"We didn't know it was going to be a big hit. We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth. He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn -- we were all very young at the time, Tom was 20, I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don't agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names. He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, 'You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?' I mean, his lingo was larded with the most ... There was no basis for it. It was like, 'It's a nice day, I'm glad there are no gay people standing here.' Very, very strange.Years and years later when people started to torment him with that, I used to think God, that's really fitting, because he tormented a lot of people as a 20-year-old. He made such a big deal about it. Same thing with Eddie Murphy -- I remember somebody calling and saying, "You'll never guess who was just caught with a transvestite!" [Laughs.] And I remember thinking that seemed fitting, because there are certain people in showbiz who make it an agenda, every third sentence has to have something knocking that life choice, and you think, What are you doing? ... I just thought it was very funny that years later, that became his bugaboo. Which is a nice 1930s term I thought you'd enjoy."-- Perfect Strangers star Bronson Pinchot discussing Tom Cruise's and Eddie Murphy's alleged homophobia in a new interview with The A.V. Club. Pinchot -- who worked with Cruise on the film Risky Business -- was most recently in Mr. Art Critic, now out on DVD.
