from www.samesame.com.au – Bronson Pinchot, best known for his performance as Balki Bartokamus on the now defunct American sitcom Perfect Strangers has dished the dirt on Tom Cruise in a recent interview with website AV Club, calling him a “bore” and “homophobic”.
Pinchot’s career actually kicked off in 1983 when he co-starred with Cruise in the film Risky Business.
“We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the earth,” says Pinchot. “He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn – we were all very young at the time, Tom was 20, I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that… He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, ‘You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?’ I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, ‘It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.’ Very, very strange.”
Pinchot said that it was satisfying watching Cruise later become plagued with gay rumours.
“I used to think ‘God, that’s really fitting, because he tormented a lot of people as a 20-year-old.’ He made such a big deal about it. Same thing with Eddie Murphy – I remember somebody calling and saying, ‘You’ll never guess who was just caught with a transvestite!’… And I remember thinking that seemed fitting, because there are certain people in showbiz who make it an agenda, every third sentence has to have something knocking that life choice, and you think, ‘What are you doing?’”
When asked if Pinchot thought that Cruise was motivated by insecurity or youthful naivety he said that he did not know.
“It is what it is; there’s nothing I can add to it. If someone’s 20 years old and every third line out of their mouth is anti-something specific, then draw your own conclusion. I thought it was very weird.”
Is it any wonder that gay rumours have followed Tom for years? However, in 2007 private detective and former porn star, Paul Barresi, stated publicly that he’d been following Tom for six years, trying to find out if he was hiding in the closet.
“Everything I’ve found, and everything I know, points to Tom being heterosexual,” Barresi told Contactmusic. “There hasn’t been one piece of solid evidence to prove that he’s gay.”
One of the most high profile pieces of fuel to the gay rumour bonfire was when French magazine Actustar printed a supposed interview with American gay porno star Chad Slater. The interview said that Slater had had an affair with Cruise while he was married to Nicole. Of course Cruise denied it, as did Slater eventually, and Cruise did what any self-respecting Hollywood celebrity would do – he sued Slater for $100 million.