A question from Stephen Colbert about the possibility of a Judd Apatow action movie elicited a particularly hilarious Tom Cruise story from his guest Monday night.
“Does anyone want that?” Apatow asked. “I don’t know if it’s my move, you know, but I once—just because it’s Mission: Impossible weekend—I once had a meeting with Tom Cruise.”
The director of the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary about Garry Shandling explained to Colbert that it was 2006 and Cruise was interested in making a romantic comedy. So his people got in touch with Apatow and invited him to come over for a meeting to discuss potential ideas. Apatow was shooting Knocked Up at the time and told Seth Rogen, “You have to come with me.”
“And no one knew who Seth was, he wasn’t famous, he was just a dude with me,” Apatow continued. “So I said, someone needs to witness this. So we’re talking to him, and I don’t know how it came up, but it usually comes up with Seth, where he starts talking about marijuana and pornography.”
Rogen was talking about watching “adult films on the internet,” as Apatow put it, when Cruise stopped him and asked, “What?! Wait, you’re saying there’s adult films on the internet?!”
“And Seth’s, like, ‘Yeah there’s all these movies on these websites!’”
“And Tom Cruise is like, ‘Wait a second, you’re saying, if I go on the computer, on the worldwide web…”
Rogen told Cruise, “Yeah, I watch all the time, it’s great! Everybody does it! It’s not a big deal anymore!” Suffice it to say, Apatow added, “No movie was made.” Two years later, however, Cruise did make a very memorable comedic appearance in Tropic Thunder, directed by Apatow’s early creative partner Ben Stiller.
Asked by Colbert if he thinks Cruise actually had never heard of internet porn in 2006, Apatow said, “It’s hard to know. He was being very polite. I assumed he was against it, being polite, but who knows? We’ll never know.”
Back in 2012, Rogen told a similarly bizarre story about that same trip to Cruise’s house on The Howard Stern Show. “I once peed in a Snapple bottle in my car while parked in Tom Cruise’s driveway,” the actor tweeted in early January of that year.
“It’s true,” Rogen told Stern. “Years ago Tom Cruise was viewed as a psychopath. It was during this time that he, very wisely, thought to align himself with comedians. He was meeting with people like me and Judd Apatow, to kind of, I think, get a sense of the comedic landscape at the time.”
Rogen said he got to Cruise’s house early and had to pee but didn’t want to go inside alone because he was worried it would be awkward. “I was so uncomfortable, I had never met him before,” he said. “It was so weird.”
That was before he apparently told the biggest movie star in the world that internet porn was a thing.