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Tom Cruise has been a part of our lives for the past 40+ years - from Risky Business and Top Gun to Mission: Impossible and Top Gun: Maverick. And just as we have changed over the years, so has Cruise - not just in his segue from being an actor to being a leading man, producer, and part-time stuntman - but also in the types of roles he finds himself in - and more recently, chooses.

Tom Cruise's career can be divided into three eras: the 'Young Leading Man' era, the 'Serious Actor' era, and the 'Blockbuster Action Star' era. While there is some slight overlap in the eras, I'd say from personal experience, life is never neatly organized; but that being said, the Tom Cruise movie catalog has three major acts - and when you see it, you can't unsee it.

Tom Cruise: Hollywood's Young Leading Man era

In 1980, a young kid fresh into L.A. got a role as a background actor in the military drama Taps starring George C. Scott - but by the end of rehearsals, his dedication to the performance led director Harold Becker to give him one of the key ensemble leads. That led to being cast in the ensemble of Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders, then competing against Tom Hanks, John Cusack, Kevin Bacon, and Sean Penn for his first starring role: Risky Business.

Combining equal parts The Graduate and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1983's Risky Business helped give Cruise his archetype: the model young adult (or 'good son' as his character's last name of 'Goodsen' belies) who has a brash, wild side that is encouraged to come out. His performance there was singular, with the iconic scene of him sliding across the floor in his briefs to Bob Seger's Old Time Rock & Roll becoming one of the '80s most meme-able moments in part due to the rise of the MTV generation.

That role - and its success - led to his first big-budget project in 1985's Legend as a literal white knight, and then into his other leading man in the back-to-back four-movies-in-four-years cavalcade that is Top Gun, The Color of Money, Cocktail, and Rain Man. The successes of these movies led Cruise to be able to open the door on these other eras we're about to discuss, but he did continue as just the 'Young Leading Man' into 1990's Days of Thunder, 1992's A Few Good Men, and 1993's The Firm.

Tom Cruise: Serious Actor era

It's not that Cruise wasn't paired with great directors before this; just at the time, he was chosen by them such as in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders or Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money.  But with 1989's Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise chased the role - and a chance to become more than the "Golden boy" as director Oliver Stone called him at the time. But then Stone's pejorative view of Cruise became one of the reasons he was hired to play the disabled Vietnam veteran.

“I saw this kid who has everything,” Stone told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “And I wondered what would happen if tragedy strikes, if fortune denies him. In the film, one thing after another begins to unravel in a man’s life. He kills one of his own men and atones by wandering through nine circles of hell. I thought it was an interesting proposition: What would happen to Tom Cruise if something goes wrong?”

The Godfather's Al Pacino was originally a lock for the lead role in Born on the Fourth of July, but after he dropped out Cruise managed to win the role against other candidates such as Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage to become the star. And Cruise wanted it, to the point that he gave up his upfront salary after the movie went through budget issues to keep it being made - instead signing up to receive money only if the movie made money. The movie did what Cruise wanted - not at the box office, but giving him a shot at being a serious actor - and with it came the 'Best Actor' nomination with the Academy Awards that year.

Following this, Cruise began having the power to choose to work with well-revered directors - Sydney Pollack in The Firm, Cameron Crowe in Jerry Maguire and Vanilla Sky, Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut, Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia, Michael Mann in Collateral, and Steven Spielberg with Minority Report and War of the Worlds. That's not to mention unrealized projects he's had with Guillermo Del Toro and Spike Lee.

Tom Cruise: Blockbuster Action Star era 

Tom Cruise came into movies when the action star was huge, and those action stars themselves were huge. Arnold Schwarznegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme. While Cruise wasn't gifted with the genetics to stand eye-to-eye with those stars in terms of height, he also didn't become identified for his physicality in movies until years later. While 1986's Top Gun and 1990's Days of Thunder are considered action movies, both weren't so much about physical action for their stars, but when Tom Cruise decided to step up as an action star, he did so in a big way.

In 1992, Tom Cruise began betting on himself as a star - and got into the business of signing onto movie projects where he could not only be the leading man, but be involved as one of the key producers in that. He found that in Paramount's long-gestating Mission: Impossible movie ambitions, in which he offered himself to star only with the idea he could also steer the project - including hiring the staff - but more importantly, who did his stunts.

With 1996's first Mission: Impossible movie, Cruise began the risky-but-rewarding plan to do most of his own stunts, something that became part of the movie franchise's marketing as it went on through sequels. While it's not something he was known for previously to this movie, it's something he said has been a part of him since childhood. 

"I think I was about 4½ years old, and I had this doll, and you throw it up in the air, and a parachute comes down. I played with this thing, and I'd throw it off a tree, and I was like, 'I really want to do this,'" Cruise said during a 2022 even promoting Top Gun: Maverick. "I remember taking the sheets off my bed, and I would tie a rope ... and I climbed up to the eave, and I got up to the roof. I looked and my mother was in the kitchen — she had four kids — and I jumped off the roof."

"It's that moment when you jump off the roof and you go, 'This is not gonna work. This is terrible. I'm gonna die.' And I hit the ground so hard. Luckily, it was wet," Cruise continued. "I don't know how it happened, but I figured out after that my face went past my feet as my ass hit the ground. And I saw stars in the daytime for the first time, and I remember looking up, going, 'This is very interesting.'"

1996's Mission: Impossible immediately carved out new territory for Cruise as an action star (in addition to his other skills), which he continued not only with the seven later M:I movies but also with 10 other action movies including the grueling Edge of Tomorrow and his attempt at reviving another M:I like franchise in 2017's The Mummy.

As for where it goes next - after the obvious Mission: Impossible: Final Reckoning in May 2025, what I'm really looking forward to is Cruise working on a blockbuster big budget Warner Bros. movie with famed writer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Maybe with that we could see all three of Cruise's eras converging?

Want more? Here is all of Tom Cruises's movies, ranked.