Tom Cruise Has Twitter Reunion With Onscreen ‘Jerry McGuire’ Co-Star Jonathan Lipnicki

Tom Cruise and Jonathan Lipnicki reunited on Twitter last week thanks to a viral Jerry Maguire meme.

Earlier this month, a tweet from screenwriter Noel Pascual took off with a joke about Cruise, Lipnicki and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie. In it, Pascual joked that McQuarrie looked like a grown-up version of Lipnicki’s character from the 1996 classic, Jerry Maguire, placing pictures of them side by side.

“Remember Tom Cruise and the kid from Jerry Maguire? This is them now,” Pascual wrote dryly. “Feel old yet?”

The post picked up thousands of likes and retweets and, after a week, it gained the attention of Cruise himself. Cruise retweeted it on Friday night, to the delight of some followers and confusion of others.

“They grow up so fast,” Cruise joked. Many of his followers were fooled by the picture, actually believing that McQuarrie was the actor who had played Ray Boyd. Before long, however, Lipnicki showed up to settle the score.

“Working with you was great,” he wrote to Cruise. “Getting trolled by you, even better.” He included a series of fire emojis and laughing crying emojis for good measure.

By the end of the ordeal, Pascual’s harmless joke had drawn the attention of everyone involved except for McQuarrie. If the director had seen the post, he did not throw his two cents in online. The picture of McQuarrie and Cruise together came from a video Cruise had posted several weeks ago, where they discussed HD video quality on modern TVs.

McQuarrie and Cruise have a long working history together in Hollywood. McQuarrie wrote the screenplay adaptation of Jack Reacher, as well as the screenplay for Edge of Tomorrow, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Mission: Imposssible: Fallout. He also directed Jack Reacher, Rogue Nation and Fallout, and produced the latter, as well as the Jack Reacher sequel, Never Go Back.

Many replied to Lipnicki tell him how much Jerry Maguire means to them, and how well the movie holds up to this day. They felt that he should join Cruise and, presumably McQuarrie in the next installment of Mission: Impossible, whenever it comes.

Any future projects will have to wait a while, as Cruise is apparently on set filming his long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick. The movie comes over 30 years after the original, revisiting one of Cruise’s most beloved roles. Top Gun: Maverick is expected to hit theaters some time in 2020.