What’s Going on Between Tom Cruise and Ana de Armas?

You know how it is: You’re with your extremely famous, rich, successful rumored boyfriend on an “intimate” little yacht vacation in Menorca, just the two of you (and his various Scientologist disciples via Zoom, I assume), when suddenly paparazzi encircle the vessel and find what appears to be incontrovertible proof that the two of you are a capital-T Thing. What do you do? If you’re Ana de Armas, you say nothing, letting a “source” tell the tabloids that you’re single and just really “focused” on your role opposite Tom Cruise in Doug Liman’s upcoming thriller film Deeper. And yet…the yacht images persist!

Setting aside the sheer hilarity of any luxury-yacht-based trip being called intimate—oh, I’m sure!—I can’t stop wondering whether Cruise and de Armas could be, in fact, dating. (Some mentally pore over questions of particle physics or 18th-century British history for work…I, personally, am lucky enough to devote the lion’s share of my gray matter to celebrity hookups. Yes, I’m quite blessed!) Is Cruise just an “incredible mentor” to de Armas, or is she “losing her patience” at having to hide her relationship with the 63-year-old action star?

All this rumination brings me to another key question, one I’ve had for years: Do women actually find Tom Cruise sexy? For some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on (ahem, the aforementioned Scientology), I’m tempted to say no, but some of the things that make Cruise a less-than-traditional leading man—such as his height, which is famously a modest five feet seven—are actually kind of attractive when I consider them outside of the context of his specific personality. Does the man wear lifts? Possibly-slash-probably. And yet short kings like Tom Holland and Jeremy Allen White are pulling their own modest statures off with aplomb. (As a side note, remember when Nicole Kidman said that she was happy to be able to wear heels again after her marriage to Cruise ended?)

While I would undoubtedly find Cruise hotter if he embraced having taller girlfriends whom he could literally look up to, there’s no arguing that he is exceedingly well-preserved for a man in his 60s, not to mention a father of three children whose ages range from 19 (Suri) to 30 and 32 (Connor and Isabella, respectively). This isn’t about what I find attractive, though; it’s about what de Armas values in a man. And if we can glean anything from her prior relationships with the likes of Ben Affleck and stepson to the president of Cuba Manuel Anido Cuesta, it’s that she clearly likes a man who’s left his mark on the culture in some way or other. Who better to fill her ex-boyfriends’ shoes, then, than the star of once and future Top Guns?