In “Mission: Impossible III,” the third installment of the greatest action-film franchise of all time, Tom Cruise tells his fictional wife that she needs to kill him before he dies. It’s a classic Cruise conundrum: a villain has implanted an explosive charge in his head, and, to deactivate it, his wife must use a makeshift defibrillator that will disable the bomb but also stop his heart. Fortunately, the wife, played by Michelle Monaghan, is a nurse. (Earlier scenes of her being smiley with hospital personnel weren’t in vain.) She gamely electrocutes her husband to death, takes a quick break to shoot the bad guys in the room, and then performs CPR on Cruise. He bursts back to life and instinctively grabs his gun, ready to rejoin the fight.
As we’ve seen over the years, Tom Cruise can do almost anything—fly helicopters, free-climb cliffs, and even sing and play the guitar. Only rarely does he flop. But “Mission: Impossible III,” which came out in 2006, made less than four hundred million dollars globally—not much in the eyes of its distributor, Paramount. Sumner Redstone, then the chairman of Viacom, which owned Paramount, blamed these disappointing box-office numbers on Cruise. In the run-up to the film’s première, the actor had become extremely vocal about his involvement with the Church of Scientology and had given some unnerving talk-show interviews, jumping on Oprah’s couch and ranting about psychiatry in an exchange with Matt Lauer on the “Today” show. (“Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug?” Cruise asked Lauer, speaking with an urgency that amphetamine users could only envy.) Redstone estimated that Cruise’s antics had cost “Mission: Impossible III” up to a hundred and fifty million dollars in lost ticket sales, and Paramount announced later that year that it was ending its long-standing relationship with the star. “We don’t think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot,” Redstone told the Wall Street Journal.
Until then, Cruise had been considered box-office gold. In 1996, he became the first person to star in five consecutive films that grossed at least a hundred million dollars in the United States. He was also thought to be one of the finest dramatic actors of his generation, having worked with directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and Paul Thomas Anderson. Cameron Crowe, the director of the romantic comedy “Jerry Maguire,” has noted the actor’s unique ability to deliver sincere dialogue that might sound silly coming from someone else. In an interview with Deadline, Crowe said that he was nervous about the line that Cruise says in the movie’s climax—“You complete me”—and considered cutting it. But on shooting day, Crowe recalled, “in he comes, and in the most loving way, this heavyweight was ready for the knockout. He gently crushed it.” Everyone on set was crying.
It seemed inevitable that, at some point in his career, Cruise would win an Oscar. In 1990, he was nominated for his performance in Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July,” and he would later receive nominations for “Jerry Maguire” and Anderson’s “Magnolia.” He won Golden Globes for all three performances but was snubbed by the Academy. After his breakup with Paramount, in 2006, Cruise began to take more creative risks. In the 2007 film “Lions for Lambs,” a lacklustre political drama, he played a neocon senator hellbent on winning the war on terror. In 2008, he starred in “Valkyrie,” as the German colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler. “Valkyrie” was an anti-Nazi bio-pic released on Christmas Day; in other words, it was Oscar bait. And yet it did not earn any nominations.
“Valkyrie” would be the final snub. After that, the actor turned away from prestige roles entirely. He has been in fourteen movies since, and thirteen of them have been action films. (The outlier was the movie musical “Rock of Ages,” which may be best left unacknowledged.) Most of them were either directed, written, or produced by Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise’s creative soulmate, whom the actor first worked with on the set of “Valkyrie.” In 2011, Paramount reunited with Cruise for a fourth “Mission: Impossible.” Robert Elswit, the film’s cinematographer, has said that the “marching orders” were for Cruise’s character to retire at the end of the film, and for a new actor, such as Jeremy Renner, to replace him as the face of the franchise. But Cruise brought McQuarrie on set midway through production, and McQuarrie helped rework the script, focussing the story on Cruise and changing the ending. The movie earned nearly seven hundred million dollars globally, revitalizing the franchise.
