Tom Cruise once portrayed a flesh feeding fiend in the adaptation of an "Interview with a Vampire", but is the fresh-faced star with the pearly white teeth actually guilty of drinking the blood of mere mortals to retain his youth?
The Peter Pan of the silver screen has made a recent return to form, and while out and about in New York to promote his new movie Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol; it was evident that the star who's rapidly approaching his 50th birthday looks like a man many years his junior.
Hollywood has a long history of devouring the clear complexions, athletic physiques and starry-eyed innocence of youth, and spitting it out the other end of the star making machine as a plastic surgery ravaged, neurotic, egotistical, sexually perverted, and drug and drink addicted mess. In short, it makes corpses of potential and promise, and still manages to convince itself that it creates only the stuff dreams are made of.
Yet industry workhorses such as Tom Cruise seem oblivious to the one thing that Hollywood despises above all else - old age.
Pictured above is young Tom! Are those blood stains on your teeth sir?
Pictures in the Daily Mail compare the Tom of today with the Tom of ten years ago, and there is no visible difference between the two.
Why is that? Is he a vampire, who sucks the blood of lesser talents to fight off the aging process. Does Tom howl at the moon as he rips into the neck of his next poor victim. Is the Mission: Impossible star guilty of slaughtering others just to keep the laughter lines and crow's feet at bay. Is it all part of a terrible murderous conspiracy shared by other members of the Hollywood vampire élite such as Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp.
Does this rarefied sect of A-list monsters butcher members of the cinema going public all in the name of eternal youth and the perpetual creation of films with an ever diminishing level of quality?
Don't be so foolish! Even if this was the case, your tongue would be savagely ripped clean from your mouth before you could reveal the dark and terrible truth behind Hollywood's leading men.
The secret behind Tom Cruise's youthful appearance is rather more predictable and more mundane. Apparently the movie icon is an obsessive user off his wife Katie Holmes' range of very expensive skin-care products, and not, as some warped fantasists might suggest, a blood-sucking, flesh-eating monstrosity who can turn into a bat at the drop of a hat.
