NEW YORK -- Tom Cruise gazes at his interviewer. He supplies enthusiastic answers.
But a half-hour with America's most bankable actor does not reveal much about the man. If you want more information, you probably have to be the family babysitter or orthodontist.
The star of Cocktail, Jerry Maguire and the Mission Impossible series has come to a swanky hotel to promote Minority Report, the Steven Spielberg-directed thriller opening Friday. It's adapted from Philip K. Dick's short story about psychics in the near future who help the police arrest suspects before they commit their crimes.
Unfortunately for Cruise, however, it's the juicier aspects of the actor's life that tend to hold sway. "I don't enjoy gossip," he says.
Asked if he is feeling calmer after a tumultuous year -- a divorce from Nicole Kidman and a pair of $100 million defamation suits against two men who claim to have had sex with the Top Gun stud -- Cruise cackles and says, "I hope so. I just keep going. I'm just thinking about my kids, my work and I just keep going."
He becomes a little more expansive when the subject turns to his girlfriend, Penelope Cruz, whom he met on the set of Vanilla Sky. What makes her such a catch?
The idea of peeling away a layer of himself stops him at first, then he bursts out laughing again. "Do I say it's personal, it's private?" he says. "I think it's obvious. What you see of Penelope is who she is. She's a very generous woman and obviously very beautiful. There's a real sweetness, intelligence. She's fun and a lovely person to be around."
The vacuum-sealed privacy around Cruise's life is pretty-much inviolate. He does not discuss financial deals. ("I make a lot of money.") He offers a brochure-like explanation for his conversion from Catholicism to Scientology ("It gives you individual tools for living and finding out who you are.")
Above all, he is fiercely protective of his and Kidman's adopted 9- and 7-year-old children, Isabella and Conor. They are perhaps what defines Cruise most.
Spielberg recalls Cruise was in the midst of the movie's most emotional scene when his assistant waved the cell phone at him. Cruise immediately dropped character to tend to the minor emergency. One of his kids had been poked with an eraser.
"I thought it was amazing," Spielberg says. "I couldn't believe his attentiveness to his family."
Cruise came up with the idea of using the loss of a child to springboard the conflict in Minority Report. While on a search for his son, Cruise's detective in the Pre-Crime unit finds himself on the Most Wanted list for a shooting that a trio of "pre-cognitives" predicts he will commit.
The actor's devotion to his children doesn't stop on the set. When Cruise took them in for braces, the orthodontist told the man whose smile netted him a reported $75 million on the Mission Impossible sequel that he had crooked teeth. "I figure I'm asking my kids to do it, so what the hell, I gotta give it a go," he says.
Cruise's braces come off in October, when he begins filming The Last Samurai. Mission: Impossible 3 will likely follow. And he isn't done with science-fiction just yet, having recently purchased the rights to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
Cruise, who turns 40 July 3, said having the power to green-light anything is "very cool," though it carries responsibility. "Fortunately, I haven't lost studio money ever," he said. "It's inevitable. It's going to happen at some point."
Not that fear would stop Cruise from assuming risk. He says he refuses to lose sleep over "what-ifs." When his celebrity took off after his macho flyboy turn in Top Gun (1986), his advisers begged him not to play a disabled Vietnam veteran in Born on the Fourth of July (1989). He didn't listen and earned his first Oscar nomination. In a more recent example, his creepy sex guru in Magnolia (2000) was another role to inspire a double-take from his fans; it also earned him an Oscar nod.
"If you do something and you don't believe in it, what do you have left if it doesn't do well?" he asks.
Cruise, whose original name was Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, seemed destined to make money. Born in Syracuse, N.Y., he grew up poor in a wandering family. He recalls that when they lived in Ottawa, he went on a 40-mile charity walk with one of his sisters. The day was hot, and Cruise recalled that all he could think about was if he could only have a quarter to buy a soda.
"A woman walks up, opens my hand and puts a quarter in it and just walked away," he remembers. "It was so bizarre. I was 10, and I thought this was incredible."
That sort of windfall continued. When Cruise's mother remarried and moved the family to Glen Ridge, N.J., her son became a high-school drama standout and was soon taking on a supporting role in Taps (1981) and the lead role in the kid-meets-hooker romp, Risky Business (1983).
With paychecks from the aforementioned, Cruise bought one sister a college education and another a car. Nowadays, he could foot the bill for a small and very ambitious nation.
Spielberg throws out words like honesty and presence to describe Cruise's massive appeal. Yet Cruise's success still begs analysis. He is short (5-foot-9 or so); he has a beaked nose. What makes him a movie star?
"We do," Spielberg says. "For whatever personal reasons, we needed to bring Tom into our world. We crowned him. He didn't crown himself."