When GQ writer Zach Baron floated the phrase “last movie star” at him, actor Tom Cruise turned the crown down and answered with a name: fellow actor Brad Pitt. The star of “Top Gun” and the “Mission: Impossible” films made the remark in a rare interview with GQ published September 15, 2026, offering a fellow actor as evidence that the description does not hold.
“There are really talented actors. Do you know what I’m saying? Like, Brad Pitt is a great actor, great star, great charisma, and there are many, many, many,” Cruise said.
Coming from an actor who seldom sits for long conversations, the answer plays as a quiet sidestep. Most stars would accept that kind of praise with a shrug. Cruise treated it as inaccurate.
A Craft Passed Down on Set
Instead of accepting the title, Cruise framed moviemaking as a trade rather than a gift. As a young actor he worked beside great craftsmen and learned the job from them, he said, describing filmmaking as a generational skill that gets handed down on set and then adapted by whoever inherits it.
That version of stardom has no finish line in it — no last of anything, only a long relay of people showing one another how to shoot a scene. The first name he reached for, Pitt, happens to belong to the one actor who shares a very specific piece of history with him.
The Only Film They Made Together
The two shared the screen once, in “Interview with the Vampire” in 1994, which Neil Jordan directed from the novel by Anne Rice. Cruise played Lestat de Lioncourt, a French vampire who leads his companion through one misadventure after another. Louis de Pointe du Lac, the hard-drinking man of the 18th century whom Lestat turns, went to Pitt, and Kirsten Dunst and Antonio Banderas also starred. No other film has since brought the two men together.
A second thread ties the two men together off screen: children and surnames. Cruise’s daughter Suri was registered to vote in Pennsylvania in October 2024 under the name Suri Noelle, according to voter records, and she studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The actor “has reportedly been completely estranged from his daughter for years,” following his 2012 divorce from Holmes and her decision to cut ties with Scientology.
Pitt’s family has been through its own version of that. As of September 16, his son Maddox is “his latest child to drop the actor’s last name.” Zahara and twins Vivienne and Knox have also dropped Pitt from their names socially, with plans to legally formalize the change.
By Pitt’s telling, what lingered from the shoot was not an argument about acting. It was a racing result.
A Go-Kart Grudge, Cheerfully Held
In June 2025, Cruise turned up beside Pitt on the red carpet at the London premiere of “F1,” one star publicly backing another. Talking to Extra that night, Pitt recalled racing go-karts with Cruise in the downtime on the “Interview with the Vampire” set roughly 30 years earlier, and said the two were overdue for a go-kart rematch.
“The last time we went there, he pit me. He took me on the last corner and I’m still bitter about it 30 years later,” Pitt said.
Would he work with Cruise again? Pitt attached one condition to his yes: as long as he did not “have to hang from biplanes and, like, swim through submarines” — a nod to Cruise’s habit of doing his own stunts.
A Title Hollywood Keeps Reassigning
Baron’s phrase has been handed around for years, though writers have mostly used it to eulogize an era instead of complimenting a working actor. Actor George Clooney carried it in a 2008 piece. Essayist Joseph Epstein revived it in the Wall Street Journal after film legend Robert Redford died in September 2025, arguing that Redford’s death closed out the Hollywood phenomenon of the movie star, and drawing a line between stars and actors.
Cruise’s answer runs the other way. Scarcity is what gives the label its force — the label assumes that whatever machinery once turned out a handful of enormous, bankable personalities has seized up for good. Cruise declined the premise instead of the compliment, and he put forward a contemporary’s name to show that the category still has people in it.
Nothing here reads as a feud. The two have stayed friendly across the decades since their single collaboration, and that London red carpet in June 2025 made it plain; the only score Pitt claims to be settling involves a corner on a go-kart track. Something rarer came out of the GQ exchange: a movie star given the last word on movie stars, declining it and pointing instead at the co-star who is still sore about losing to him on a go-kart track.