Rebecca De Mornay has nothing but love for her “Risky Business” co-star and ex, Tom Cruise.
The actress met Cruise on the set of their breakout film in 1982. They dated for nearly three years after the teen comedy was released in 1983.
“I’m really proud of him,” the 65-year-old recently told Page Six about her former flame.
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De Mornay described the 63-year-old as a “major chord” while she labeled herself “a minor chord.” She said that Cruise had always been ambitious and eager to make his dreams a reality.
“He’s like, ‘I am “Top Gun,”’ and that’s what America really wanted, and so he’s fulfilled it,” De Mornay gushed. “He is a brilliant, brilliant interpreter of what the zeitgeist is. I’m really, really proud of knowing him from when we were in the suburbs of Chicago [filming ‘Risky Business’], and knowing what he wanted and where it is now.”
She added, “We started this together and look what he did with it.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Cruise for comment.
One of De Mornay’s latest appearances was in the thriller “Saint Claire,” opposite Bella Thorne and Ryan Phillippe. It tells the tale of “an avenging serial killer [Thorne] who murders misbehaving men,” Page Six reported.
“It’s very rare that I read scripts about a female serial killer who’s obsessed with Joan of Arc, which I thought was just brilliant,” De Mornay shared.
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In “Risky Business,” Cruise plays Joel Goodsen, a high school student who stays home alone while his parents are on vacation. He goes on to meet a prostitute named Lana [De Mornay]. For the role, Cruise earned his first Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.
Cruise went on to make his mark in blockbusters like “Top Gun” and the “Mission: Impossible” film franchise.
De Mornay was just 24 years old when “Risky Business” skyrocketed her to fame.
“It was personally jarring and thrilling and discombobulating to have become famous so quickly,” she told TheWrap back in 2023. “Tom and I were together when the movie came out, and we had photographers jumping out of bushes, the pre-paparazzi days.”
“I was a more complicated, mysterious presence, innately, than Tom,” she reflected at the time. “His presence is more like, I would say, a major chord, [thinking] in music terms, and I’m more of a minor chord… America really, really loves the major chords.”
After playing Lana, De Mornay was labeled a sex symbol. To avoid being typecast, she took on the grittier role of a railway worker for 1985’s “Runaway Train.”
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“You reach people on many levels,” she explained to the outlet about being a sex symbol. “You can reach people when they’re sexually attracted to you. It doesn’t have to be that it’s all about sex, but when you touch someone on that level, it brings them in to perhaps other things about you.”
“I am an actress, and I could be a sex symbol, but I am an actress, first and foremost,” she added.
Over the years, De Mornay stepped away from glamorous roles and was selective about which projects to take on. As both an actress and mom to two daughters, she wanted to make sure her children weren’t separated from their father.
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“I’m not quite sure how some of these very famous actresses with children, how they do it. Maybe they’re good at multitasking? I’m not,” she admitted to the outlet.
“… [But] it’s always been important to me to choose roles where there [is] some model of strength to women, regardless of what they do or how they do it,” she added.
