Inside Millie Bobby Brown’s Tom Cruise Friendship

What did Millie Bobby Brown say about Tom Cruise?

“He’s a dear friend,” Brown told Horowitz during the conversation. “He’s a wonderful man and I’m very lucky to call him my friend.”

That friendship may surprise some fans who primarily associate Brown with the close-knit younger cast of Stranger Things, where viewers watched her grow up on screen over nearly a decade. But Brown’s Hollywood circle has clearly expanded well beyond Hawkins, Indiana.

Cruise, of course, is known not only for his long film career but also for his intense commitment to practical stunts, from scaling skyscrapers to hanging off aircraft. Brown has her own appetite for action work, though she suggested there are limits to how far she plans to follow his example.

How far will Brown go with Cruise-style stunts?

“Tom does the craziest stuff,” Brown said. “I think he’s trying to get me to somehow fly a plane at some point.”

She has already gone up with him once. Brown said she has “flown his helicopter before,” though the experience did not exactly convert her into a permanent member of the Cruise Aviation Club.

“I was like, ‘This is the last time I ever fly any of his equipment,’” she said.

Fair enough. Some friendships involve brunch. Others apparently involve reviewing whether a helicopter outing was a character-building exercise or a warning label with rotor blades.

Why does Brown still push to do her own action scenes?

Brown has her limits, though. the Enola Holmes actor said she cares deeply about performing as much of her own stunt work as possible, especially because of what it can show younger audiences.

“I really want young girls to think they can, you know? You’ll always hear an older actor say, ‘Don’t do your own stunts,’ and I get that,” Brown explained. “But back in the day, they might have been throwing you against a wall. And now, if you get a really great stunt coordinator and you learn how to land and you learn the whole technique of it, we as actors should know how to do certain things.”

Brown, 22, who shares a baby girl with husband Jake Bongiovi, joked that she tries “to do 90 percent” of her own stunts. The remaining 10 percent, she said, is “in my contract that I’m not allowed, even though I beg.”

When did Brown compare herself to Cruise before?

Brown has compared her own action work to Cruise’s before. While promoting Damsel on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2024, she recalled being surprised by the scale of the physical scenes she was actually allowed to perform.

“You’re just like, ‘Am I really gonna do that stunt?’” Brown said at the time. “And then that day they’re like, ‘Yep, put the harness on.’”

She added, “And I just did the stunt as if it wasn’t Tom Cruise-level stuff. I felt like Tom Cruise.”

The comparison works because Brown is still balancing two sides of a modern screen career: the star who wants to prove she can handle the demanding work, and the person who knows that not every invitation from Tom Cruise needs to end with aircraft controls in her hands.