According to a recent study by Rotten Tomatoes, the more time that Cruise spends running onscreen, the better the movie does. (Cruise was frustratingly slow in “Lions for Lambs” and “Valkyrie,” which may explain why they were his lowest domestic grossers in the two-thousands.) Cruise’s Instagram bio says that he’s been “running in movies since 1981.” This is a reference to his first screen role, a small part in the feature film “Endless Love.” When we first see him, he is but a teen-ager, wearing cutoff denim shorts, racing across a soccer field. The actor has since worked with professionals to develop his trademark stride: hands slicing the air, high knees, chest up, head relaxed, with very little movement from side to side. Former Olympians have praised him for his abilities; a former “Mission: Impossible” stunt coördinator has said that Cruise can run 17.5 miles per hour, more than double the speed of an average non-élite athlete.
Over time, Cruise has taken to running longer distances on camera. In the first “Mission: Impossible,” he ran an estimated seven hundred and thirty feet, at one point sprinting away from an antagonist after using a piece of explosive chewing gum to blow a hole in a restaurant’s fish tank. In more recent installments, he has run somewhere between two and four thousand feet, including on top of an airport in Abu Dhabi and while breaking out of a Russian prison. But running is probably the least impressive thing he does in these movies. For “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation,” the fifth movie, he hung off the side of an Airbus A400M plane during takeoff. During filming for “Mission: Impossible—Fallout,” he became the first actor to perform a HALO jump, or a high-altitude skydive, usually reserved for military special forces. (He performed the dive more than a hundred times, and ultimately did it with a broken ankle.) The seventh film, “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One,” featured what Paramount has called “the biggest stunt in cinema history”: Cruise rides a motorcycle off a four-thousand-foot cliff, lets go of the bike, and parachutes into a valley below. (He did that one six times.)
By constantly putting his life at risk, Cruise has saved his career. The stunts have become so vital to the franchise that Cruise and McQuarrie have taken to planning them first, and then figuring out the plot later. “We start all these movies with each asking the other, ‘What do you want to do with this one?’ ” McQuarrie explained, at the première for “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” at Cannes. “I knew I had a submarine sequence,” he said, “and Tom wanted to do a wing-walking sequence.” In the first sequence, which was filmed in a nine-million-litre water tank, Cruise dives down to the wreckage of a Russian submarine. When he enters it, the sub starts to roll, making Cruise look like an errant sock in a gigantic washing machine. During filming, the actor did seventy-five-minute dives, which is “unheard of,” according to the film’s marine coördinator. He was also wearing a mask without a mouthpiece, which greatly restricted his oxygen. But it would have got in the way of the audience being able to see his face.
Cruise’s wing-walking sequence was somehow even more dangerous. (“ ‘I want to be zero G in between the wings of the plane,’ ” McQuarrie recalled the actor saying.) While shooting one element of the scene—which involves Cruise jumping from one plane to another, hanging out on the wing, and fighting his way into the cockpit, among other feats—McQuarrie recalls wanting to vomit. Cruise performed that stunt another eighteen times. “He wanted to do one more and that’s when I said no,” McQuarrie said. “I was, like, ‘Do not anger the gods. We have what we need.’ ”
Other actors, including those who have dabbled in stunt work, have expressed awe at Cruise’s level of dedication. “What Tom Cruise does is extraordinary and special,” Keanu Reeves once said. Reeves described himself as “on the ground playing in the mud,” whereas Cruise is “flying and jumping outside of buildings and helicopters.” Will Smith has said that when he started filming “Bad Boys for Life,” he was intent on performing his own stunts. “I was, like, Man, I’m better than Tom Cruise,” he said. But after Smith did two stunts, “I was, like, I’m not better than Tom Cruise.” Smith, unlike Cruise, has an Oscar. But Cruise has found a different way to set himself apart—by becoming the Daniel Day-Lewis of stunt work. “It communicates to an audience when it’s real,” he has said. “It’s different. There’s stakes.”
The actor is now sixty-two years old. Though “The Final Reckoning” is widely speculated to be the last film in the franchise, Cruise seems determined to keep giving viewers what they want. He has said that he wants to make “Mission: Impossible” movies until he’s in his eighties. A follow-up to “Top Gun: Maverick,” Cruise’s fighter-pilot drama, has been confirmed, as has a sequel to “Days of Thunder,” his Nascar movie from 1990. Cruise is also working with McQuarrie, as well as NASA and SpaceX, to create the first Hollywood action movie filmed in outer space. It seems likelier than ever that we’re going to kill Tom Cruise before he dies.
