As far as interviews go, this Q&A with a young Tom Cruise in 1988 may be one of the more awkward ones that you may see for a while.
Not that Cruise or his answers are the issue, he just gets thrown some questions bordering on the psychoanalysis variety. Despite a bit of fluster, Cruise shows he had a wise head on those then 26-year-old shoulders. Poor guy doesn’t get to say that much about Rain Man the film he was trying to promote.
But Cruise has since then had plenty of tough interviews through his career.
You can rank this interview on the same level as the one done with Brad Pitt which you can see here when he was around the same age as Cruise.
Watch Cruise in this earlier interview on the Merv Griffin Show from 1983 just after he made Risky Business.