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Tom Cruise says he wouldn’t mind if his 2-year-old daughter Suri followed in his famous footsteps.

“I’d love it. I’d love it,” he told Usmagazine.com at the NYC premiere of Valkyrie on Monday. “Acting is … a great life to get to entertain people and create characters and stories.”

No matter what his children do, “They have the life that I wanted,” Cruise said. “I always wanted to travel the world, to be developed by different cultures, learn about their history.

“So that’s how I raised my kids — that they have full exposure to the world and all different kinds of ideas and philosophies so that they can make choices for themselves,” he went on. “I support them in whatever choices they want to make.

“But I do have a thing,” Cruise said. “If you’re going to do it, really do it. Don’t be casual about it.”

Suri is already finding ways to express herself through words.

“Her vocabulary is great,” Cruise said. “The ones that we love are, ‘I love you.’ I love hearing ‘I love you, dada. I love you, mama.’”

He said she had one issue with his new World War II thriller Valkyrie: She didn’t like his eye patch.

“Suri would come up and take it off,” he says. “Suri would be in the make-up trailer, and she’d pull my patch off. So the girls in the make-up trailer got a little teddy bear with a patch on it, and they gave it to her to play with, so she got used to the patch on the teddy bear.

“It’s amazing how quickly she adapted to set,” Cruise said of his daughter. “To know to be quiet when I’m shooting … I mean, Suri was great on the set.”

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“Three and a half years after the interview heard ’round the world, Tom Cruise is back in the studio, today,” Matt Lauer said at the very top of Monday’s Today show.

Lauer wasn’t kidding. Hovering over Lauer and co-anchor Meredith Vieira as they were trying to open the morning program at 7 a.m. was Cruise, standing over their desk, even though the interview segment to promote his Christmas release Valkyrie wasn’t slated until the 7:30 half-hour.

“Let’s set the record straight,” Lauer said before Monday’s sit-down with his one-time on-air sparring partner. “This is not Rocky II.”

But the two did finally clear the air – and discussed at length – their June 2004 confrontation, in which Cruise angrily accused Lauer of being glib during a discussion of Brooke Shields’s use of anti-depressants to treat her post-partum depression.

Cruise also said that while he may not be discussing Scientology in current interviews – “I think there’s a time and place for it,” he said – he is still a follower. He also demurred when Lauer asked if Cruise and wife Katie Holmes were considering a sibling for 2-year-old daughter Suri.

“I think that’s the question for the women,” Cruise told him.

And while Lauer noted that Cruise is no longer “jumping on couches” – a reference to the star’s performance on the Oprah Winfrey Show right after meeting Holmes – the Today host wanted to know if Cruise still felt giddy over Katie.

“She’s an amazing woman,” he said.

But in terms of their previous Today appearance together, Lauer told Cruise that he received about 10,000 e-mails immediately after the interview, and wondered about the reaction on the star’s end.

“Probably pretty much the same,” said Cruise. “I went back, and looked at [the interview], and it was interesting.”

Cruise said, “I thought about it a lot,” and chalked up his passion at the time to the fact that the discussion concerned “a subject matter that’s important. It’s something that’s been debated in the public, and that’s what it should be.”

Yet, he also said, he came across “not as I had intended. In looking at myself, I came across as arrogant. … I didn’t communicate it in the way I wanted to communicate it. Also, that’s not the way I am. That’s not the person I am.”

Cruise blamed part of his behavior on the timing, at “the end of a p.r. tour” for War of the Worlds. “A lot of stuff was going on,” he said. “I learned a really good lesson.”

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Check out that truck!! Dang!

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes take Suri Cruise to buy a truckful of toys at FAO Schwarz. Suri was allowed to buy whatever to her heart desires as she picked out stuffed animals, board games, dolls, and candies.

UPDATE:  All the toys are not for Princess Suri, afterall.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes did a little holiday shopping on Katie’s day off from the theater – but not for trinkets for little Suri.

Shortly after New York City’s famed toy store, FAO Schwarz, closed Sunday, the couple slipped in to go on a little shopping spree for children they don’t even know.

They are expected to pile up shopping carts full of dolls, toys, books, and games to donate to Stockings with Care, a not-for-profit organization that gives gifts to children in need.

The organization, founded in 1992, assists homeless and near-homeless families by fulfilling thousands of needy children’s “wish lists” for presents to open on Christmas morning to “create the magic of Christmas.”

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Will Smith credits Tom Cruise with his record-breaking box-office success – because the icon reviews his movie scripts before he takes on a new role.

The stars have become close friends over the years, and Smith admits he turns to Cruise for advice before signing on to a film.

Smith tells Newsweek, “I was so used to competition between other artists that I just didn’t get him at first. And then Tom just broke it down to me and said, ‘Will, we are not competing, so don’t think that way.’ That blew my mind because that is not how this business works at all…

“He looks over my scripts and everything. When I did I Am Legend, I sent him the script, and he sent me back four hours of notes and changes. He did more work on I Am Legend than I did.

“Now we’re looking at some projects to work on together because we have that basic understanding of each other.”

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