. This wide-ranging volume also covers essential new ground for the analysis of contemporary Hollywood stardom. Its insightful cross-disciplinary examination of the star’s perpetual border crossing makes this book an unmissable read. Stars like Tom Cruise never seem to lose their shine. This book enables us to understand why.

~Virginia Luzón-Aguado, Harrison Ford: Masculinity and Stardom in Hollywood

What this new volume gets right is its insistence that Cruise’s stardom isn’t peripheral to the films in which he acts. Instead, that stardom indelibly shapes and limits the sort of interpretations his films occasion.

~J. D. Schnepf, Celebrity Studies

Moreover, as well as textual analysis of Cruise’s films, the contributors use a wide range of press coverage, biographies, documentary, websites, reality television and social media posts, alongside academic literature, to explore Cruise’s complex image and longevity as a star. An excellent read for those both familiar and unfamiliar with Cruise and his work.

~Gillian Kelly, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Love him or loathe him, there is no denying that Tom Cruise has been one of the world's biggest movie stars for a long time. As such, he deserves serious scholarly attention, and this book provides it with fifteen smart essays that adroitly address just about every imaginable facet of the star's cultural, sexual, and symbolic resonance.

~Gaylyn Studlar

This is a book that star studies has wanted, even if we didn't know it—a wide-ranging set of reflections on the desirability, authenticity, and dogged agelessness of contemporary Hollywood's ubiquitous genre king. As equally attuned to the white, masculine normativity of Tom Cruise as to his performative excess, sexual indeterminacy, and spiritual eccentricity, this book advances star studies by elucidating a changing Hollywood landscape through the cultural continuity of its most tenacious star.

~Misha Kavka

The contributors analyze Cruise's appearance, his affect, the surrounding discourses, and films' presentation of the actor in ways that illuminate the various aspects of his stardom and the society and industry that have made him a star for forty years.

~Cynthia Baron