Can you believe it’s been 12 years since Matt Lauer’s glib-tastic Today interview with Tom Cruise on the subject of psychiatry that went so gleefully off the rails ? In fact, it’s been almost 12 years to the day, as the sit down occurred on June 24, 2005, just one month after Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch and presumably shortly before the actor had a “come to Jesus” (err, Xenu) style PR intervention.
But while Cruise himself may keep a much more low profile personal life these days, especially in the years since his divorce with Katie Holmes, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t relive the free-wheeling days of the aughts. As such, when Lauer and Savannah Guthrie stopped by the Watch What Happens Live clubhouse for a special Today edition of the Bravo chat show, host Andy Cohen asked Lauer to recreate the famous interview — only this time he would be playing the part of Cruise.
Although Lauer agreed to play along, he was careful to note that he likes Cruise to this day, and that the contentious back-and-forth was a blip in an otherwise good relationship. Still, he did a pretty good job with the material, donning a brown wig to fully get in character. (Although the whole thing would have been more authentic if he had a tightly-fitted black T-shirt to go along with it.)
Afterwards, Lauer stated again, “We are friends, I think he got such a bum rap for that, and to be honest he was a real mensch after that, he came, he apologized, we had a great time.” Pretty impressive, when you consider how much tension there was back then. You can watch the original interview segment below, for comparison.