Everything Tom Cruise Knows About Bush, He Learned From the ‘Today’ Teleprompter

Tom Cruise reunited with Matt Lauer on the Today Show this morning, and fortunately for the audience, Cruise’s strategy appeared to be, “Bring the crazy up front and as early as possible.”

How else to explain Cruise wandering into the shot two hours before his scheduled interview to unsettle Lauer and Meredith Vieira? As his offscreen underlings attempted to muster a “Great idea, Tom!”, Cruise awkwardly interrupted the hosts’ top-of-the-show news reading, prompting Vieira to ask him what he knew about Bush. The loaded question caused Cruise to flash back to an uncomfortable 1987 query from Mimi Rogers until Vieira helpfully added, “The President?” Later, Cruise would actually sit down for his Lauer tete-a-tete, a weirdly downbeat affair that saw Cruise virtually unable to complete a thought without a groggy digression. Glib? More like glub. Clip above.

• Today [NBC]