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on the third of July—not the fourth—in 1962, in Syracuse, New York. He would later drop the “Mapother,” likely because “Tom Cruise” has a better ring to it, but also potentially to distance himself from his father. The actor has described him as a “merchant of chaos” who would lull Cruise into a false sense of security and then beat him. (His father died, of cancer, in 1984.) The family was poor, and they moved around a lot: Cruise has said that he attended more than a dozen schools growing up, including a Catholic seminary. He briefly aspired to be a priest, a dream that was cut short after he was caught, according to one former classmate, stealing alcohol from the Franciscan fathers.
Cruise was daring, even as a very young child. At four and a half, he has said, he climbed up to the roof of his house and jumped, inspired by a parachuting doll: “It’s that moment when you jump off the roof and you go, ‘This is not gonna work. This is terrible. I’m gonna die.’ ” He hit the ground hard. “I saw stars in the daytime for the first time, and I remember looking up, going, ‘This is very interesting.’ ” As he got older, he used his neighbors’ newly planted pine trees for high-jump practice, and he nearly killed himself riding a motorbike into a brick wall, according to an unauthorized biography by Andrew Morton. He channelled some of his energy into sports, but, Morton writes, he was known more for his “tough, unbridled aggression” than for his athletic ability. (“He was rough in floor hockey,” a childhood friend of the actor said. “He was hardheaded but not talented.”) In high school, Cruise says, a teacher encouraged him to try out for a production of “Guys and Dolls.” He got the lead; his former castmates told Morton that it was very clear, even then, that he was going to be famous. Cruise landed his first screen role less than a year later.
That same year he was in “Endless Love,” he starred in “Taps,” as a cadet at a military school that is getting shut down. Cruise’s character is brilliantly unhinged—when the cadets go into town, he starts firing his M16 rifle to intimidate some locals; later, he unleashes a rain of bullets on the National Guard troops who have come to close the academy. He was praised for his performance, but it was his role in “Risky Business,” in 1983, that propelled him to a new level of fame. In it, Cruise plays a high-school student who turns his house into a brothel while his parents are out of town. It’s a coming-of-age movie, but it’s strangely poignant: the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Cruise “knows how to imply a whole world by what he won’t say, can’t feel, and doesn’t understand.” His character, Joel, became an icon, in part because of a famous underwear-dance scene, which Cruise largely improvised. Ray-Ban Wayfarers reportedly increased in sales by nearly two thousand per cent after Cruise wore them in the film.
In 1990, Ebert laid out the formula for a Tom Cruise box-office hit: the movie is about a character who’s boyish and full of potential (“The Color of Money,” “Days of Thunder,” “Cocktail”) and who, with the help of a mentor (played by the likes of Tom Skerritt or Paul Newman), sets out to master a difficult craft (pool hustling, racecar driving, bartending). Often, there is a woman, who is both more mature and taller than Cruise. She either puts him in his place, or helps save the day, usually by saving Cruise himself. “Top Gun” adheres closely to this formula. A few years later, though, he showed his range by appearing in “Born on the Fourth of July,” an antiwar film. The bio-pic is based on the life of Ron Kovic, a peace activist who was paralyzed after serving as a marine sergeant in the Vietnam War. Cruise visited veterans’ hospitals and rode around in a wheelchair to prepare for the role; he also reportedly talked to the director about the possibility of using a chemical drug that would temporarily induce paralysis. The idea was apparently rejected by the movie’s insurance company, for fear that the drug would leave Cruise paralyzed forever.
Several directors have talked about needing to rein Cruise in. Paul Thomas Anderson, when asked if Cruise was “hesitant” about playing a misogynistic dating guru in “Magnolia,” said, “He was sort of the exact opposite. My job in directing Tom was to sometimes calm him down.” Francis Ford Coppola, who directed Cruise in “The Outsiders,” has described the actor’s “willingness to go to extremes.” According to Rob Lowe, one of the film’s stars, Coppola asked the cast to learn gymnastics. “Tom was relentlessly competitive. He ended up being the only one who could do a backflip. It is in the movie ‘The Outsiders’ for no reason.” Needless backflips have become a theme in Cruise’s movies; in “The Firm,” his character—a budding lawyer—encounters a young Black boy who is doing street gymnastics, and joins in, performing a back handspring into a backflip. (The scene is never explained.)
