NEED TO KNOW
- The notorious Tom Cruise sofa leap turns 20 years outdated on Might 23, 2025
- It was 2005 when Cruise made his memorable look on Oprah, leaping on the sofa together with his arms within the air in pleasure over how in love with Katie Holmes he was
- The second elicited a variety of reactions in its speedy aftermath, and continues to make its mark all these years later
The yr 2005 was one thing of a subdued one for popular culture. Future’s Baby carried out their final live performance as a gaggle. Determined Housewives and Everyone Loves Raymond entertained tv viewers. Wedding ceremony Crashers, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Hearth and Mr. & Mrs. Smith topped the field workplace.
However there was one cultural second that yr that will be defining — not only for 2005 however for the actor on the heart of it: Tom Cruise.
Cruise made headlines that yr when, throughout an look on Oprah, he jumped on the sofa together with his arms within the air in pleasure over how in love with Katie Holmes he was.
It is virtually tough to place into phrases how massive a deal the sofa leap was on the time.
It was arguably one of many first “viral” moments on community tv, the place it seemingly performed on a loop for weeks, if not months, after.
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Here is what occurred: a then 42-year-old Cruise was the day’s visitor on Oprah, a present recognized for its stay studio audiences, who usually energized each the present’s host and its friends.
On the time, Cruise was selling Warfare of the Worlds, the Steven Spielberg-directed science fiction/motion movie by which he starred as a father making an attempt to guard his youngsters amid an alien invasion. But it surely was one thing else — his then-still-burgeoning relationship with actress Holmes — that had audiences excited.
And boy had been they ever excited. Even earlier than Cruise entered the stage, the vitality was palpable, with Oprah Winfrey egging on the gang that stuffed Chicago’s Harpo Studios.
Shut-up pictures of the gang confirmed grown girls applauding, dancing and providing up deafening screams — some even crying with the information that Cruise was “within the constructing,” as Winfrey shouted.
Cruise — then, as he’s now, the world’s largest film star — ultimately burst onto the set, flashing an ear-to-ear grin and eliciting even larger cries from the gang as he took a knee to bow to the host.
Nearly instantly, Winfrey talked about Holmes, thanking Cruise for attending a current occasion together with his new girlfriend. The mere point out of her title and a giddy Cruise threw up one hand — looking for a high-five from Winfrey — after which the opposite, clenching her arms as he started to rise off the sofa.
“What has occurred to you?” Winfrey then requested, later including: “We’ve by no means seen you behave this fashion earlier than!”
“I’m in love!” Cruise responded.
On the finish of the episode, Winfrey even implored Holmes herself to return to the stage (Cruise himself pulled her out). But it surely was Cruise’s unbridled vitality that everybody remembers. At varied factors he smiled, laughed, knelt on the ground, pumped his fists, held each arms aloft in a “victory”-like stance, and, in a second most cemented within the minds of everybody who was watching, jumped onto the couch with each ft.
The second was temporary — some 5 seconds elapsed between the time he landed on the cushion and made his manner again down — however memorable.
It has been parodied on Sesame Avenue and Household Man. Spoofed endlessly on YouTube.
The sofa leap grew to become such a long-lasting a part of the cultural zeitgeist that Chet Hanks even made an homage to the second on The Drew Barrymore Present in March 2025. It additionally had repercussions past being cemented in popular culture lore for the higher a part of three many years.
Some would argue it modified the course of Cruise’s profession, ushering in a brand new degree of scrutiny to an actor who had beforehand shied away from being too private. Executives even urged the stunt had price Cruise tens of millions in manufacturing offers, the Wall Avenue Journal reported not lengthy after.
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The tentacles of the sofa leap reached additional than Cruise. On the March 2025 ICG Publicists Awards, publicist Tim Menke — who booked Cruise on Winfrey within the fateful 2005 look — mentioned it had price him that job.
“These awards solidified a particular place in my coronary heart in 2006 when, after a dozen years at Paramount, I used to be kicked to the curb largely as a result of, properly, lengthy story wanting a sofa,” Menke mentioned on the occasion, per The Hollywood Reporter. “It was my reserving and it didn’t go very properly. It violated the adage that each one publicity is nice publicity.”
Menke ultimately obtained his job again. And Cruise recovered as properly, happening to helm a slew of field workplace hits, most notably 2022’s High Gun: Maverick, which grossed practically $1.5 billion globally, making it the highest-grossing movie of Cruise’s profession. He premieres his newest challenge, Mission: Unimaginable — The Ultimate Reckoning, this weekend.
Cruise has not often spoken publicly in regards to the sofa incident. He reconvened with Winfrey shortly after the episode in query to replicate on it, saying he had no concept it might develop to be as wide-reaching because it had.
“No, I didn’t. That was a second, and it was actual. It was one thing that I simply felt that manner. And it’s one thing, you already know, that’s simply how I felt,” he mentioned.
In a later interview with TV Information Journal, Winfrey mentioned that she too was stunned by the “brouhaha” that ensued following the 2005 second.
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Cruise, she informed TV Information, “was in love. He was very completely happy about it. He was on a present. He knew me. He got here to play.”
“It ended up on the night information, folks performed that tape all around the world,” Winfrey informed the journal. “I believed it was an expression of pleasant exuberance and being in love. Any girl, anyplace, in any hut, in any mansion, in any hovel or in any dwelling could be actually thrilled to have her man leap on a settee run round a room, no matter, proclaiming his love for her.”
