Anyway, the Tom Cruise joke in Preacher got plenty of media attention after the episode aired. News of the gag first emerged after the episode was shown at SXSW in Austin in March, so plenty of people knew it was coming.In the show, an adaptation of a dark graphic novel series, an entity from outer space seeks out and inhabits a series of preacher types. The show opens with a scene in a church somewhere in Africa, and the minister giving his sermon is suddenly seized by the unseen force. Wide-eyed, the cleric announces that he’s become a prophet, and then he promptly explodes.
The entity seeks out a couple more holy men to blow up before finally settling into the preacher that the show is about, Jesse Custer, played by Dominic Cooper.
The show’s producers, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, have said that they were looking for a quick way to get through those early preacher explosions when they hit on the idea of blowing up Tom Cruise. The actor’s death happens off camera, and the viewer learns about it in a TV news broadcast playing as Custer is having a beer in a seedy bar. Over his shoulder, on the TV, you hear…
“Tom Cruise has died. This footage, just coming in from a Church of Scientology service Cruise was presiding over when apparently — the details are still coming in — he spontaneously exploded.”
Yee-ouch. It’s a funny joke, but it packs a punch. As in, it only works if you consider Cruise and his involvement in Scientology laughable. Which, for most of the population, is probably true.
Even Rogen has admitted that he knows the joke isn’t a flattering one.
