Tom Cruise Uses Private Jet to Fly His Favorite Christmas Cakes to England
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Over the past week, the world has been treated to a new report about Tom Cruise’s latest act of supposed heroism.
This time, the gung-ho mega-star wasn’t seen landing a helicopter in someone’s back garden or hanging upside-down from an airplane for some insane stunt for “Mission Impossible 8.” Instead, news came from “insiders” that Cruise is so amazingly generous to his U.K.-based film crew that he had 300 of his beloved holiday cakes delivered to them, all the way from his favorite bakery in Los Angeles.
To emphasize the actor’s kindness, these “insiders” specifically made a point to The Sun of saying that Cruise dispatched his private plane to make sure that the white chocolate coconut bundt cakes, from Doan’s Bakery in Woodland Hills, were expeditiously transported across the Atlantic. That’s a round-trip journey of more than 5,500 miles.
“Tom wanted to give the team on ‘Mission: Impossible’ a treat for Christmas and decided that only cakes from his favorite bakery in LA would do,” a source told The Sun. “It is extravagant, but Tom is an incredibly generous person and he wanted to do something special for everyone who has worked on the movie with him.”
It’s safe to assume that these insiders are working on behalf of Cruise’s publicists, who are looking for a way to generate positive P.R. for their client, but it’s curious that they, or even Cruise himself, emphasized that he used his private plane to transport cakes.
Didn’t they get the memo? Don’t they know that it’s not so cool anymore for celebrities to flaunt their use of private planes? That’s because of, well, growing concerns about global income inequality and climate change. Among other things, CO2-spewing jets are notoriously bad for the environment. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle could tell Cruise a thing or two about how bad P.R. follows revelations of private plane use.
Cruise may not try to tout himself as an eco-warrior, as Harry and Meghan do; still, it’s strange that Cruise, or his publicists, thought it would be a good idea to promote the idea that he had used his private plane to deliver the $99 cakes, not for, say, some noble humanitarian mission. Extravagant indeed.
They may be desperate to please their client. Cruise must be pretty frustrated that he hasn’t had a new movie to promote since 2018, and he won’t until next year. The release of his two hotly anticipated blockbusters, the “Top Gun” sequel and the seventh “Mission: Impossible” film, were delayed until next year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Top Gun: Maverick” was supposed to come out last month but was pushed to May, while “Mission: Impossible 7” was delayed from May to September 2022, Deadline reported. Cruise’s last movie, “Mission Impossible: Fallout,” was released in 2018.
In the meantime, Cruise, one the world’s biggest movie stars, has only been able to get attention for his occasional acts of derring-do, showing up at San Francisco Giants game in October, his unpleasant ties to the controversial Church of Scientology, his failed marriages to Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes and for yelling f-bombs at his “Mission: Impossible 7” crew members for purportedly breaking COVID-19 set safety protocols.
Cruise’s holiday cakes garnered him positive attention during the holiday season of 2020, with reports emphasizing how he likes sending them to his A-list friends, including Kirsten Dunst, Rosie O’Donnell and James Corden. The story about Cruise’s beloved cakes made for a pleasantly diverting story during a bleak December when a surge of COVID-19 cases kept families from getting together.
This year, the private plane angle adds a slightly sour note to the cake story. It seems that Cruise’s “insiders” were hoping otherwise. Then again, they did manage to get one effusive story out of the actor’s extravagance, by sending not one, but two cakes to a writer for The Guardian.
In a column, Stuart Heritage shared the news that he had received two of the cakes that had arrived on the private jet. Heritage indicated that the use of the private jet was a tad excessive but otherwise focused on how delighted he was to be a recipient. He said he written about the cakes in 2020, hoping that he might one day be important enough to “receive such a wonderful gift.”
Heritage said the cake lived up to its reputation. Perhaps, as he wrote, that’s because it was rushed over on Cruise’s private jet and not transported commercially via FedEx or UPS.
“Given the nature of the cake and the distance it had travelled, I was expecting it to be a little on the dry side,” Heritage wrote. “Not so. This is a soft, silky, luxurious thing, so impossibly rich that it almost defies description.”
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