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• The Couch Jump That Rocked Hollywood

Tom Cruise’s 2005 appearance on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ was an iconic episode of television—and a turning point for how we discuss and understand celebrities

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In the spring of 2005, an unknown 20-something in California uploaded a 19-second video of himself to the internet. “Me at the zoo,” the first YouTube video, featured cofounder Jawed Karim rambling about animals. “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks,” a man said, gesturing toward an elephant enclosure. It was boring, but it was the beginning of something.

That same spring, Karim’s YouTube quickly found one of its first hits. Its origins were far less obscure than a tech guy on a field trip. At the time, Tom Cruise had a more-than-reasonable claim to the title of biggest celebrity in America. He was the movie star, a leading man with mom-approved handsomeness, a nimble physicality, and a gung-ho intensity that played on the big screen as magnetic instead of disturbed. He counted Top Gun , Jerry Maguire , and two Mission: Impossible movies among the idol-making roles under his small belt. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey had already established herself as not only the biggest celebrity on daytime television, but the biggest celebrity in media. She’d made the careers of Drs. Phil and Oz. She’d debuted O, the Oprah Magazine . She’d hollered “You get a car!” to a euphoric crowd. Cruise’s May 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show seemed destined to be yet another fluffy meeting of monstrously famous minds. Instead, traditional media’s powerhouse duo was about to provide the new video-uploading service with a clip that would demonstrate the format’s growth potential far better than a rinky-dink recording of a random dude musing about zoos.

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Before Cruise came out on stage that day, the crowd at Chicago’s Harpo Studios had already hyped itself into an ecstatic frenzy, whooping and clapping and jumping in overwhelmed pleasure at being in the presence of Winfrey, in her space, living their best lives. By 2005, Oprah had transformed her daytime talk show from a variation on Phil Donahue’s talk theme into something new, something that took the voyeuristic thrills of seeing televised confessions and elevated them with the language of self-help seminars and the polish of Hollywood. “Oprah is sitting in the throne of American pop culture,” said WBEZ anchor Jenn White on the podcast Making Oprah , describing Oprah’s cultural cachet in the early aughts. “She commands a regular worldwide audience of tens of millions. She can turn a book into a bestseller, a product into a trend, and people into stars.” At that point, Christianity Today had identified Oprah as “one of the most influential spiritual leaders in America.” Her audiences resembled gaga congregants.

Cruise was in Chicago to talk about his upcoming movie, Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds . Instead of sticking to the promotional script, though, the compact action star gushed about his new girlfriend, actress Katie Holmes. “You’re gone,” Oprah said, searching for words to describe Cruise’s over-the-top infatuation. Within 15 minutes, Cruise had leapt onto Oprah’s couch in a spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm for his personal life. Cruise’s offbeat showboating was memorable in part because of its unusual setting; The Oprah Winfrey Show was where celebrities traipsed to shine up their reputations and get a warm embrace from a sympathetic fellow star. Oprah would polish, not grill. But Oprah, usually so masterful at empathizing with her guests, appeared to be at a loss. “You’re gone,” she repeated. The charismatic preacher had been sidelined by an even more earnest proselytizer.

People hated it. More importantly, they loved to hate it. Most importantly, they loved to talk about hating it. Divorced from its context and remixed into YouTube clips and GIFs, Cruise’s couch outburst looked far more bizarre than it had during the episode, when at least the studio audience had been equally hyped up and Oprah had encouraged him to talk about his personal life. Within the context of the episode, Cruise’s behavior was strange but not outrageous. On the internet, isolated and amplified into a single furniture-leaping moment, it looked like an A-list meltdown . The most popular spoof was called “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah,” where Cruise appeared to kill Oprah with lightning. Family Guy parodied it. Even Sesame Street eventually parodied it. But the couch clip went beyond launching parodies and viral videos. The response to the Cruise episode signaled a changing of the guard in Hollywood media, from a pecking order where publicists and studios could strike deals with access-hungry press toward a more democratic and chaotic media landscape. Even though Cruise had been in a terrific mood during his Oprah appearance, it was appropriate that his tomfoolery was reframed to look far more aggressive than it was. The internet and the media were about to get much sharper.

“Tom’s couch-jumping coincided with the rise of gossip blogs,” Matt James, who runs the celebrity gossip site Pop Culture Died in 2009, told The Ringer . “The entire incident became a testament to the way public opinion could form online in the pre-Twitter era, and how damaging it could be in the long run.”

