Tom Cruise receives Honorary Oscar at 2025 Governors Awards with powerful speech

Tom Cruise is beaming with delight as he received an Academy Honorary Award at 16th annual Governors Awards.

On Sunday, November 16, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences  honored the Mission: Impossible star at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in California.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu – who is directing Tom Cruise in an upcoming untitled film – presented him the Academy Honorary Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the entertainment industry.

After receiving the award, Tom Cruise delivered an emotional yet powerful speech expressing his childhood love for the cinema.

“My love for cinema began at a very early age, as early as I can remember,” he began.

Tom went on to share, “I was just a little kid in a darkened theater, and I remember that beam of light just cut across the room, and I remember looking up, and it seemed to be just exploded on the screen. Suddenly, the world was so much larger than the one that I knew.”

“And entire cultures and lives and landscapes all unfolded in front of me, and it sparked something. It sparked a hunger for adventure, a hunger for knowledge, a hunger to understand humanity, to create characters, to tell a story, to see the world. It opened my eyes. It opened my imagination to the possibility that life could expand far beyond the boundaries that I then perceived in my own life. And that beam of light opened a desire to open the world, and I have been following it ever since,” he added.

Earlier in the ceremony, Cynthia Erivo presented choreographer Debbie Allen with an honorary Oscar. While Dolly Parton received Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award virtually.