Inside Tom Cruise and Ana de Armas’ Break-Up: House Hunting, Hollywood Boost, and the Role of Scientology

Wanted: a companion for the last great A-list Hollywood star. Must be young, gorgeous, successful, at home in a helicopter – and a Scientologist.

News that Tom Cruise, 63, has moved on from his 37-year-old girlfriend Ana de Armas after around nine months of dating comes as little surprise.

As is customary with Cruise, the romance started with intense enthusiasm – and ended just as abruptly with an apparently irrevocable split and sources saying the couple had realised they were ‘better as just friends’.

At least with de Armas, Cruise refrained from jumping up and down on a sofa, as he infamously did in 2005 when he pounded the floor and told a startled Oprah Winfrey on her chat show: ‘I’m in love!’ (Katie Holmes was the woman in question back then.)

But he and de Armas were ‘inseparable’ and clearly an item for most of this year. She was said to be taking instruction in Scientology from Cruise, who was acting as a personal, professional and spiritual mentor.

There were even reports suggesting they were talking about getting married, which would have been Cruise’s fourth try at matrimony.

So what went wrong? The pair were first linked in February this year when they were seen getting a takeaway in London’s Soho on Valentine’s night. The explanation given was that Tom was talking to her about them making a film together. This was true. She was duly officially cast in his movie, Deeper, in May.

Cruise was never seen at any of her red carpet events, and she didn’t come to his, but they kept on being spotted together in his helicopter as it buzzed in and out of London’s Battersea Heliport.

By May, there was no doubt that this was a full-blown romance. He took her as his plus-one to David Beckham’s 50th birthday party at the Core restaurant in Kensington. They were seen dancing together and (sweetly) holding hands at the table. ‘They looked very much in love that night,’ I’m told.

That month they were also pictured walking together through Hyde Park with her dogs, trailed by Cruise’s security detail. They were seen together at an Oasis concert in Wembley this summer, and on a trip to Spain by private jet.

Cruise, it was reported, saw something very special in Cuban-born de Armas. They were even supposedly house-hunting outside London together, according to a report last month. De Armas, who mostly lives in a remote hideaway in Vermont, was said to be blown away by megawatt Tom’s attention.

There were unmistakable signs, too, that Cruise was promoting his new girl on a professional level. De Armas was already his stablemate at the agency CAA, but was represented by Tracy Brennan and Josh Lieberman. Suddenly, this summer, she became a client of the legendary Bryan Lourd, the agency’s CEO.

Sources said Cruise had asked Lourd to step in and make sure she was ‘prioritised’ at the agency.

That’s the kind of favour only an A-lister can pull, and you can see why observers thought it meant Cruise was serious about de Armas.

And, let’s be in no doubt, she needed a bit of a Cruise boost.

Yes, the former Bond girl was nominated for an Oscar for the film Blonde, in which she played Marilyn Monroe, but she then made the universally panned rom-com Ghosted for Apple TV+, followed by the thriller Eden, which was also disappointingly received.

She then starred in Ballerina, the John Wick spin-off. That performed terribly, taking just £98 million worldwide in June, after which the studio Lionsgate fired both its marketing heads.

At the premiere of Ballerina, de Armas let slip that she was ‘training, just training, getting ready for what’s going to come’ for the film Deeper. Both she and Cruise were apparently doing a lot of work on diving for the movie, which features a former astronaut on a deep dive to an unexplored ocean trench who then encounters a supernatural force. Like Cruise, de Armas enjoys doing her own stunts.

However, the wheels started to come off Deeper in July, with Warner Bros deciding that the £205million budget was simply too high. Indeed, the whole project was then abruptly yanked only a few weeks before production was meant to start in August.

And, as the film foundered, so did the relationship. They haven’t been seen together since the planned production date of the film.

One source said: ‘Tom and Ana had a good time together but their time as a couple has run its course. They are going to remain good friends but they aren’t dating any more. They just realised they weren’t going to go the distance.’

These are almost exactly the sentiments expressed at the end of Cruise’s previous romance, with co-star Hayley Atwell. They had apparently sparked a romance after meeting during the filming of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One in 2020 and were seen attending Wimbledon together.

However, they split in September 2021, with a source saying: ‘It has been a very intense period of filming together. They really got on well – but as the latest film winds down they’ve decided to go back to being friends. Their filming schedules are very full-on and Tom has a number of other commitments coming up, and is always shooting around by private helicopter and jet, so it just ran its course.’

