How Post-TomKat Era Katie Holmes Became More Fascinating By Getting Boring

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Last weekend, Brahms: The Boy II, a sequel to the surprise 2016 horror hit, opened in North American theaters with a first-week domestic gross of just under $6 million. For a February film with mediocre reviews and a reported budget of $10 million, that’s solid stuff, and as with many horror franchise titles of its kind, we can easily expect this one to make its budget back and yield a small profit for STXFilms. The Boy wasn’t exactly an A-List project. Its biggest star was the guy who played Bishop Brennan in Father Ted. Franchises like this, made on the cheap with minimal expectations, don’t really require the pull of a major actor. Perhaps that’s why it’s still kind of strange to see Brahms: The Boy II headlined by Katie Holmes.

Holmes, who has been in the business since she was 19-years-old, is, for all intents and purposes, a star. You know who she is. You’ve definitely seen some of her movies. The chances are that you’ve seen her face on many a celebrity magazine. To this day, she’s still a tabloid regular, although nowhere near as much as she was during those heady days of her marriage to that one guy, and she is featured regularly in glossy photoshoots with fluffy accompanying interviews. Holmes still attracts a lot of attention, even though her career is, to put it bluntly, pretty awful these days. There are bright spots and underrated moments, but it speaks volumes that Holmes’s 2020 is defined by a sequel to a horror film she wasn’t in, a minor drama that barely received a release and an adaptation of the infamous self-help book The Secret. This is B-List work, verging on C-List. Holmes is essentially a working actress, taking roles as they come and doing just fine as a result. She probably isn’t going to win an Oscar but she could easily land a Golden Globe nomination with the right role. Frankly, it’s probably the career best suited to her skills. She isn’t a bad actress but there’s a reason the big breakout of Dawson’s Creek was Michelle Williams.

Holmes is now kind of boring, and paradoxically, that’s only made me even more fascinated with her. It’s all too easy to forget just how catastrophically famous Katie Holmes was for many years as one half of a major Hollywood power couple. We still live in the shadow of TomKat.

By 2005, Katie Holmes was in her late 20s and two years on from the end of Dawson’s Creek, the show that had made her a teen star. The roles that followed were mixed, with her appearing in a couple of flops and a few indie darlings, from Pieces of April to Thank You for Smoking and The Singing Detective. Even in movies that the critics liked, Holmes was often singled out as a weak link among the cast, a criticism that became particularly prevalent when she appeared in Batman Begins as Rachel Dawes. She excelled in smaller projects with sharper writing, like Pieces of April, but said parts seemed few and far between for someone best known as a teen soap opera star. She was often billed as an America’s sweetheart type but seldom given the roles to show off those qualities. As with all celebrities who start life as teen idols, the great questions surrounding their work is always rooted in unfulfilled potential, even for the ones who succeed: How else could things have gone? With Holmes, those questions become ever-more tantalizing because the thing that hindered her artistic progress is now the stuff of Hollywood history.

I doubt that I need to sum up the history of the relationship between Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise here. The chances are that you already know the basics, from the couch-jumping to the lavish proposal to the wedding photo featuring Holmes kneeling just enough to make her new husband look taller. We all know the conspiracies, the rumors, the jokes, the Scientology lore, and the sheer glut of oddities that made TomKat so alluring from a gossip perspective. They were characterized as a power couple akin to the Beckhams or Brangelina, but the rhetoric was entirely different. ‘Power couple’ implies a balanced dynamic and nobody ever believed that about Tom and Katie.

I remember seeing multiple people wearing ‘Free Katie’ t-shirts both on- and offline. When Holmes disappeared from the public eye for months following the birth of Suri, the press ran rampant with speculation over her whereabouts and her possible lack of freedoms. Everyone seemingly became a body-language expert, dissecting every glance or smirk she gave as proof that she was trying to blink out S.O.S. in Morse code or reveal L. Ron Hubbard’s secret plans for world domination. As with all things surrounding Scientology, no theory seemed too outlandish. It didn’t help matters that Holmes, whenever she was on Cruise’s arm at a public event, seemed subdued and older than her years, now Kate and not Katie.