Man Crush Monday Goes All the Way Back to 1981
Before Risky Business, before Top Gun, before four decades of sprinting through action movies like the world’s most committed cardio enthusiast, there was an 18-year-old Tom Cruise turning up in the January/February 1981 issue of Pariée.
And for this week’s Man Crush Monday, we are going all the way back to the beginning. The magazine was already looking ahead, billing the young actor with the wonderfully on-the-nose headline “Tom Cruise: Birth of a Career.” They had no idea just how literal that was about to become.
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Tom Cruise: Before the Blockbusters
In early 1981, Tom Cruise was 18, newly pursuing acting and still months away from his first movie roles reaching audiences.
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The issue’s cover belonged to Gregory Harrison, crowned “Man of the Year!,” while Cruise was still introduced as a new face whose career was only beginning to register. Born July 3, 1962, he was just 18 when the issue appeared — the same year his screen career officially started.
That timing is what makes the spread such a keeper. Cruise would make his film debut in Endless Love in 1981 and appear in Taps later that year, but the full movie-star machinery had not switched on yet. Risky Business was still two years away. Top Gun was five. Here, he is not yet “Tom Cruise” in the enormous cultural sense of the name. He is simply a young actor being introduced as someone to watch.
The magazine itself is a time capsule, too. Alongside Cruise’s feature, the issue carried interviews and reviews, while the notice “Complimentary, Not for Sale” points to promotional distribution rather than a standard newsstand copy. It is exactly the sort of archival oddity that becomes more interesting after the future arrives.
And arrive it did. Within a few years, the young man introduced under “Birth of a Career” would move from supporting roles to Risky Business, Top Gun and one of the longest-running movie-star careers Hollywood has ever produced. Not bad for a Man Crush Monday pulled from 1981.
See Tom Cruise’s 1981 Pariée Magazine Feature
INYIM’s video revisits Tom Cruise’s pre-fame Pariée appearance from the January/February 1981 issue.
Don’t have TikTok? Watch on IG.
Sources: Pariée, January/February 1981 issue via the National Public Center Historical Archive; Biography.com.