A reported rekindling the following year – just around the time of the release of Part Two – was over within weeks. You can see, given the timings, why some believed that the connection with Atwell was in some way a ‘showmance’ rather than the real thing.

And the undeniable fact is that the Atwell affair followed a string of reported Cruise romances which simply weren’t real.

These included reported love affairs with British actress Vanessa Kirby (Princess Margaret in The Crown), who had barely met him and was dating London actor Callum Turner at the time; with his British assistant Emily Thomas, who also had a boyfriend; with actress Sofia Boutella, who was supposed to have sent him into a ‘fever’ but again was not his girlfriend.

He was supposed to be close to leaving Scientology in order to marry actress Annabelle Wallis, but in fact she was dating Coldplay’s Chris Martin.

Such a string of not-as-they-seem romances sparked malicious gossip that the actor could, in fact, be a closeted homosexual. Sadly for conspiracy theorists, there are plenty of women – including the singer Cher, with whom he had a fling – who willingly attest he is genuinely attracted to women. He just seems to have trouble sustaining a relationship.

Cruise’s first marriage was to actress Mimi Rogers, six years his senior. Her father was a highly prominent member of the Church of Scientology. They met in 1985 at a party, were married in 1987 and split in 1990, with a sorrowful mutual statement about what a difficult decision it had been.

In truth, Cruise filed for divorce after falling for his co-star Nicole Kidman on the set of the film Days Of Thunder, while married to Rogers. As Cruise told Vanity Fair in 1995: ‘Instant lust, that’s what I felt. I thought she was amazingly sexy and stunning. It grew into love and respect.’

Perhaps stung by this public dumping for another woman, Rogers gave an interview in which she said: ‘Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn’t fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument. My own needed tuning.’ She later retracted the comments – but the suggestion that Cruise was less than red-blooded has endured.

The Kidman-Cruise marriage included the adoption of children Bella and Connor. It ended abruptly after 11 years, with Cruise apparently shocking Kidman with the divorce filing. There followed a firestorm of gossip linking Kidman to other men, though much of this gossip, it should be acknowledged, was fuelled by Cruise saying tightly, ‘Ask Nic, she knows’, when someone asked him why the marriage had ended.

As to whether they had a conventional sexual relationship, Cruise and Kidman successfully sued over suggestions that it wasn’t when they were filming the 1999 thriller Eyes Wide Shut together for director Stanley Kubrick. The film’s drawn-out production process – it took some 15 months to film – did seem, though, to have an adverse effect on their union.

Post-divorce, Cruise’s reputation became compromised due to his championing of Scientology. He chided Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants and, on the set of War Of The Worlds, there were ‘Scientology tents’ where cast and crew could learn more about the religion.

In 2004, reports claimed British actress Nazanin Boniadi, who was a fellow Scientologist, had been ‘auditioned’ for the role of Cruise’s new partner.

Disaffected Scientologist Leah Remini says that when the relationship didn’t work out, the church punished Boniadi by making her clean toilets with a toothbrush. The church denies all such allegations.

Katie Holmes, who made her name on TV series Dawson’s Creek, then entered the picture. She met Cruise to discuss the possibility of appearing in Mission Impossible III and found herself bowled over by the A-lister, whose poster she’d had on her bedroom wall.

Raised a Catholic, she was sent on an intensive study course in Scientology, a religion founded by sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard in 1954, which holds that humans are descended from an exiled race of aliens called Thetans.

Their daughter Suri was born in April 2006 and Holmes and Cruise had a Scientology wedding in November that year. Cruise’s best man was David Miscavige, the head of the movement. There is no doubt that the beautiful wedding at an Italian castle to a nice girl from Ohio helped to detoxify Cruise’s faltering public image.

When the split came in 2012, it was widely reported that Holmes was uncomfortable with the idea of raising their daughter as a Scientologist. She had also become miserable with her workaholic, religiously devout husband, who spent no more than a handful of nights a month under the same roof as her. Instead she was in a mansion with Cruise’s sister and her family, plus his adopted children Connor and Bella. Bella was even Suri’s nanny for a time.

A shopping and sundries budget, reputed to run at £80,000 a month, could only keep her amused for so long. One Hollywood source told me: ‘They really couldn’t drag out the pretence any longer.’

And now another one bites the dust. People who have worked with the star all say the same thing, which is that Cruise is the ‘nicest guy’ who ‘radiates positivity’ – and when the tractor beam of his attention falls upon you, it’s quite an overwhelming experience.

But it still remains to be seen whether he will ever find someone who is willing to stay the course.