MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE—ROGUE NATION Pictured: Tom Cruise running.
  • MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE—ROGUE NATION Pictured: Tom Cruise running.

"Cruise not only has the most distinctive gait in Hollywood—the New Yorker's Anthony Lane drolly applauded his 'ability to remain totally upright when sprinting, as if carrying an invisible egg and spoon'—he's got the most omnipresent run, with close-watchers tallying that over 80 percent of his films feature him in a mad dash," Amy Nicholson wrote in her definitive treatise on Cruisology, Anatomy of an Actor: Tom Cruise (Cahiers du cinéma, 2014). "He's run across soccer fields, football fields, tropical beaches, and an enchanted forest, toward proms and midterm exams and street fights and helicopters, away from missiles and more missiles and aliens and a detonated aquarium, over snowy hills, through pool halls, subways, small town Main Streets, Greenwich Village, and an abandoned Times Square, in tuxedos and Irish dungarees, and alongside everyone from soldiers to samurais. In Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol alone, Cruise runs in a dust storm, he runs in traffic, and he even runs down the side of skyscraper."

No one else runs like Tom Cruise runs.

His hands become blades, slicing the air. His spine snaps rigid, aggressively vertical. His thighs pump with a ferocity unmatched by Olympians and terminators. This is to say nothing of his face: Running takes focus, and when Tom Cruise runs, every millimeter of his face strains with focus.

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