Longtime Hollywood gossip blog Lainey Gossip also credited Cruise’s leap onto Oprah’s couch with galvanizing the media landscape. “This rise of the gossip blog quickly accelerated,” site creator Elaine Lui wrote in 2015. “Celebrities were not being contained the way they used to be. And the PEOPLE and Entertainment Tonight coverage just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Not when these illusions were so quickly being destroyed. This incident became one of the most critical chapters in the Origin Story of Internet Gossip.” The intense online response to Cruise’s convention-breaking presaged a shift in how celebrity freakouts were covered, as it was one of the first major entertainment-world meltdowns to saturate the blogging world. “There was something so personal, so oversharey, so necessarily engaged with the audience in Cruise’s couch-jumping that it set the tone for the kind of one-person media circus we’d expect and enjoy in the years to come, to varying degrees of sadness (Britney Spears), amazement (Charlie Sheen) and despicableness (Chris Brown),” Gawker ’s Rich Juzwiak wrote in 2012. While the word “meme” hadn’t yet entered the mainstream lexicon, Cruise’s furniture leap went viral. “Culturally, it was, in my mind, one of the first celebrity memes,” Brandon Ogborn, the writer behind The TomKat Project , an excellent play examining Tom Cruise’s reputation, told The Ringer . “That clip was reenacted so many times. It was kind of a watershed moment for internet culture.”

Along with memes came a cascade of internet commentary on Cruise’s behavior, most of it overwhelmingly negative. While Oprah’s studio audience had been pleased with his effusiveness, the story line soured in the digital world. “Now, whenever something happens in the news, we can go online and quickly find the tide in which public opinion is turning. In the early days of the internet, it wasn’t that distinct,” James said. “That changed with Tom. The people who watched Tom’s appearance and felt it was maybe even the slightest bit heartwarming went online to find that the majority opinion was Tom had lost his mind.”

It was an exciting time for bloggers, and terrible timing for Cruise. He had fired his longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley, in March 2004. Kingsley was a powerhouse with a viselike grip on the dicks of traditional outlets. “She was adamant about keeping Cruise out of the tabloids. At press junkets, she demanded that journalists sign contracts swearing not to sell their quotes to the supermarket rags,” film critic Amy Nicholson wrote for LA Weekly in 2014, arguing that internet culture was to blame for Cruise’s fall from grace. “Then Kingsley expanded her reach and insisted that all TV interviewers destroy their tapes after his segment had aired.” Without Kingsley, Cruise didn’t have his usual PR fixer at hand to tell him what not to do, to tell him how to course-correct once the backlash began, or to tell the press to lay off. Instead, Cruise had replaced the flinty Kingsley with his sister, Lee Anne DeVette, a fellow Scientologist. The public reaction to his romance with Holmes was no good even before The Incident. According to a People poll, the majority of respondents saw the relationship as a publicity stunt . “We can’t get enough of the TomKat show because eventually the paint will start to chip and we will hopefully see all the ugliness as openly as we’ve been shoved the lovey-dovey bullshit,” Perez Hilton wrote. Cruise’s past habit of keeping his private life to himself and manicuring his public image had given him an idyllic but distinctly artificial sheen, one that may have counterintuitively exacerbated the response when he finally stepped out of line. “He had never done anything publicly wrong before,” Nicholson told The Ringer . “He’d always been so perfect.” Cruise’s over-the-top display of hyper-public affection, possibly made more intense by his desire to prove that his love was real, backfired. Instead of making people think he was a romantic, Cruise just made people think he was weird.

He quickly got weirder, and darker. Shortly after his couch leap, Cruise started a feud with Brooke Shields by dismissing her experience with postpartum depression. He went on Today to go even further, insisting that psychiatry and psychiatric medicine were dangerous. While Cruise was a longtime Scientologist, he had never openly advocated for the abusive group’s more controversial beliefs so publicly before. “It was a time when he really just let himself go, and let his freak flag fly. And it was also a time when he was really proselytizing for Scientology. I think it was a huge explosion of press that was bad press, because the Tom Cruise machine just stopped,” Ogborn said. “He said, This is who I am, I’m going to jump on that couch, I’m going to tell Matt Lauer he’s glib. ”

