By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2012
Long before he became one of the most-cited bylines in Hollywood deal coverage, Mike Fleming had a side gig: he conducted the marquee Q&A for Playboy. In 2012 FishbowlLA noted that the Deadline editor was still keeping that tradition alive, this time with Tom Cruise.
Then
Running deadline.com is not a part-time job, yet Mike Fleming had spent two decades quietly maintaining a freelance habit on the side. Going back to a Robert Downey Jr. sit-down in the 1990s, he had filed roughly two dozen of Playboy’s centerpiece interviews, talking at length with subjects from Denzel Washington to Harrison Ford to Quentin Tarantino.
For the magazine’s June 2012 issue, the subject was Tom Cruise. Fleming used the conversation to circle back to the moment that had reshaped Cruise’s public image — the 2005 couch episode on Oprah Winfrey’s show and the combative Matt Lauer interview that followed. Cruise told him he understood how it had played but did not recognize himself in it: “I get how it came across, but I don’t feel that way, and I never have.”
Cruise also addressed Scientology, framing the subject as a no-win press topic — criticized for dodging it if he stayed quiet, accused of proselytizing if he engaged. His stated solution was to wall off personal subjects entirely while promoting a film. The film in question was the musical Rock of Ages, and the interview was one more example of a working editor keeping a writer’s discipline alongside the day job.
Now
Mike Fleming Jr. is still at Deadline, where he remains the outlet’s lead film-deals reporter and rose to co-editor-in-chief. Deadline itself has spent the years since folded ever more tightly into Penske Media’s entertainment-trade portfolio alongside Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
Tom Cruise, meanwhile, did exactly what the interview foreshadowed — he kept the conversation on the films. The Mission: Impossible series and the 2022 blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick rebuilt him into one of the last reliable movie-star draws of the theatrical era, and the careful separation of work and personal subjects he described to Fleming became his durable public posture.
The Playboy celebrity interview as an institution did not survive the magazine’s long contraction; the print edition that once made those Q&As required reading wound down later in the 2010s. The arrangement the 2012 item captured — a digital-trade editor still filing for a legacy print monthly — reads now as a snapshot of a media economy in transition.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.