Culture
Man Who Dangled From a Plane Could Not Follow Football Without Taylor Swift's Help
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
Tom Cruise appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday to discuss Digger, his forthcoming film about a man who digs, and instead delivered what historians of celebrity will eventually classify as the most voluntarily humiliating confession since a Roman emperor asked his horse for policy advice.
Cruise, 61, told Fallon and approximately four million viewers that he attended a Kansas City Chiefs game last season and spent the first quarter in a state of pleasant, complete ignorance, watching men collide at high speed with the serene confidence of someone who has always been able to afford not to know things.
This continued until Taylor Swift, seated nearby in the suite that Travis Kelce apparently rents out to people who are famous enough not to need directions but still require basic orientation, turned to him and began explaining football.
"She just started walking me through it," Cruise told Fallon, who laughed in the way that Tonight Show hosts laugh when they cannot think fast enough to say anything. "She knows everything. The formations, the calls, all of it. I was like, okay, I am learning from Taylor right now and that is absolutely fine with me."
It is worth pausing here to appreciate the full dimensions of this moment. Tom Cruise has hung from the exterior of a moving Airbus A400M at altitude. He has driven motorcycles off cliffs. He has held his breath for six and a half minutes in an underwater sequence that required eighteen months of preparation and caused the film's insurance company to reportedly hold a separate meeting just to discuss him personally. He completed actual fighter jet training for Top Gun: Maverick, a film in which real naval aviators described his technique as, and this is a quote from a Navy spokesman, "genuinely concerning in the best possible way."
And yet: a screen pass. Completely lost.
Swift, who has attended enough Chiefs games to have a named section of the parking lot informally dedicated to her fan contingent, apparently took to the role with the quiet authority of someone who has spent two years watching professional football and absorbing it the way she absorbs everything, which is completely, immediately, and with the evident intention of eventually being better at it than the people who invented it.
Cruise said she explained the two-minute drill "like it was nothing," which is a phrase he used with what appeared to be genuine admiration and possibly a small amount of feelings he has not fully categorized.
Fallon asked whether Cruise was now a Chiefs fan. Cruise said he was "absolutely" a Chiefs fan, with the exact cadence of a man who learned the word "Chiefs" seventeen minutes before the interview.
Cruise also discussed Digger, his new film, for approximately ninety seconds. The film appears to involve digging. He called it "the most emotionally raw thing" he has done since Jerry Maguire, which is a sentence that will now have to compete in the public memory with the image of Taylor Swift explaining zone coverage to Ethan Hunt while he nods and eats a stadium pretzel.
A spokesperson for the NFL declined to comment on whether Swift's contribution to Cruise's football literacy qualifies for any official recognition. The Chiefs organization also did not respond, possibly because they were busy winning things.
Swift has not commented publicly, which is the move of someone who knows the story is already perfect and understands, unlike some people, when to let the clock run.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/tom-cruise-taylor-swift-chiefs-game-tonight-show-interview-1235628674/