Every once in a blue moon, someone tells the truth in Hollywood. Finally every movie or TV show wasn't a brilliant learning experience. An actress admits she does have to diet, and she hates it. Or someone admits that working with Hollywood's crème de la crème of talent isn't always an uplifting, motivating inspiring experience. They're not always wonderful human beings. Some of them are pricks! And some of them, if Bronson Pinchot is to be believed, are just weirdos.

You will know Bronson Pinchot. I immediately remember the 50-year-old actor for his role as Balki Barktokomous, the hilarious immigrant cousin of Larry Appleton on 80s sitcom Perfect Strangers. Remember him leaving his far-off village on the back of a cart with the sign ‘America or Burst?' Ah! Brings a tear to your eye.

Bronson Pinchot was a busy actor before Perfect Strangers came on the air in 1986, having co-starring roles in Beverly Hills Cop, Beverly Hills Cop 3 and Risky Business - in which he starred alongside a young 20-year-old wannabe called Tom Cruise.

Pinchot wasn't impressed with Cruise, and said so quite frankly in a recent interview with website The A.V. Club. Interviewer Nathan Rabin was taking Pinchot on a walk down memory lane through his past acting work when the actor decided to tell it how it really was.

I love it when they do that.

On his Risky Business co-star: "We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the earth. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don't agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names. He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments like, "You want some ice cream, in case there are 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."

"Years and years later when people started to torment him with that, I used to think "God, that's really fitting, because he tormented a lot of people as a 20-year-old." He made such a big deal about it. Same thing with Eddie Murphy - I remember someone calling and saying ‘You'll never guess who was just caught with a transvestite!"

Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows how much I love the Eddie and the tranny incident and his subsequent excuse that he was ‘just being a good Samaritan.'

"I don't know what it is; there's nothing I can add to it," Pinchot said when pressed further on Cruise's behaviour. "If someone's 20 years old and every third line out of their mouth is anti-something specific, then draw your own conclusion. I thought it was very weird."

Sometimes it must be hard being Tom Cruise. You spend the last 25 years building a reputation as a virile, red-blooded action hero and family man who likes to jump on couches and lives life on the edge - and then a former co-star breaks free of the PR machine, opens his gob and outs you as a ‘homophobic bore.'

"He always talked about himself like he was a mega-superstar; that was weird too," continued Pinchot.

Well, Tom was right! You can't bag someone out too much for their powers of positive visualisation. And if we're being honest, what has Bronson Pinchot done lately? The A.V. Club reports that Mr Art Critic, a movie he made in 2007, has just been released on DVD - two years later. So he's not really setting the world on fire.

Cruise isn't the only one in Pinchot's firing line. Denzel Washington, the star of Pinchot's 1996 film Courage Under Fire, is ‘one of the most unpleasant human beings' the actor has ever met. He also called out Bette Midler for being ‘such a bitch' on the set of The First Wives Club - but praises Tom Hanks, calling the actor ‘a wonderful and genuine and lovely and down-to-earth person.'

We must all have said a few things we regret at the age of 20, but this Cruise businessis just weird. Doth his 20-year-old self protest too much? Or were they just the youthful rants of an insecure boy from Syracuse, New York?

Granted, 1983 was a different time. It was not an easy time to be gay. People were petrified of AIDS, and pointed the finger at the gay community. There wasn't as much tolerance as there is in 2009, and that's still not enough. That said, I'm with Bronson. It's weird.

Despite three kids and three wives, a very public wedding to Katie Holmes and a whole lot of red-blooded romantic gestures, Tom Cruise has never been able to shake those gay rumours. Gay porn stars have alleged to have slept with him, and got their perky asses sued. Tell-all books on the seedy side of Hollywood have claimed to dish the dirt on Tom's secret gay life, with degrees of truthfulness still under debate.

An episode of South Park which had Tom Cruise ‘trapped in the closet' prompted Scientologist cast member Isaac Hayes to quit the show due to its ‘treatment of religion'. Reportedly Cruise refused to do promo for his movie Mission: Impossible III if Viacom, the owners of his movie company Paramount and Comedy Central, where South Park screened, allowed the episode to air again. It didn't. Cruise's people denied his involvement in the incident.

His appetite for suing those who query his heterosexuality is legendary, and because of this I will hereby state that Tom Cruise is straight, super manly and infinitely attracted to and attractive to women. That is all.

Some celebs take gay rumours as a compliment. Tom Cruise is not one of those celebrities.

Cruise's rep waded in to the issue late this week, telling the press that Pinchot must have ‘failed to get a joke.'

"Obviously this is so far removed from who Tom Cruise is as a person, this must have been said in jest," publicist Cheryl Maisel told US TV Guide.com.

I don't see how you could construe that as an attempt at humour, but whatever.

Today Bronson Pinchot e-mailed The Wall Street Journal to discuss the interview, which has gone viral online. He said he wished to clarify his comments and, to his credit, he didn't back down.

On calling Cruise a ‘homophobic bore': "The context of the question was ‘how did he strike me as a person' at a point in his career when he was a virtual unknown. And my answer was that, coming straight out of the world of theatre, as essentially all the supporting male actors did, where homophobic language was not heard, I remember thinking his use of it was remarkable and excessive; however, it is also true to say, in hindsight, that for a 20-year-old with no background in theatre, such language is actually unremarkable. Which I did not know at 23."

Really? My little brother just turned 21. He couldn't be further from having a background in theatre. I don't remember every second sentence coming out of his mouth constantly mentioning gay people.

And on Denzel Washington: "I regret my choice of words there, and would like to amend my statement by saying I found his willingness to be ungenerous, unkind, knowingly hurtful both mentally and physically to myself and the crew to be the saddest misuse of stardom I have ever experienced or hoped to experience."

Pinchot has more to gain from this than Cruise. It's not like Tom needs the publicity. Bronson does. But he also has more to lose. After this outburst I guarantee he won't be working on any production with a Scientologist involved after dissing their golden boy - or a Denzel Washington project, come to thin of it. Not that he would probably want to.

If that's not enough ragging on Tom Cruise for the week, an interview with film director Mary Harron revealed him to be the inspiration behind Christian Bale's portrayal of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman.

Never read Bret Easton Ellis' book or watched the movie based on it? Patrick Bateman was a young, wealthy Wall Street banker in New York in the late 80s, who likes making money by day, and clubbing, doing a bit of coke, and committing graphic murder by night.

"We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave," Harron told Blackbookmag.com. "And then one day he [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."

 

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I am taking an extra long Labour Weekend this weekend (weyhey!), spending Tuesday and Wednesday footloose and fancy free. Normal bloggage will resume on Thursday.