I’ll say it: Cruise is a freak. He always has been, and it’s a key part of his appeal. This is why the story of his rise and fall—and then his rise again—is so vexing. The only thing that’s changed over time is our appetite for the strange intensity that he brings to everything he does. The year before he jumped on Oprah’s couch, Cruise went on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and told a story about flying a plane and depriving a passenger of oxygen so that he could fly at the altitude he wanted. The passenger blacked out, and woke up confused, with his hands numb. “Isn’t that attempted manslaughter?” Letterman asked, as Cruise cried with laughter. Christian Bale used one of Cruise’s Letterman appearances as a model for Patrick Bateman, his serial-killer character in “American Psycho,” according to that film’s director. Cruise “just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes.” (I personally feel the opposite: if you look long enough, there’s everything behind those eyes.) In an interview on “The Graham Norton Show” from 2016, Cruise talks about learning to hold his breath for more than six minutes for a stunt. “I’ve got a low heart rate anyway—very low heart rate, which means my body is not using as much oxygen,” he explained. Professional divers helped him do breathing exercises designed to bring his heart rate down even lower. Afterward, he said, “there would be times I’d be sitting there talking in meetings and I wouldn’t breathe. I realized, I am not breathing.” Add this to the fact that the actor doesn’t seem to age, and that he essentially disappears in between his movies, and you’re left with the impression that he spends most of his time in a cryogenic slumber, awakened only to do incredibly dangerous things that he will briefly discuss on a talk-show host’s couch.
Or maybe that’s just the Scientology vibes. In 1986, the same year that Cruise starred in “Top Gun” and “The Color of Money,” he was dating the actress Mimi Rogers, who reportedly brought him into the Church. (Rogers has denied this.) Scientology was founded in the nineteen-fifties by L. Ron Hubbard, a former science-fiction writer. According to the Church’s website, one of the religion’s fundamental truths is that “man is a spiritual being endowed with abilities well beyond those which he normally envisions.” Cruise is by far the biggest celebrity associated with Scientology, though actors such as John Travolta and Elisabeth Moss are members as well. Over the years, the Church has repeatedly come under scrutiny for allegations of abuse, which it has denied. Still, Cruise seems to have embraced his role as Scientology’s global ambassador. He appears personally close to David Miscavige, the leader of the Church, who Cruise is thought to have used as a model for his character in “A Few Good Men.”
Today, Cruise is a movie star whose appeal is so timeless that it can feel dated. One recent study names him as the actor who draws the most theatregoers. “Top Gun: Maverick,” from 2022, grossed about $1.5 billion worldwide, and was credited with single-handedly resurrecting a pandemic-ravaged theatrical industry; this was akin to Michael Jackson having an album at the top of the Billboard charts today. Younger actors can get critical acclaim, but the rise of film franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made many of them feel interchangeable. As my colleague Inkoo Kang put it, “What’s ‘a Tom Holland movie’? Who can say?” (Cruise himself appears worried about this phenomenon; Timothée Chalamet recounted getting an e-mail from the older actor, which included the names of various stunt coaches.)
But there’s another reason that Cruise’s stardom seems of a different time: many fans choose to ignore the actor’s personal life when engaging with his work. He is grandfathered into modern Hollywood. This may be because the scandals happened largely before the proliferation of social media, or because he has pivoted to speaking almost exclusively about his work. Or maybe Cruise’s movies are just so widely loved, and make so much money, that his beliefs seem beside the point. That’s the mentality of some of his co-stars, anyway. As Alec Baldwin, who appeared in a couple of “Mission: Impossible”s, once told Howard Stern, when the topic of Scientology came up, “I go to work with Tom—we have a ball. It’s like the height of moviemaking. You have a great time. And I really don’t care.”