In less than a year, Cruise contorted his reputation from a hard-working, eccentric leading man into Hollywood’s premiere guileless kook. “Cruise: I will eat the placenta,” a 2006 Daily Mail headline , is a good example of the sort of news he generated. When California banned the sale of ultrasounds for personal use that year, it was known as the “Tom Cruise law” because Cruise had publicly purchased an ultrasound machine to view his daughter in the womb. South Park went for the jugular, as expected, but ridicule came from all over. Noah Baumbach wrote a New Yorker piece where the joke was that his dog was stupid and enthusiastic … just like Tom Cruise. Even Lauren Bacall dissed him to reporters. People still showed up for Cruise movies. War of the Worlds had a huge opening , but studios feared that Cruise’s bankability was tainted after Mission: Impossible III made nearly $150 million less worldwide than its predecessor. Cruise’s reputation was undeniably threatened. His Q rating, used to measure celebrity appeal, dropped 40 percent. “From that point on, we all accepted Tom Cruise was crazy,” James said. “It was a done deal.”

Cruise’s uninhibited media blunder bender cost him a lucrative, long-term production deal with Paramount. His behavior was blamed for the deal’s destruction. “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount,” Viacom chairman Sumner M. Redstone told The Wall Street Journal . The Oprah Winfrey Show , meanwhile, continued on as an unstoppable cultural force. From all accounts, as much as the couch-jumping episode yoked Oprah and Cruise together for eternity as a punch line, it also ruffled feathers at Harpo. “She was not invited to his wedding, and he was not invited for a very long time to come interview with her,” Ogborn pointed out, noting that Harpo employees would frequently come talk to him after the Chicago run of The TomKat Project to discuss that period of time. “They said she was fucking pissed when it happened.”

Regardless of Oprah’s personal opinion of Cruise’s behavior, the interview didn’t hurt her professionally. A mock set from the show is now on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of an exhibit on Winfrey. There was no lasting damage to her legacy. (Curators declined to comment on the role of the interview in her cultural history.) If anything, the couch-jumping episode only provided a bolstering example of Oprah presiding over must-watch TV. The show’s guiding ethos focused on going big and doing the best, resulting in ever-more-elaborate gift giveaways and surprises for the audience. While Cruise’s antics might have thrown off the dynamic between guest and host that Oprah preferred, his interview ultimately fit the bill for the gripping, unexpected, and wholly memorable. “Tom’s televised freakout was just another notch in her belt,” James said. Talk-show hosts now manufacture segments specifically to do well on YouTube and other online platforms, but it was Oprah who generated the first viral talk-show clip.

The incident certainly did not kill Cruise’s career, either. In 2008, his comic turn in Tropic Thunder helped undercut his reputation for unrelenting self-seriousness. (The same year, Cruise reunited with Oprah for a much calmer interview.) Cruise maintained his career throughout his reputational turmoil by sticking with Mission: Impossible and thematically similar films. “He’s always done such great work with this franchise, but he’s almost clinging to it nervously, like he’s afraid to let go and take a real risk,” Nicholson said. “He’ll take risks inside the film with stunts, but he’s not taking risks inside his own career, like doing the dramatic work that marked a lot of what he did in the ’80s, or by chasing an Oscar, which is something he gave up on.” Although he never quite regained his status as a Hollywood golden boy, he has mellowed into an aging statesman of action flicks—and anyway, his divorce from Katie Holmes and continued association with Scientology have left a longer-lasting stink on his name than his exuberant talk-show appearance. In 2015, GQ heralded “Cool Tom Cruise.” This summer, he is starring in the sixth Mission: Impossible movie. The critical response to both the film and Cruise’s performance has been overwhelmingly positive. “What’s always been so ironic to me about the Tom Cruise quote-unquote backlash is that it seemed to me that audiences still really loved him, even if newspapers were telling them that they didn’t,” Nicholson said. “I feel like he’s proving something that never needed to be proven.”

The real legacy of the couch-jumping incident has almost nothing to do with Cruise or Oprah specifically and everything to do with how people reacted online to the moment. Tom and Oprah’s strange conversation, and the reaction it provoked, is now preserved as thousands of digital artifacts, emblematic of how information traveled in the early aughts. Rewatching the episode and the viral videos it spawned feels quaint now. The bloggy media cycle that produced Cruise memes has been replaced by a cesspool of broken newsfeeds smushing conspiracy theories and branded content against real news and irrational presidential tweets with such velocity that it seems deeply unlikely that Cruise’s hop onto a loveseat would provoke much at all in 2018. However, it’s even less likely that Cruise would’ve been able to make it so far into his career without finding his kooky personality exposed as he did in 2005.

