Tom Cruise Has One Incredibly Weird Hobby on His Film Sets
Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt have both played top-tier race car drivers — Cruise in 1990’s Days of Thunder, which recently had its 35th anniversary, and Pitt in this summer’s F1. In fact, at one point, the two actors planned to make Ford Vs. Ferrari together (a film that ended up starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale). So it makes some sense that over 30 years ago, when the pair were filming 1994’s Interview With the Vampire, they took up an odd hobby to blow off steam after spending all day playing Victorian bloodsuckers: go-kart racing.
“When we were doing Interview with the Vampire, we’d go and race go-karts,” Cruise told the crowd at this past April’s CinemaCon, per Variety. “We’d literally finish and go drive go-karts all night.” Cruise was excited to see Pitt in F1 because “he’s a very good driver. Believe me, I’ve raced against him.”
In a June interview with ExtraTV, Pitt said of his go-karting adventures with Cruise, “Tom and I gotta get back out there. Because … the last time … he took me on the last corner and I’m still bitter about it.”
The late night go-karting may just be a hobby that Cruise ropes his costars into. In a 2020 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Cruise’s ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, recalled that during the time the couple was shooting the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut together, “We were happily married through that. We would go go-kart racing after those scenes. We’d rent out a place and go racing at 3 in the morning.”
In that same year, Shane Nolan, son of EastEnders star Shane Richie, produced a scorecard from a night his father spent go-karting with Cruise and Kidman in 1998 — Cruise came in first, with Kidman a close second in a group of 14.
So just putting this out there incase anyone thought my dad was talking sheep’s balls. Can’t believe he got beat off Nicole Kidman tho. Haha #imacelebrity @antanddec pic.twitter.com/pBbxOdAvys
— Shane Nolan (@iamshanenolan) November 17, 2020
No word as to whether Kidman got Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore to go-kart after a long day of shooting The Hours, but one can always hope.
Remind