“Mission: Impossible” was the first film I ever saw in a theatre. It came out in 1996, when I was less than a year old, and though I was barely old enough to drink water, one is never too young to feast on Tom Cruise. I’ve since seen the film at least a dozen times. I’ve probably watched “Mission: Impossible 2,” a vastly inferior movie, even more times. During the opening scene—which features Cruise climbing a mountain with his bare hands and leaping from one cliff to another—my dad would always make a point to tell me that Cruise “really did that.” When I was very young, I believed him, and then when I was a preteen, I didn’t. I assumed that he was lying, either to mess with me or to cultivate a sense of childlike wonder: Tom Cruise was my Santa Claus.
My dad had been brought up on eighties Cruise—a figure who inspired young men to join the Navy or to learn how to mix drinks. My dad’s best friend splurged on the same type of car that Cruise’s character crashes into a lake in “Risky Business.” My father very nearly named me “Cruise.” That might sound somewhat over the top, but “Maverick” has become a popular baby name.
There were two kinds of movies that mattered in my house: Tom Cruise movies, and Tom Cruise movies that I was too young to watch. The second category included “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Vanilla Sky,” and “Collateral”—the latter is an interesting inclusion, because it’s probably less violent than some of the “Mission: Impossible” films. I saw “Collateral” for the first time recently; it was the only Cruise movie that I hadn’t seen. Cruise plays a hit man, Vincent, who forces his cabdriver, played by Jamie Foxx, to drive him around Los Angeles on a contract-killing spree. (It’s a fun premise, though it’s never clear why Vincent didn’t just rent a car.) Cruise’s hair is dyed silver, and it’s probably the oldest he has ever looked, even though the film came out in 2004. Vincent is irrationally cruel, which adds to the unsettling feel of the movie. Perhaps this is why it was never required viewing in my household; there was no darker notion than our hero potentially being a villain. At one point, Foxx’s character asks Vincent how he can kill people he’s never met before. “I should only kill people after I get to know them?” he replies.
This, it struck me, is a kind of inverse philosophy of Ethan Hunt’s, Cruise’s role in the “Mission: Impossible” movies. Ethan does not abide by a Batman-esque no-kill rule; he butchers plenty of people. But he is far more intent on keeping them alive, even when they’re strangers, or villains. There’s a moment in “Dead Reckoning” when a character expresses disbelief at Ethan’s eagerness to save her at all costs. “You don’t even know me,” she tells him, to which Ethan responds, “What difference does that make?” As one Letterboxd reviewer wrote, “Ethan isn’t the arbiter of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ but rather of ‘alive’ or ‘dead.’ . . . He wants to save the world not because it’s the right thing to do, but because the world has people in it, and he can’t bear to lose anyone else—whether he’s met them or not.”
Some critics of Scientology argue that Cruise’s good-guy movies serve to produce an image of him as a savior. “If you’re an organization beset by controversy and accusation, why wouldn’t you want your poster boy constantly saving the world?” Jon Blistein wrote in Rolling Stone. But Cruise isn’t just interested in the idea of saving people onscreen. In a leaked video of Cruise talking about Scientology, from the early two-thousands, he alluded to having a unique ability to help people, saying, “Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else. As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one that can really help.”
Cruise’s commitment to doing his own stunts can make it hard to distinguish where Ethan Hunt ends and Tom Cruise begins. Perhaps the main difference between them is that Ethan Hunt has died, three times: once by electrocution and twice by drowning. Each time, he is quickly resuscitated. But the audience is left with the sense that Cruise, who survived doing the stunt in real life multiple times, may be more capable than his character.
Tom Cruise is afraid—or so he claims. “It’s not like I don’t get scared while doing these things,” he told an interviewer recently, when asked about his stunts. “I just don’t mind being scared.” At first, this seemed to me to be a distinction without a difference—until it occurred to me that maybe Cruise feels about jumping out of a plane the way I feel about watching a horror movie with the lights off. On a red carpet for “Dead Reckoning,” a reporter asked Cruise about his morning routine on the day of a big stunt like the motorcycle cliff dive. Cruise responded like a man who had just had his memory wiped. “Nothing unusual,” he replied. “The usual day for me.” He did recall one thing from that morning, which was that when he arrived on set, the ramp was covered with ice, and the crew had to remove it before he could do the stunt. “We just keep it real casual, as casual as possible,” he said.
