YOU'VE GOT A LOT OF CHEEK, TOM

Fans were startled when Tom Cruise debuted a full-faced look recently

- MAXINE PETERS

THE dazzling smile looked familiar but the face wasn’t quite right. The man in the stands watching the San Francisco Giants take on the Los Angeles Dodgers looked a lot like megastar Tom Cruise – if he had chubby cheeks instead of the chiselled good looks of a Hollywood heart-throb.

Yet Tom it was and the action man’s fuller face has been causing quite the commotion. Has he had work done? Or has he just been tucking into a naughty doughnut or two on the sly like the rest of us in lockdown?

The 59-year-old was all smiles at the baseball game though, crinkling his eyes for fans and flashing his pearly whites when he appeared on the stadium’s big screen along with his son, Connor (26).

The fact Tom was there with his boy was quite an occasion in itself: he often makes it mission impossible for anyone hoping to find out much about his private life. But the moment was overshadowed by, well, the shadow his cheeks cast.

And fans didn’t hesitate to jump on his fuller face. He looks like a chipmunk, one remarked. Others said he looked like late Canadian stand-up comic Norm Macdonald, who also had the kind of cheeks grannies have always loved to pinch.

Still others have claimed it’s further proof Tom has had work done. Plastic surgery rumours have dogged the youthful-looking star for decades, with speculation he’s had a hair transplant, Botox, a nose job and veneers on his teeth. Tom has always steadfastly denied all of it.

“I haven’t [had any treatment] and I never would,” he said.

But the gossip hasn’t gone away.

TOM might have had a surgical procedure called a platysmaplasty – a neck lift – combined with a mid-facelift,” says Dr Alice Henshaw, owner and practitioner of Harley Street Injectables.