Somebody not attending something really shouldn’t be the catalyst for widespread conspiracy theories, but the speculation swirling around Tom Cruise‘s notable absence at the recent Academy Awards has now dragged ex-wife Nicole Kidman into the mix.
After being surreptitiously accused of perhaps currying a little too much favor for Top Gun: Maverick when everyone gushed over the action icon swooping in to single-handedly save the entire industry from the doldrums last summer, things intensified when it was revealed that Cruise wouldn’t be showing up in person at the Oscars, despite being nominated for the first time in 23 years.
The most obvious explanation was that he was too busy doing Mission: Impossible things on the other side of the planet, but that didn’t stop rumors from spreading that after being burnt to a crisp by Judd Apatow at the DGAs, Cruise wasn’t too keen on sitting in a crowd of contemporaries when the potential was there for Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel to follow suit.
Just when you thought it was over, though, a “source” has approached the infamously unreliable British newspaper The Daily Mail to claim that the real reason the 60 year-old ducked out on the gala was because ex-wife Nicole Kidman was going to be there.
“Tom was not there because she was there, and he did not want a run-in.”
That was literally all they had to say on the matter, so color us skeptical that the genuine reason A-list megastar Tom Cruise skipped out on the Oscars was because the woman he divorced over 20 years ago was going to be there. After all, they both travel in the same circles as top-tier purveyors of their chosen craft so there’s bound to be some crossover somewhere.
You’d find it very hard to believe that the two of them have never been at the same awards show since then, so we’ll put this one in the drawer marked “unconvinced” for now.