Up-and-comers have learned to respond to a different and less controllable form of media attention. There is a whole brand of celebrity in which the famous are expected to engage with fans on social media. Celebrity PR disasters don’t often happen in such glossy settings anymore; instead, they are frequently facilitated by social media and accelerated by fans and detractors who dig up old tweets . The last time a daytime talk-show guest created a media supernova after their appearance, it was Danielle Bregoli, a.k.a. Bhad Bhabie, a.k.a. “Cash Me Ousside” Girl, who parlayed a viral moment shit-talking on Dr. Phil into a viable rap career . I doubt Bregoli knows about Tom Cruise’s Oprah appearance, but her own twist on the daytime meme underscores how much has changed since Cruise took his happy hop. Performative, contrived freakiness in front of a live studio audience can be an asset now. The big leap is figuring out how to navigate internet criticism without spinning out—a frequently impossible mission.

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Relive the Moment When Tom Cruise Jumped On Oprah's Couch

Updated on 5/23/2015 at 5:30 PM

On May 23, 2005, Tom Cruise showed his incredible cat-like agility by jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch. Ten years later, we celebrate this moment that went down in pop culture history.

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Let's revisit the Tom Cruise/Oprah's couch incident

It was one of the most-watched moments in the Internet’s relatively brief history. When Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch and declared his love for Katie Holmes, it was the daytime TV moment for a DVR, GIF-ready age.

But, as Amy Nicholson reports for L.A. Weekly , the moment we all thought we saw never happened. He never jumped up and down on the couch; he simply stood. The nitty-gritty of the infamous May 2005 Oprah appearance is but one revelation in her fascinating piece, How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star .

In the article, Nicholson explores how Tom Cruise went from the biggest movie star in the world to an Internet joke (who still manages to open films), with fascinating insight that attempts to explain the context behind the Oprah appearance (for example, that Cruise was playing to an audience that was quite different than bloggers), as well as larger points about that time period — it’s hard to believe all that media craziness was nine years ago.

As Nicholson points out, the Oprah Couch Incident happened at a time with a lot of rapid changes in entertainment culture — the launch of PerezHilton.com, the growth of TMZ, the inundation of camera phones making everyone paparazzi, etc. The piece is interesting from a How We Got Here angle, as well as its ability to shed some light on what publicity meant in the ’90s versus now — Nicholson also gets great scoop about how that infamous Matt Lauer/Tom Cruise interview came to be (never underestimate a good publicist).

For old times’ sake, watch the Cruise clip below, and then go read Nicholson’s full article :

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Tom Cruise Jumped On Oprah's Couch And Lost His Mind 11 Years Ago

Entertainment Writer, The Huffington Post

Eleven years ago today, actor Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch like a trampoline when he appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Cruise declared his love for then girlfriend (and future ex-wife) Katie Holmes and hopped up on the furniture before Oprah said, "He's gone. He's gone. The boy is gone."

The daytime host was more right than she knew. Though Cruise's name is still a big box-office draw, these days, he is better known for being an outspoken advocate for Scientology and for his public antics. The couch jump marked the first shift in Tom Cruise's image away from the heartthrob he'd been. (Pop quiz: Which movie was Tom Cruise promoting when he appeared on "Oprah" in 2005? Answer: It was "War of the Worlds," but no one remembers because he jumped on Oprah's couch.)

The same year as Couchgate, Cruise got in hot water for criticizing actress Brooke Shields for using antidepressant Paxil to treat her postpartum depression. He later got in an argument with Matt Lauer on " The Today Show" for his criticism of psychiatry.

As for his romance with Holmes, Cruise has been divorced from the "Dawson's Creek" star since 2012. He is also reportedly feuding with actress and former Scientology member Leah Remini over her tell-all memoir , which made many claims about Cruise and his family, including one that he had a meltdown over cookie dough.

What's up with Jerry Maguire now? He recently wrapped up filming "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back," and there are rumors of a "Top Gun" sequel . In Sunday night's premiere of AMC series "Preacher, " an unknown force possessed a number of religious figures, including Cruise, which caused the actor's head to explode on the show (real-life Cruise reportedly wasn't happy about the joke ).

