Tom Cruise: he’s Scientology’s golden boy mascot, he’s an acting legend, he’s a practitioner of couch parkour, and he’s at least 50% of why this year’s The Mummy film was so bad.
But … does he wear a fake butt? A photo that’s circulated all over social media suggests that, at least once, he did.
You can see it for yourself below, and we might finally have an answer.
As a general rule, we don’t spend a great deal of time contemplating Tom Cruise’s butt.
Not it’s appearance and not its authenticity.
It’s not that we have anything against his butt, even though it’s part of the flesh prison of a man Leah Remini calls “diabolical.”
But, thankfully, someone on the internet spends enough time thinking about butts that they noticed one particular image and brought it to light.
Twitter user @iluvbutts247, an account that the world never knew that it needed but suddenly cannot live without, tweeted out this message:
“Hello, please, i present the theory that for one single shot in Valkyrie (2008), at 5:12, tom cruise wears a fake butt. observe:”
Attached was this screencap from the film:
Now, this photo has been circulating for over a month, now, since this tweet was first shared.
It doesn’t look quite real, does it?
It doesn’t look unnatural, exactly — just too perfect.
And since this is really the first we’ve heard of it, we guess that it’s something that you’d never notice if a butt-centric blog hadn’t been, we’re guessing, going through the scene frame-by-frame for the perfect ass shot.
Remember — shows and films in 2008 weren’t designed for modern gif culture, where every scene is likely to get picked apart by a sizable army of fans.
Of all of the potential secrets that we imagined might come to light about Tom Cruise, we’d never imagined that “he wears a fake butt” would be among them.
But … maybe it’s not as fake as it looks.
On Tuesday, Tom Cruise responded to the theory that he wears a fake butt in an interview with Screen Rant.
“I have no idea. There was no prosthetic in Valkyrie. No.”
He also shares that this is somehow the first that he’s heard of the rumor.
Which … really goes to show you that Tom Cruise might as well be Amish in terms of how out-of-touch he is with actual society and in terms of how little benefit he gets from social media.
He lives in this planet but it’s like he’s inhabiting another world, you know?
Tom Cruise has mooned characters in past films, but he assures the world that he used his actual butt at the time, too.
“It’s me. It’s not CGI, it’s me. I do my own mooning in films. So let it be known — I do my own mooning.”
For a variety of reasons, you might be thinking that Tom Cruise is not exactly the most reliable guy to confirm or deny a rumor about Tom Cruise.
Wes Okerson, the dude who trained Tom Cruise for Valkyrie, stepped up to confirm Tom Cruise’s side of the story in an interview with Men’s Health.
“It’s real. He was working long hours and we were training every single day. Definitely, definitely real. He does his own stunts. It’s pretty well-documented.”
You might point out that Wes Okerson has a vested interest in not ratting out on his clients.
No studio wants to hire a trainer who’s going to be like “oh sure she worked out but those abs were digitally enhanced or a body double.”
But we’re not accusing Wes Okerson or even Tom Cruise of lying. Maybe Tom Cruise, or the Tom Cruise of a decade ago, really did have such an extraordinary tush that, at a certain angle, it looks like it can’t possibly be real.
That doesn’t change anything about him. Not really.
