The unknowable Katie Holmes: how a once-promising actress became a blank slate

When Katie Holmes high-tailed it out of her marriage to Tom Cruise, in an escape that surprised the media almost as much as it seemed to surprise Cruise himself, observers theorised that she could be the next Nicole Kidman.

Like Cruise’s previous wife, Holmes was a talented if often underutilised actress seemingly creatively stifled by her marriage to a superstar, who would probably use her divorce as a jump-off to juicier parts. Eight years after her split from Cruise, Holmes is starring in killer doll movies and adaptations of Oprah-approved self-help books. It’s not what anyone imagined.

Holmes, who found fame as an apple-cheeked tomboy on the seminal teen drama Dawson’s Creek, is still bagging lead roles in movies. Brahms: The Boy II, which was released in February, was a sequel no one asked for to a horror movie no one remembers, but Holmes was its star – playing the plucky mother to a boy who befriends a doll bearing an uncanny resemblance to Holmes’s real-life ex-husband.

This week, she is a down-on-her-luck widow in The Secret: Dare to Dream, a preachy weepie inspired by the self-help book of the same name, which briefly taught its legions of mid-Noughties fans to psychically manifest their wants and desires. Neither are good movies (colons in titles, outside of a Disney sequel, rarely promise good things, after all), but they’re movies all the same, with Holmes reasonably decent in both of them.

But it’s not exactly a career path many envisaged for her. Twenty years ago, few could have guessed that Holmes’s Dawson’s co-star Michelle Williams would go on to be the show’s biggest success story. After a few years of sputtering in slasher movies and forgettable indies, Williams was cast in Brokeback Mountain and went legit. She currently has four Oscar nominations and two Golden Globe wins to her name.

Holmes, at the turn of the millennium, was groomed like few others for major stardom. “Katie has more latent ability than anybody I’ve ever worked with,” fellow Creeker Joshua Jackson told Rolling Stone in 1998. “The onus is on her now to turn into a Meryl Streep and not rest on her laurels.”

“She is that rare jewel, the real deal,” the show’s creator Kevin Williamson once wrote. “[She’s] hypnotic, smart, funny, sweet, shy, boisterous, sneaky, talented, pretty, soulful, sleek, sophisticated, innocent, naive, comical, womanly, childish, caring, gracious, dependable, nurturing, protective, generous. I could go on.” You don’t doubt it.

Holmes was undeniably beguiling as a performer back then, and had a classic Audrey Hepburn appeal at a time when teen stars, from Sarah Michelle Gellar and Reese Witherspoon to Christina Ricci and even Melissa Joan Hart, generally had more bite. It’s also easy to forget how charmed her career was.

A teenage model and high school drama nerd, Holmes scored her first professional acting role off a videotaped audition for Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. Dawson’s Creek came a year later, and she’d worked with filmmakers including Christopher Nolan, Sam Raimi, Joel Schumacher, Frank Oz and Curtis Hanson before she was 26.

She was capable of great things. In Doug Liman’s Go, a glow stick fuelled rave comedy, she was well cast as a coltish checkout girl in over her head among drugs and crime. She held her own playing a sensual English major in the charming comedy drama Wonder Boys, where she starred alongside Michael Douglas and Frances McDormand, and her best work remains the sweet indie Pieces of April, as a young woman preparing to make Thanksgiving for her family in her tiny New York apartment.

She also earned a reputation for being a bit dull. One of Holmes’s funniest interviews was with Arena Magazine in 2004, wherein journalist Michael Martin tried, in the nicest way possible, to work around the fact that he had encountered the most uninteresting person alive.

“The coy thing is refreshing, even avant-garde… [but] we can’t help feeling a little concerned,” Martin writes. “She avoids questions by employing some light verbal gymnastics, creative use of silence, lapses into the third person and a particularly pregnant deployment of the word ‘ummm’.”

Still, regardless of what she wasn’t doing in her interviews, it was clearly working behind-the-scenes. In the wake of Dawson’s Creek, which ended in 2003, Holmes kept being cast in high-profile roles – the college romance First Daughter, playing the offspring of US President Michael Keaton, Jason Reitman’s sharp tobacco industry comedy Thank You for Smoking and, in what remains her most visible work to date, starring as Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend in Batman Begins. It was an enormous get, one that seemed set to push Holmes further into the A-list. But then she got a boyfriend.

Even though she split from Tom Cruise in 2012, Holmes remains encased in his myth. It is no surprise – Cruise is bigger than a mere movie star. He’s a super-powered icon of modern cinema, who can throw himself off tall buildings in a single bound and shoot movies in space. Like Beyoncé or David Bowie, he’s the kind of star other stars are asked about encountering. So actually marrying the guy is a whole other level of attention.

Cruise and Holmes, or TomKat as they came to be known, were unlike any other celebrity couple in recent memory. Their sudden courtship, which coincided with the release of Batman Begins and Cruise’s War of the Worlds, was a bizarre spectacle of screams, smiles and punches to the air.

It saw media-friendly stunts typically used to promote films being used to promote a relationship, from the pair rocking up on a Harley Davidson to the War of the Worlds premiere, to Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah’s sofa professing his love. Seven weeks after meeting, the pair were engaged and suddenly inescapable.

In terms of Holmes’s movie career, Cruise served as a sentient pick-axe, a man by mere association single-handedly chopping down everything she had built in the years prior. 

