Tom Cruise has confirmed that he mentored Glen Powell by asking him to watch a six-hour video he had created about filmmaking and screen acting.
The actors worked together on Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, and Powell previously discussed Cruise’s guidance in a 2025 interview with GQ. Cruise has now confirmed the account in a further interview with the magazine.
Cruise described the instructional film as “very basic”, saying it was designed to help people understand “a different concept of lenses and what the lens is and what the frame is.”
He said the video also taught Powell what “frame means and how to understand that frame”.
Explaining the length of the lesson, Cruise said: “There’s just different layers of storytelling, of structure, but also: to understand certain things so that you can forget about it.”
The comments shed further light on the mentorship between the two actors, which developed while they were working together on the action film.