Cruise may still be a movie star, but he's mostly a Scientology punchline at this point. Jumping on that fateful couch was just the tip of the iceberg.

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Freeze Frame: How the world reacted to Tom Cruise's infamous couch jump on Oprah in 2005

By April Glover | 4 months ago

When most people think of Hollywood star Tom Cruise , his most famous roles come to mind.

Some recall his '80s portrayal of pilot Pete Mitchell in Top Gun, while others might think of his character Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

But for Oprah Winfrey fans in 2005, Cruise will forever be immortalised for his bizarre couch jumping antics and public declaration of love for his then-girlfriend, Katie Holmes, live on television.

Watch the video above.

READ MORE: The 10 words that cost Oprah Winfrey $1 million in 1996

Cruise's appearance on the talk show was a huge coup for Winfrey. The Jerry Maguire actor, hot off the heels of his divorce from Nicole Kidman, was having a huge career moment.

The actor was supposed to be promoting his new Stephen Spielberg-directed blockbuster, War of the Worlds, but the conversation with Winfrey quickly devolved to his new romance with Holmes.

The interview had little to do with Cruise's new film and it's now part of pop culture folklore because of how he acted while sitting on the infamous couch.

READ MORE:  'That's not the truth': Infamous Ellen moment four years on

Minutes into the interview, Cruise began to gush about Holmes, barely able to contain his passion and excitement. He couldn't stop laughing as he darted around the room.

A bemused Winfrey could only utter this sentence. "Something happened to you," she said.

"I'm in love!" Cruise proclaimed, before embarking on a series of physical displays of pure euphoria. "She's truly extraordinary."

READ MORE: The whirlwind 96 hours that happened before famous beachside snap

"I've never seen you behave this way before, have you ever felt this way before?" she asked, before Cruise jumped onto the couch – a moment that has followed him for the past 18 years.

Winfrey could barely contain her own shock at Cruise's behaviour as the segment quickly spiralled out of control.

The veteran interviewer seemed unable to return the interview to normality. "You're gone," she kept repeating.

Cruise's comical outburst became front-page news, was splashed across TV screens and inspired countless op-eds and articles.

Parodies began rolling in, one even airing on the children's show Sesame Street.

Winfrey would later admit she was surprised Cruise's couch jump turned into such a pivotal cultural moment.

"Certainly, I did not think it would turn into the brouhaha that it did," she told TV Guide . 

"I thought it was an expression of delightful exuberance and love that any woman...would be thrilled to have her man jump on a sofa in love with her."

Cruise's display of affection did nothing to save his relationship (and later marriage) to Holmes.

After welcoming daughter Suri the year after the interview in 2006, the couple called it quits in 2012.

READ MORE: This magazine shoot made Kate Moss famous - but she secretly hated it

The mood of their bitter, drawn-out split was world's away from Cruise's freshly-in-love elation.

Three years after the infamous interview, Winfrey and Cruise met again on The Oprah Show.

It marked one of the few times he acknowledged his antics on the couch - and this time, he was a little calmer.

"It was a moment," he said. "It was something that I just felt that way. And I feel that way about [wife Katie Holmes]. And it's something, you know, that's just how I felt."

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How Tom Cruise Jumping on Oprah's Couch Changed Everything

Ten years ago, a media event took place that changed the public's perception of one of its most beloved stars. And while he has continued to see success, his image has never recovered — and it's possible it never will. I'm referring of course to the jump heard 'round the world: Tom Cruise 's interview with Oprah Winfrey .

Freshly in love with Katie Holmes , a relationship long speculated to be the result of a "wife search" sanctioned and lead by the Church of Scientology, Cruise visited his friend Oprah — and a very on-board audience who loved every moment of the interview — and discussed his newfound happiness. And he did so by grabbing Oprah's hands, standing on the couch, and retrieving Holmes from backstage to show off his prize.

Some things go viral and when we look back years later, we see they weren't such a big deal. This is not one of those things. This is just as awkward as it was in 2005.

People responded. And the response was an embarrassment. While the studio audience was incredibly stoked, the viewers at home — and online — were weirded out. This display of emotion was so intense, so striking, that it rang false. Or, if not false, definitely kind of creepy. It was too much. So, the memes began.

