Tom Cruise is to receive a BFI Fellowship, the highest honor bestowed by the UK’s lead organization for film.
The award will be presented to Cruise at the BFI Chair’s dinner in London on Monday 12 May, hosted by BFI Chair Jay Hunt. The day before, Cruise will take part in an onstage In Conversation session at the BFI Southbank where he will discuss his decades-long career.
The Fellowship presentation will be the centerpiece of a month-long retrospective of Cruise’s film career at the BFI. A season of 27 films featuring Cruise will screen at the BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX throughout May 2025.
Cruise is currently filming Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment’s untitled Alejandro G. Iñárritu movie in the UK and his next Mission Impossible film could potentially debut at the Cannes Film Festival, which gets underway the day after his Fellowship presentation.
“I am truly honored by this acknowledgment,” Cruise said in a statement. “I’ve been making films in the UK for over 40 years and have no plans to stop. The UK is home to incredibly talented professionals — actors, directors, writers, and crews, as well as some of the most stunning locations in the world. I’m grateful for all the BFI has done to support UK filmmaking and this incredible art form we share.”
As mentioned in his statement, Cruise has a longstanding relationship with the UK film industry. Many of his Mission: Impossible films, including the latest, Mission: Impossible 8, have been shot in Britain. The veteran actor also famously spent many years living in the UK shooting Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut in the late 1990s. A selection of Cruise’s other former collaborators includes Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Martin Scorsese, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, Neil Jordan, Brian De Palma and Cameron Crowe, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, J.J. Abrams, Robert Redford, Brad Bird, Doug Liman, Joe Kosinski, Christopher McQuarrie, and Alejandro González Iñárritu.
“We are thrilled to be honoring Tom Cruise with a BFI Fellowship,” BFI Chair Jay Hunt said in a statement. “Tom has brought so much to the UK as a producer through choosing to make many of his films on our shores, where he is welcomed by our crews who step up to help make his cinematic visions a reality. In doing so, he also supports our studios and puts our locations on a world stage, in the process creating jobs and inspiring the next generation of film talent.”
Hunt added: “He is, of course, also simply one of the world’s great actors and a true movie star, delighting audiences as the action hero and romantic lead and then surprising us with brave, leftfield roles where his versatility and talent shine through.”
Previous Fellowship honorees include Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Satyajit Ray, Tilda Swinton, David Lean, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Steve McQueen, Akira Kurosawa, Nicholas Roeg, Orson Welles, Ridley Scott, Ousmane Sembène, Bernardo Bertolucci and Souleymane Cissé.
