Tom Cruise Opens Up About Father, ‘Oprah’ Incident

Tom Cruise’s closeness to his family — especially to his mother Mary — is legendary, but in a new interview with Esquire magazine, he opened up about a side of his family he rarely talks about – his late father.

“He was an electrical engineer moving between jobs, and we moved a lot,” the actor told Esquire of his father – Thomas Cruise Mapother III, whom he was named after. “My mother basically did all the work, and then they got separated and I didn’t see him for a long time. He didn’t try to help the family financially or spiritually, and I lived with the effects of the chaos.”

Before his father left, Tom said that as a young man, he was deeply interested in figuring out who his dad was.

“I remember looking at my dad and wanting to understand him,” the actor told Esquire. “I didn’t want to just write the guy off. He was lost. I can’t speak specifically in terms of why and how he got to where he was – that was his journey. All I can tell you is, he was overwhelmed by life.”

In the emotional interview, which is entirely made up of Tom’s words, the “Knight and Day” star revealed that after he became successful, and following the release of “Risky Business,” he saw his father, who was dying in a hospital.

“I hadn’t seen my father in about 10 years. I found out he was dying, and I went to see him in the hospital,” Tom revealed to the mag. “He knew… that he’d blown it. There was deep regret. I think he was torturing himself. We tend to do that. All I could do was tell him, ‘Look, it’s okay.’ I wasn’t going to live in blame and regret.”

In a lighter moment in the Esquire interview, Tom also opened up about the infamous couch-jumping incident on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” a moment that expressed his excitement at having fallen in love with his now wife, Katie Holmes.

“Perception and reality are two different thing,” Tom said. “Yeah, the point can be made that I wanted the audience to be happy just like I wanted to make my sisters and my mother happy when I did those skits as a kid. But I’ll take responsibility for my actions.”