Tom Cruise News: Balki and American Psycho

Published by Jeff Leins on October 21, 2009

It has been four years since the “couch incident” on Oprah, at least a year since he’s publicly praised Xenu, and ten months since his latest movie as a one-eyed Nazi, but Tom Cruise is still making headlines for his wild antics. Of all places, Balki is calling him a homophobe and people are comparing him to the title character in American Psycho.

Bronson Pinchot, the actor best known for playing Balki Bartokomous on television’s “Perfect Strangers,” did a great interview with The Onion’s AV Club titled “Random Roles.”  The winding discussion took the 50-year-old actor through his filmography, stopping to tell a behind-the-scenes story or two along the way.

Balki bantered about the show, talked of a depressed Eddie Murphy, claimed Denzel Washington mentally abused him, and said Tom Hanks was a good guy.

When Pinchot reached 1983’s Risky Business, his first feature film, he recalled Cruise being the “biggest bore on the face of the Earth.”  He continued by saying Cruise, “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.”

“You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?”  What does that even mean!  “Hey, you want to pet this grizzly bear in case he’s a gay?  Let’s get off this pogo stick ride to Homotown.  We can use Dianetics to cure the gays!”  Oh wait, that last one is supposed to make sense…

A publicist for Cruise has responded with this statement: “Obviously this is so far removed from who Tom Cruise is as a person, this must have been said in jest.” Was Cruise joking?  Or Pinchot?  Who cares, let’s get some ice cream.

Also this week, American Psycho director Mary Harron talked with Black Book about how Christian Bale developed the character of serial killer Patrick Bateman. It seems Cruise was the inspiration for the smiling, high status psychopath.

“One day [Christian Bale] called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.”

The resemblance is uncanny.