Cruise would continue to have box office success thanks to the Mission Impossible franchise — though for a few years his star dimmed a bit. (Anyone remember Lions for Lambs or Knight and Day ?) But the public's image of him has never been the same. Never again would he be dreamboat Tom Cruise, universally beloved celebrity. He has been since and will remain the overly intense guy who either must be hiding something or has lost the ability to act like a regular person.

Critics have blamed bloggers and internet culture for their abuse of the clips, like the above, ultimately leading to the backlash that still exists against Cruise, but it was more than just a couch jump. This was also a time when the internet was giving the public more information than ever before, meaning most of us were learning about Scientology for the first time. We saw this video on YTMND , we could read about Operation Snow White and other scary stuff, and we would soon all be able to read this still terrifying Katie Holmes W magazine interview . If you missed that interview back in 2005, it's still a great, creepy read. Holmes answers every question with a robot-like focus on how perfect Cruise is (whether that was the question or not) and is often answered for by a Scientology handler. Cruise's Oprah exuberance was clearly contagious — here's one example:

...A security guard lumbers into the dressing room and presents Holmes with a giant silver box tied in a thick purple ribbon. A small crowd gathers to watch her gleefully tear open the package and pluck out a Chanel diamond necklace—a gift, naturally, from Cruise. “He’s my man! He’s my man!” she screams, then jumps up on her chair to do an impression of her fiancé’s now-famous sofa shtick from Oprah.

People begin to cheer. “This is your moment!” cries the manicurist.

“I can do splits too,” Holmes says, jumping down and splaying herself across the floor. On that note, I suggest, we should probably get the photo shoot started.

“On that note,” she replies, “I love him.”

And when the two split years later, no one was surprised by tales of Holmes's harrowing escape — and no one saw that as mere media hyperbole. Our eyes had been opened to the fact that movie star Tom Cruise was also perhaps weird public figure Tom Cruise. And he likely always will be.

What came first: the couch or our discomfort? Oprah may have been the impetus, but Cruise was hardly a victim of mean memes and viral videos. He was a victim of a public that had become too difficult to fake it in front of.

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Tom Cruise Jumped on Oprah’s Couch, Freaked Out Over Being in Love With Katie Holmes 10 Years Ago – Relive the Moment!

“Calm yourselves!” That is what Oprah Winfrey had to tell the audience when Tom Cruise appeared on her talk show 10 years ago — little did she know, it would be Cruise himself who needed to calm down.

Related: PHOTOS: TomKat -- the way they were

As the world is well aware, the Mission: Impossible star couldn’t contain himself while declaring his love for then-girlfriend Katie Holmes during a 2005 interview with Winfrey. Cruise, who was known as an uber-private celebrity, pumped his fist in the air, kneeled on the floor, and most notably, jumped on Winfrey’s couch with giddiness while confessing his infatuation with Holmes in a moment that has since gone — and stayed — viral.

“I’m in love. I’m in love and it’s one of these things where you want to be cool, like, ‘Yeah I like her’…that’s not how I feel,” a hyper Cruise told the talk show host. “I admired her and I thought I wanted to meet her so I called her because I wanted to meet her. You see someone’s work and you hear about them and you hear what a special person she is…and I wanted to meet this person and I met her and she’s extraordinary.”

Related: PHOTOS: Kaite's life after Tom

While Cruise was unable to contain his emotions, a shocked Winfrey explained to the crowd: “I’ve never seen this. What happened to you?!” After he jumped on her couch — repeatedly! — Oprah concluded: “He’s gone. He’s gone. The boy is gone!”

Following the 2005 interview, the clip was turned into thousands of memes, including standout “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah.”

Winfrey, however, wasn’t exactly in on the fun. “Certainly, I did not think it would turn into the brouhaha that it did,” she later told TV Guide Magazine . “I thought it was an expression of delightful exuberance and love that any woman… would be thrilled to have her man jump on a sofa in love with her,” she said, while adding that she thought that re-airing the footage would be “really, really unfair.”

Related: PHOTOS: How Katie transformed for Tom

As for Cruise and Holmes, well, we all know what happened. The couple announced they were expecting their first child together, Suri, just six months after going public with their romance. Suri Cruise was born in April 2006, and that December her parents tied the knot. Before starting their life together, Holmes, who was born Catholic, converted to Scientology for Cruise. The religion is rumored to be the downfall of their marriage.

