To Understand Tom Cruise, You Must First Eat Chocolate Cake For Three Days

Everyone knows that Tom Cruise is committed to his roles, whether he's doing his own stunts during the Mission: Impossible movies or yelling at people on set who weren't following COVID-19 protocols. You know he's serious about his job. But if you really want to know how dedicated he is to the art of filmmaking, let's talk about his experience eating a buttload of chocolate cake on the set of the 1983 movie The Outsiders.

The Guardian recounted a conversation that Cruise had with Graham Norton regarding a scene involving chocolate cake.

"I was like, 'You know what, I'm going to eat chocolate cake in this scene,'" Cruise told Norton. "I thought, because I had to do it in the scene, it's part of the character, I'm going to eat chocolate cake. We ended up shooting this scene for three days, we did like 100 takes of me eating chocolate cake, and I had to keep eating it. Three days of Francis [Ford Coppola] saying, 'Let's do it again.' I was in sugar shock, I was vomiting."

Now, I have not yet vomited in the course of my food writing, but I've come extremely close. I almost did the other week when I put Alka-Seltzer in beer for a personal experiment, which was a catastrophic mistake. I'm feeling quite sick just thinking about it. But making myself sick on food that I'd otherwise enjoy, like chocolate cake? That sucks. I'd be a crabby guy too. Not sure I'd join Scientology over it, but I'd definitely be thinking about my life choices after making myself ill with chocolate cake multiple times for my job.