Here's How Old Katie Holmes Was When She Married Tom Cruise

Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's strange relationship turned heads from the very beginning. The "Mission: Impossible" star famously declared his love for Holmes by jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch in May 2005, per Entertainment Weekly — a moment that has become part of our cultural fabric. The media wasted no time in nicknaming them TomKat and adding them to the list of Hollywood's most talked-about couples.

Cruise jumped off of Winfrey's furniture and into serious territory with Holmes rather quickly. Five months later, they announced her pregnancy, shattering the notion that their relationship was just for show, as many had speculated, according to People. They welcomed their daughter, Suri Cruise, in April 2006, and tied the knot seven months later, according to The Blade. Cruise and Holmes signed a prenup, and the end of the relationship drew even more attention than its inception.

Holmes filed for divorce from Cruise when he was away working on a film in Iceland in 2012. Rumors arose that she was being harassed by the Church of Scientology and that she feared for her daughter's life. "They [Scientologists] are professionals at pressuring people to be quiet," a friend of Homes told the New York Post. "That's why she did this in secret." Following the divorce, plenty of speculation has surrounded the supposed rules Cruise imposed on Holmes based on his Scientology beliefs, according to the Mirror. Amid all the controversy, it's easy to forget some of the other details of the relationship, like their age gap. But the truth is that Cruise is a lot older than Holmes. 

Those who grew up seeing Katie Holmes' baby face on "Dawson's Creek" in the late '90s and early '00s may have put two and two together. By then, Tom Cruise was already a seasoned actor with a couple of Oscar nominations, a few Golden Globe wins, and two failed marriages under his belt. But Cruise still boasted his pretty-boy face in the mid-2000s when he married Holmes. Looks, however, can be deceiving. In early 2005, Cruise was 42, while Holmes was 26, according to CNN and Yahoo.

Holmes was exactly a month shy of her 28th birthday when she married Cruise in November 2006. Cruise, for his part, had turned 44 that July — Holmes' age as of this writing. While the focus of their romance shifted with Cruise's increasing interest in Scientology, their age difference did initially inspire some commentary.

ABC News pointed out, for example, that Holmes had a poster of Cruise on her bedroom wall growing up. Entertainment Weekly highlighted that their age gap was similar to that of then-couple Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. Their age was no barrier for Holmes, according to the Irish Examiner. But this wasn't the only time they were in relationships with large age gaps — with Cruise having previously dated older women and Holmes moving on to another older man. 

Shortly after splitting from Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes and Jamie Foxx started a relationship. He is 11 years her senior. Their relationship was famously kept under wraps until their breakup in 2019, Harper's Bazaar noted. Rumors flew that the reason was Cruise. The "Top Gun" star reportedly included a clause in their divorce that stated Holmes wasn't allowed to see anyone publicly until 2017. "Katie signed a clause in her quickie divorce settlement that prevents her from embarrassing Tom in various ways, like talking about him or Scientology, or publicly dating another man for five years after the divorce," an anonymous source told RadarOnline in 2016.

The claim is certainly bizarre, but, if true, at least Cruise didn't make his ex-wife sign it and then do the opposite himself. Since their divorce, Cruise hasn't had a public relationship, either, Us Weekly pointed out. But before Holmes, Cruise showed he had no issues dating older women. In the mid-1980s, Cruise and Cher were in a relationship, and she is nearly 16 years older than him. And not long after, Cruise married Mimi Rogers in 1987, when he was two months shy of turning 25 and she was 31, People reported.

Cruise then married Nicole Kidman, who is five years his junior. While the actor's exes range in age, they all have one thing in common: Rogers, Kidman, and Holmes were all 33 when their relationship with Cruise ended, Today noted. Given Cruise's link to Scientology, conspiracy theories regarding the number 33 abound.