After five years together — and a complete glam transformation for Holmes — the Dawson’s Creek alum filed for divorce in June 2012. In a statement to Us Weekly , the actress’ attorney told Us at the time: “This is a personal and private matter for Katie and her family. Katie’s primary concern remains, as it always has been, her daughter’s best interest.” While Cruise’s rep offered: “Kate has filed for divorce and Tom is deeply saddened and is concentrating on his three children. Please allow them their privacy.”

During an August 2014 appearance on the Today show , Holmes, who is now happily dating Jamie Foxx , said she never reflects on their split.

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Related: PHOTOS: Suri's fabulous life

“I never really look back. I just approach life [taking] it one day at a time,” she told Matt Lauer . “I’m really excited about where I am right now. I’ve had some really wonderful creative experiences. I’m just really grateful.”

Cruise, who has yet to publicly date anyone since their split, and Holmes continue to share joint custody of their now 9-year-old daughter, Suri.

Prior to Holmes, Cruise was married to Nicole Kidman from 1990 to 2001 and then dated Penelope Cruz for three years until 2004.

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Katie Holmes

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Remember When... Tom Cruise Jumped on Oprah's Couch Because He Was in Love With Katie Holmes?

During a 2005 appearance on the oprah winfrey show , tomkat was unveiled to the world and a couch was changed forever.

Remember When... is a weekly feature every (#Throwback)Thursday where we look back on a moment that changed the world of pop culture forever. Come for the nostalgia, stay for the reminder that you are getting SO OLD.

What Happened:  The date was May 23, 2005 (it's worth mentioning, tomorrow is the nine-year anniversary). It was a month after Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes confirmed they were dating, about a year and a half before they'd get married, and seven years before they'd get divorced.

Tom appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show  presumably to promote a movie, but mostly to tell the world he was in love with Katie, which involved a lot of bowing on one knee (five times), grabbing Oprah's hands and shaking her (three times), and—after Oprah pointed out, "We've never seen you behave this way before!"—jumping. He didn't jump on the couch. He jumped onto the couch, then just kind of stood there. A minor correction to the collective memory. The audience LOST THEIR MINDS.

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What Else Was Happening: The movie Tom should have been plugging was Spielberg's War of the Worlds , while Katie Holmes transitioned from Dawson's Creek to the big screen in Batman Begins . Both were among the 10 highest earning films of the year. Only one got a sequel. Katie would be recast with Maggie Gyllenhaal .

TomKat wasn't the only big celebrity couple with a big celebrity couple nickname that year: 2005 was the year Mr. & Mrs. Smith hit theaters and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie became Brangelina.

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How We Remember It

Julia Hays, Audience Development Associate: "A day that will be remembered as one of the most notable couch moments in television history. TV is known for its iconic furniture. Al Bundy's '70s-style seating, the Huxtables' sophisticated sofa, Dick Van Dyke's  sentient ottoman. As a furniture aficionado, I knew that Tom Cruise's abuse and blatant disrespect of Oprah's seating arrangement would be a divisive issue in the media. Naturally, one would like to root for an impassioned display of true love, however, the etiquette regarding shoes on upholstery is just, like, Manners 101. It appears that I was not alone, because soon after his infamous talk show appearance the public image of Tom Cruise shifted. Granted, he is still a Hollywood superstar, but we've never really looked at him the same way, have we? And we all know why—Tom Cruise is disrespectful toward other people's furniture, and America has rightly and fairly judged him for that. I might still see  Edge of Tomorrow , though. That looks fun."

Jenna Loomer, Senior Interactive Producer: "I will forever remember Oprah's face of pure horror the second Tom got that crazy look in his eye. Sure, she acted like she was thrilled for him, but you can tell underneath that big hair she was thinking what we were all thinking, which was get this guy a net already. To this day I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to when he and Katie watched that interview together, because no woman wants to be dating the guy who made a scene on Oprah..."

Oprah Winfrey, Television Personality: ( to Good Morning America in 2005 ) "It was wilder than it was appearing to me. I was just trying to maintain the truth for myself because I couldn't figure out what was going on. And what I was prepared for was the dance that happens when you're doing celebrities—when you know they're not going to tell you, but you're going to ask anyway, and then you try asking another way...I was not buying."

How do you remember Tom and Katie's romance? Regale us in the comments!

PHOTOS: Take a stroll down memory lane with TomKat's courtship gallery!

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