He did, however, break that rule for one movie.
When you think of Tom Cruise, you, of course, think of 'Top Gun', 'Mission: Impossible', maybe Scientology or that Oprah interview, that weird laugh / smile thing he does, and of course, running flat-out on screen.
It doesn't matter what the movie is, odds are you're going to have at least one scene with the Cruiser sprinting somewhere or at something. In fact, a study of his movies has shown that they perform better with critics and audiences when he's running longer than when he isn't.
When you have an actor who is that known for running, you can imagine that they're protective of it. Well, it turns out that that's actually the case. In a recent interview with THR, Annabelle Wallis - best known for her role in 'Peaky Blinders' as Grace Burgess, and who starred alongside the Cruiser in 2017's ill-fated 'The Mummy' - revealed just such a rule.
"I got to run on-screen with him, but he told me no at first," Wallis explained. "He said, ‘Nobody runs on-screen (with me),’ and I said, ‘But I’m a really good runner.' So, I would time my treadmill so that he’d walk in and see me run. And then he added all these running scenes."
Of course, all those running scenes and the fact that Cruise shared his running scenes with another person didn't help 'The Mummy' at all, and it became a box-office bomb, killed off the Dark Universe franchise, and was Tom Cruise's poorest-received movie in years.
Still, it's a shame but then again, it was pretty cool for Annabelle Wallis that she got to run next to him on-screen. "It was, like, better than an Oscar. I was so happy! I was so happy that I got to run on-screen with Tom Cruise," Wallis laughed.