“I didn’t hear the Afgh anistan [comment], but that’s what it feels like, and certainly on this last movie, it was brutal. It was brutal,” Cruise says.
TMZ had reported on the same quote about the filming being “brutal”, though it somewhat unfairly characterized Cruise as having said that filming the movie was like war. It later had to amend the article to reflect the fact that that wasn’t really the case, as Snopes reports, saying:
On 8 November 2013, the TMZ celebrity gossip site ran a story which characterized Cruise as describing his work as an actor as being “as hard as fighting in Afgh anistan.” This bit of TMZ gossip was quickly picked up and widely disseminated, usually accompanied by declarations mocking Cruise for having the hubris to compare acting in films with the real-life sacrifices and hardship of actually serving in a combat zone.
[…]TMZ subsequently modified their article to include the following statement from Tom Cruise’s attorney, which branded TMZ’s characterization of Cruise’s words as a “distortion”:
Cruise’s lawyer, Bert Fields, says the notion that Tom compares his acting to fighting a war is a distortion, pointing to a section in the deposition — not part of the deposition that was publicly released — in which Tom is asked, “Do you believe the situations [being in a movie and fighting a war in Afgha nistan] are the same?” Tom replies, “Oh, come on.” Fields says that clearly means “of course not.”
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