As both an enormous movie star and the de facto face of Scientology, Tom Cruise is a true object of national fascination. So what's it really like to meet the man when the noise of the Hollywood machine is stripped away? Simon Pegg, who appears alongside Cruise in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation ," answered that question during a Monday conversation with HuffPost Live's Josh Zepps .

Cruise is completely aware of the massive interest in what he's "really" like, Pegg explained:

"He's kind of engendered it, to a degree. It's part of who he is, and part of what makes him so interesting as a personality and an actor. He's kind of allowed this thicket of nonsense to evolve around him, and it makes him very unattainable. ... I don't know if he's orchestrated it in any way. He's not like some kind of Machiavellian mastermind playing everything. He just kind of lets people get on with it, and there is a degree of crazy speculation that surrounds him, and obviously the vast majority of it is not really true. So it's kind of interesting to penetrate that air of mystique and actually meet the human at the heart of it."

So what happened once Pegg broke through that mystique? Watch the actor describe his own personal experience with Cruise in the video above, and click here to see his full HuffPost Live conversation.

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