His 18-year-old daughter Suri (who he hasn’t been seen with since she was six) may have recently dropped her last name, but Tom Cruise clearly remains close to his son.
The star was pictured boarding a helicopter in London with Connor, whom he and ex-wife Nicole Kidman adopted in 1995, two years after adopting their daughter Isabella.
Father and son are believed to have been attending Glastonbury, where Cruise’s best friend, writer Chris McQuarrie, and his Mission: Impossible co-star Simon Pegg were also in attendance. They were seen singing together in the VIP area before Coldplay’s concert on Saturday night.
Not that father and son’s musical tastes always coincide. When Connor was a party DJ, he rarely played pop, which may explain his absence from last week’s Taylor Swift concert at Wembley, which Tom attended.
Instead, a day after the trip to Glastonbury, Connor was spotted enjoying Kings of Leon at BST Hyde Park with a woman, presumably Tom Cruise’s PR, Amanda Lundberg.
Tom Cruise was photographed boarding a helicopter in London with his son Connor, whom he and ex-wife Nicole Kidman adopted in 1995.
Connor was spotted enjoying Kings of Leon at BST Hyde Park with a woman, presumably Tom Cruise’s PR, Amanda Lundberg.
Although Cruise and Connor are rarely photographed together, they are regulars at sporting events, particularly basketball. People who know Cruise say their bond is “strong,” especially since Connor is committed to the religious movement of Scientology, like his father.
Connor even has “1938” tattooed on his arm, referencing the date of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s earliest writings. They live near each other in Clearwater, Florida (Scientology’s world headquarters). Connor has also spent Christmas with his father, Tom’s sisters Cass, Lee Ann and Marian, and their children at Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, West Sussex, the religion’s headquarters in the United Kingdom.
And Connor is believed to have been at Saint Hill for much of the lockdown, so was able to watch his dad, in the UK, making Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, when Covid allowed.
Now, Scientology watchers believe Connor and his adopted sister Bella, 31, could move into the luxury Skyview building in Clearwater, where their father owns the penthouse, complete with a car elevator, as early as 2021.
Her three aunts and their husbands also live in the building, and the apartments appear to be reserved for Bella and her husband, and Connor.
Although Bella works in London as a Scientology auditor and lives with her husband Max Parker in Croydon, it wouldn’t be much of a change for Connor, who already lives in a nearby Scientology compound and is often seen driving around Clearwater in his bright yellow sports car.
Nicole Kidman, Connor, Isabella and Tom Cruise in Sydney, Australia, in 1996
His passion is deep-sea fishing (in 2016, Cruise bought him a £400,000 boat) and he works for a fishing expedition company. Connor, who is also a potential food influencer, has an Instagram account, Connor’s Meat Shack.
She often travels to be with her father; last year, the two were photographed together in New York. They were also seen with Bella after an ice hockey game in Tampa, Florida.
Why are the two eldest children so close to Tom and Suri so distant? The main reason is that Suri, who just graduated from high school, is raised exclusively by her mother, Katie Holmes. The actress was married to Cruise from 2006 to 2012.
While Bella and Connor are solely parents to Tom, Kidman has not been photographed with her adopted children since 2007.
Isabella Jane Cruise was born in December 1992. Her biological mother was a married Scientologist and mother of two, who apparently thought she could not afford to raise a third child. During her pregnancy, the Church of Scientology put her in touch with Cruise, then 30, and his young wife Kidman, then 25. They had been married for two years.
In 1995, they completed their family when they adopted one-month-old Connor.
After the Hollywood power couple split in 2001, Kidman and Cruise split custody of the children. But by 2005, Isabella and Connor were with their father full-time, living in a mansion in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles run by Cruise’s sister, Cass, a devout Scientologist. She also home-schooled them.
Nicole apparently sees very little of them. Neither Connor nor Bella attended her 50th birthday celebrations or her father Antony’s funeral in 2014. Kidman was raised Catholic, never converted to Scientology, and reportedly did not want Bella and Connor to be raised in the Church.
However, in 2018, she told Who magazine: “They are adults. They can make their own decisions. They have chosen to be Scientologists and as a mother it is my job to love them.”
Bella and Connor attended Scientology balls and Bella married IT consultant Parker. Cruise paid for the wedding in 2015 at the Dorchester Hotel in London.
As for Connor, it was reported in 2019 that he would marry the leader of the second generation of Scientologists, Silvia Zanchi. Originally from Bergamo, Italy, she is described as a “princess of Scientology” and is said to have completed preparations last year to begin ascending to the upper echelons of “OT.”
It stands for Operating Thetan and is a reference to the immortal soul of the Thetan, which Scientologists believe represents the source of all life.
Silvia and Connor were spotted sitting at the same table at a Scientology wedding in 2018 and reportedly went to Disney World in Orlando with Cruise in 2019, but it remains a mystery whether or not they tied the knot. They haven’t been seen together in public for years and aren’t on each other’s social media accounts. Connor doesn’t wear a wedding ring.
What’s next for Connor? Former Scientologist Katrina Reyes predicts he’ll take on a more prominent role: “He’ll be Scientology’s golden boy.”
Surely this means her bond with Tom will only get stronger, while the supposedly weaker bond with Kidman (and perhaps Suri) probably won’t change anytime soon.