A few years ago, Jimmy Kimmel asked Henry Cavill, one of the stars of “Fallout,” if Cruise has “a death wish.” Cavill took a moment to ponder this. “He doesn’t,” the actor ultimately said. “He’s just really good.” Still, there have been some close calls. On the set of “Fallout,” one of Cruise’s co-stars, Rebecca Ferguson, thought that she had witnessed Cruise fall to his death from a helicopter while he was performing a stunt. “I heard myself scream,” she said, in a behind-the-scenes clip. “I actually thought he fell.” McQuarrie has said that while filming the wing-walking sequence for “The Final Reckoning,” Cruise appeared to be passed out on the wing of the plane. This was a problem, because the actor was up there alone, at ten thousand feet, and needed to get up in order to land the plane. It was also running out of fuel, as the gas tank had been kept partially empty to facilitate the acrobatics. “He’s got three minutes to get up, but he’s been on that wing for twenty minutes,” McQuarrie said. Then a miracle happened. “We watched as he pulled himself up and stuck his head in the cockpit so that he could replenish the oxygen in his body and then climb up into the cockpit and bring the plane safely down to land,” McQuarrie continued. “No one on earth can do that.”
What Cruise’s stardom has facilitated, maybe more than anything else, is his ability to do things on set that no other actor would ever be allowed to do. “The Final Reckoning” is reportedly one of the most expensive films ever made, with one estimate putting it at four hundred million dollars. An executive who has previously managed a Cruise film told The Hollywood Reporter that it’s difficult to set a budget ahead of time; this is owing to Cruise and McQuarrie’s improvisational method of filmmaking, which involves pitching a movie without a “locked script,” and then writing and continually reworking it during filming. This can be hard on the cast: as Ferguson, who did not return for “The Final Reckoning,” once said, the process leaves actors spending “a lot of time sitting around waiting to film a huge movie that could take over a year.” Some have suggested that this production style poses physical risks. In 2015, two pilots died on the set of “American Made,” Cruise’s movie about a drug runner who is recruited by the C.I.A. The pilots were not performing a stunt at the time of the crash; they were flying back to town after they finished shooting, and encountered bad weather. The families of the victims sued the movie’s producers, alleging that they were liable for the accident, in part by making the cast and crew work prolonged hours. (The producers filed counterclaims and the suit was ultimately settled out of court.) Cruise was not sued, but the families argued that “the demands of filming in Colombia, together with Cruise’s and director Doug Liman’s enthusiasm for multiple takes of lavish flying sequences, added hours to every filming day and added days to the schedule.”
Cruise’s risk-taking is driven by his perfectionism. This is the through line of his movies; even smaller stunts are done with incredible precision. In “Mission: Impossible 2,” the villain, played by Dougray Scott, tries to stab Cruise in the eye with a knife. Cruise insisted that a real knife be used. The crew attached the blade to a steel cable, which was rigged to stop a quarter inch away from his pupil. A technological malfunction—or an inopportune sneeze—could have killed him. If we’re searching for an analogue, I wouldn’t propose other action stars like Glen Powell or Dwayne Johnson. One must reach back a century, to the silent-film actor Buster Keaton, who regularly risked his life—jumping across rooftops, plunging over waterfalls, and standing underneath a collapsing building—for the sole purpose of entertaining audiences. Keaton, of course, was a comedian; arguably, so is Cruise. His commitment to authenticity is so extreme that the resultant footage is, often, ludicrous. (He’s not so far away from Nathan Fielder, who has created full-scale replicas of bars and airport terminals, all in service of the world’s most complicated bit, for the HBO series “The Rehearsal.”) In 2022, Cruise released a promotional video from South Africa, addressed directly to his fans. Thousands of feet in the air, standing on the edge of a plane, Cruise is beaming at the camera; he explains that he’s in the middle of filming the last two “Mission: Impossible” movies. He falls backward into the air, stretching out like a cat in the sun. “Where was I?” he asks. “Oh, yeah! Thank you for supporting ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’ ” He goes on, “Thank you for allowing us to entertain you. It truly is the honor of a lifetime.” Smiling even wider now, he tells us to stay safe. Then he curls up and hurtles toward the earth.♦
