This feels very much like a lost scene from “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
On Wednesday, Vulture confirmed a very funny story director Judd Apatow recently told on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” about how Seth Rogen introduced Tom Cruise to the concept of internet porn.
During the premiere of the Netflix film “Like Father,” which was written and directed by Rogen’s wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, the “Sausage Party” star told the outlet that he had forgotten about the story until he heard Apatow’s retelling.
But he does vaguely remember how he responded to it.
“I probably was like, ‘This is crazy you don’t know this.’ I mean, I can’t remember — it was, like, 12 years ago or something like that. I think generally my reaction was, ‘You are a very sheltered man.’”
As Apatow told the story on the “Late Show” Tuesday, while he was filming “Knocked Up” in 2006, he got a meeting with Cruise, who was interested in doing a romantic comedy.
This was at a time when Cruise’s public image was rapidly changing, due to the 2005 couch-jumping incident in which the “Mission: Impossible” star leapt on a sofa and proclaimed his love for then-girlfriend and now ex-wife Katie Holmes while on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Due to this, Apatow brought a then-unknown Rogen along with him to his meeting with Cruise because he felt “someone needs to witness this.”
“I don’t know how it came up, but it usually comes up with Seth, where he starts talking about marijuana and pornography … and he starts talking about watching adult films on the internet,” Apatow recalled. “And Tom Cruise goes, ‘What? Wait, you’re saying there’s adult films on the internet?!’ And Seth’s like, ‘Yeah there’s all these movies on all these websites!’”
He continued, “And Tom Cruise’s like, ‘Wait a second, you’re saying if I like go on the computer, on the World Wide Web—’”
“—The information superhighway,” Colbert interjected.
“‘—There’s people having sex on this highway?!’” Apatow said, impersonating Cruise’s sincere surprise.
Apatow went on to say that Rogen informed Cruise that “everybody does it, it’s not a big deal anymore.”
“So, anyway,” Apatow said. “No movie was made.”
Although the details are fuzzy for Rogen, he does remember a few other tidbits from his first encounter with Cruise.
He told Vulture that when he arrived at the star’s house, Cruise, Holmes and their infant daughter, Suri, greeted him at the door.
“It was right when the baby was born, and no one had seen a picture of it yet,” Rogen said. “So literally there was a debate whether or not she was real.”
He also remembered another interesting detail from that encounter.
“That day in Tom Cruise’s driveway, I got to his house, and I had to pee so bad,” he said. “I very vividly remember this, and he has a very long, winding driveway, and I didn’t want to show up at his house and just pee right away, because I thought it would be an awkward thing. So as I was driving up his driveway, I stopped halfway through it and peed in a Snapple bottle I had in my car.”
Yeah, helping Cruise discover internet porn seems like a much better first impression.
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