Reports in 2005 suggested Warner Bros, the studio behind Batman Begins, were unhappy that coverage of the TomKat affair seemed to overshadow the film. Holmes’s TV interviews for the movie were routinely two thirds gushing over Cruise, and one third Batmobile. “She won’t be in the sequel,” a source told the New York Post. “Warners is happy that people are now focusing on who’ll be playing the Joker rather than Katie and Tom.”

Less than two years later, it was officially confirmed that Holmes wouldn’t appear in the follow-up, titled The Dark Knight. She was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Warner Bros blamed the move on “scheduling conflicts”, but a Wall Street Journal article suggested Holmes and her team “rebuffed” an offer to reprise her role. The Dark Knight went on to become one of the biggest movies of all time. Holmes made Mad Money, a forgotten heist comedy starring Diane Keaton and Queen Latifah.

The WSJ piece remains an interesting glimpse behind the curtain. Published in January 2007, it speaks of Holmes’s “return to acting” following a two-year hiatus which saw her have a daughter, Suri, in April 2006, and seven months later marry Cruise in a traditional Scientology ceremony held in an Italian castle.

The pair had also been relentlessly mocked and criticised, with the WSJ noting that Holmes’s “Q score” (a measurement of public opinion which is used by advertisers and entertainment industries in the US) had plummeted in the wake of her meeting Cruise.

Professionally speaking, Holmes’s years with Cruise were often unusual. She would perform on the US competition series So You Think You Can Dance, reenacting Judy Garland’s rendition of Get Happy from the film Summer Stock, and guest star on How I Met Your Mother.

She did some theatre, was photographed repeatedly with Victoria Beckham, and was overshadowed by both Adam Sandler and Adam Sandler playing his own twin sister in the disastrous Jack & Jill. Nothing Holmes did seemed to have any connective tissue to anything else she was doing, while tabloids were fixated on her marriage, Scientology, and the endlessly photographed Suri.

It’s why her decision to separate from Cruise, news which dropped out of nowhere on a Friday afternoon in 2012, felt so thrilling. Not because he had been acting as the architect for her recent career, but because it felt like an admission that something had gone awry. Or at least that the relentless insistence that the pair’s marriage was “amazing”, as they so often called it, wasn’t true.

Celebrity divorces are usually driven by archetypes, with the media aligning certain characteristics to certain parties, and allowing those ideas to flourish in the court of public opinion. Holmes was immediately declared a hero and a protective mama bear for getting out of her marriage, and set to do something extraordinary with her newfound agency.

There was also the sense that we were about to learn more about the ins and outs of the notoriously secretive Church of Scientology, with one of its most high-profile members breaking rank seeming particularly important.

But nothing actually happened in the wake of the TomKat divorce. It was settled in a rapid 12 days, and has quite literally hasn’t been spoken of again. Cruise’s personal life has never been more absent from the public sphere, while Holmes dances around her divorce whenever it is vaguely hinted at by journalists.

“That time was intense,” she said of the split while speaking to InStyle Magazine in April. “It was a lot of attention, and I had a little child on top of it.” She then told an anecdote about a friendly New York cab driver, and the subject shifted.

It’s a tactic that is all over Holmes’s modern press. Her alleged relationship with Jamie Foxx, which was either nothing, or an on-and-off fling, or so deathly serious that they were secretly together for years until an apparent split in 2019, was never confirmed nor denied. She wore maddeningly ill-judged braces throughout her entire recurring role on the Liev Schreiber series Ray Donovan, rendering everything she said a sloppy mumble, and yet never acknowledged how weird it was.

When Matt Lauer asked her in 2014 about an infamous conversation he had about antidepressants with Cruise in 2005, Holmes answered in the context of the film she was promoting. She has similarly said absolutely nothing about Harvey Weinstein, who was industrial in her post-divorce career, casting her in the star-studded YA adaptation The Giver and the Helen Mirren/Ryan Reynolds courtroom drama Woman in Gold.

She even promoted The Giver alongside Weinstein himself on daytime television, and was regularly photographed with his former wife, the fashion designer Georgina Chapman. But, still, nada. Not even a cursory appreciation post for #TimesUp on her Instagram page.

Holmes doesn’t need to speak about any of that publicly, and the public isn’t remotely entitled to know about her life. Her divorce settlement may have included a gag order, for all anyone knows, or she may not wish to place further attention on Suri, who has noticeably been kept out of the public eye ever since her parent’s divorce.

But the complete avoidance of so many juicy topics grants every one of her interviews a strange energy – as if half the conversation is missing, or a tree is growing out of Holmes’s head and not a single person is allowed to talk about it.

Considering the volume of her fame 15 years ago, there must be something cathartic about moving through the world somewhat anonymously again. Holmes is often photographed on New York subway trains and quietly doing her groceries – worlds away from a time where she could regularly zip away on a private helicopter to Cruise’s 298-acre estate on a Colorado mountain.

She’s the rare celebrity who made a big deal about pushing for privacy and seems to genuinely want it. Not somewhat half-way, where privacy essentially means total control over the paparazzi photographing you or the stories written about you, but sincere, stay-the-hell-out-of-my-business privacy. Suri Cruise is now 14 years old. Do you have any idea what she looks like anymore?

In 2016, Holmes directed her first film, a treacly yet generally well-made mother/daughter drama titled All We Had. She has another directorial gig in development. So she’s probably never been happier – cashing cheques for occasional B-movies, securing financing here and there for her passion projects, and keeping her off-screen life on the down-low.

It’s rare, though, to see someone in the spotlight who is so tangentially connected to incredibly interesting things, but exists as a blank void at the centre of it all. There’s probably power in boring. You just wish that it wasn’t so, well... boring.