Adam Badawi On Remaking GQ: From Fashion Flagship to Magazine for Modern Men

Adam Badawi secured Tom Cruise’s first GQ cover in 20 years by focusing on his artistic evolution rather than the controversies surrounding his personal life, signaling his strategy to spark meaningful conversations rather than play it safe.

Summary of Cruise Control. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:11:16 — Badawi sees Tom Cruise as a consequential but complicated figure, and deliberately assigned Zach Baron as interviewer because avoiding difficult topics would have been the easy path—instead, the publication wanted to explore why Cruise is continually topping the box office and choosing auteur filmmakers over typical blockbusters.
• 00:16:55 — The shirtless cover photo happened organically 20 minutes into the shoot rather than being preconceived, and Badawi chose it over more conventional alternatives because he wants GQ to provoke conversation and get people talking rather than simply be polite and pretty.
• 00:20:59 — Badawi’s journey to GQ involved a circuitous route: growing up as a first-generation Australian with immigrant parents from Iraq, becoming obsessed with magazines as a teenager, freelancing for years, working as a New York Times correspondent, and eventually launching GQ in the Middle East at age 28 before becoming global deputy under Will Welch.
• 00:25:23 — Transforming British GQ required decisive moves and social courage, particularly in the first difficult months post-COVID when the team questioned his credentials; Badawi shifted the focus from Dylan Jones’s traditional luxury angle toward new luxury that would appeal to younger money entering the market.
• 00:38:58 — Badawi’s vision for GQ rests on three pillars: maintaining it as a magazine for and about men, expanding beyond fashion and celebrity into money, wellness, love, and sex while preserving taste, and deploying their strongest storytelling everywhere rather than keeping talent underutilized until big moments.
• 00:42:53 — Badawi pushes back against the advice that publications must go niche, arguing that GQ’s four billion annual global video views and presence in 21 territories means limiting scope amounts to self-imposed shrinkage when the brand has unprecedented reach and influence.
• 00:52:54 — Staffing changes focus on mid to senior-level hires and resource reallocation rather than director-level turnover, with major reorganization around new weekly video content and rebudgeting for expensive feature reporting previously not prioritized.
• 01:03:25 — Badawi intends to prove his business thesis before requesting expanded budgets, having previously tripled event revenue at British GQ’s Men of the Year, and believes the combination of stronger storytelling, wider audience appeal, and platform diversification positions GQ for growth beyond current revenue levels.

In depth

The calculus behind the Tom Cruise cover

Badawi frames the Cruise get not as a splashy celebrity coup but as a deliberate bet on tension. He argues that Cruise is one of the most consequential and complicated artists of the last several decades, and that most magazines now sidestep exactly that kind of complexity in favor of safer, easier bookings 00:11:2400:11:49. Rather than chase “the hottest guy in the best look from the biggest show,” he wanted a subject who would provoke conversation, and he paired Cruise with Zach Baron specifically because Baron is used to prying answers out of people who are not used to being asked questions 00:12:1600:12:5600:13:02.

Sherman presses him on the most obvious omission: Scientology. Badawi insists there were no editorial conditions attached to the sit-down, but concedes he was conscious that many people’s relationship to Cruise is really a relationship to his private life and faith, and that this simply wasn’t the story he wanted told 00:13:1200:13:28. His defense is that the piece still surfaced real, previously unknown material — he cites learning that Cruise attended fifteen schools in sixteen years — and that the value of the piece is in Baron’s persistent follow-up questioning rather than in checking an obvious box 00:15:1000:15:4800:15:53.

The shirtless cover photo became its own flashpoint, and Badawi is candid that it wasn’t planned; it happened organically about twenty minutes into the shoot 00:16:5500:17:01. He weighed it against calmer, more conventionally elegant options — he references a nearly identical choice with Jeremy Strong, where a serene underwater portrait in Lake Maggiore was passed over for a more provocative alternate image — and concluded that in this moment he’d rather be talked about than considered polite 00:18:0500:18:3400:18:55. Sherman pushes back that she personally preferred the other photos, but grants that the strategy worked, noting the flood of memes the Strong cover generated as proof of concept 00:19:1700:19:23. She credits critic Jacob Gallagher with the sharpest read: is the cover an instruction manual for how men should look, or a mirror society is being forced to hold up to itself 00:19:4700:19:57.

An immigrant’s circuitous route into magazines

Badawi’s account of how he got here is deliberately non-linear, and he frames that as the point. His parents were part of a small, persecuted ethnic minority from Nazariyah, Iraq, and left for Australia determined that their children assimilate fully — so much so that Arabic was never spoken at home 00:20:5900:21:0600:21:1600:21:28. His sisters, steeped in nineties alt-rock and music magazines, brought home an issue of Australian GQ with Pharrell on the cover during his NERD days, and that single issue — stitched together from content shot in LA, Paris, and beyond — became the spark for a lifelong fixation 00:21:4700:21:5100:21:58.

What followed was years of unglamorous persistence: freelancing for Australian GQ for nearly two years before he identified a new deputy editor, Kerry David, and pitched her on her second day on the job, then said yes to every assignment that came his way regardless of beat 00:22:2100:22:2600:22:36. He financed his own trip to London and cold-DM’d Dylan Jones for work experience, crashing with a cousin to make it happen 00:22:5900:23:05.

A formative detour came via a year as the New York Times’ Australia correspondent, which he describes as rigorous in a completely different register from magazine work, and notable because it put him inside a newsroom mid-transformation — arriving during the period the paper was building its digital subscription business and just before the crisis moment chronicled in the documentary featuring David Carr, when a sale to Carlos Slim was on the table 00:23:3400:24:0000:24:0400:24:08. That exposure to a platform-agnostic, digitally native operation, he suggests, shaped how he later thinks about magazine strategy. From there he jumped to launch GQ Middle East at twenty-eight, moving from Melbourne to Dubai on two weeks’ notice and, by his own account, crying at the airport before building a functioning magazine team within ten weeks — a leap that eventually caught Anna Wintour’s attention and led to his appointment as Will Welch’s global deputy 00:24:1800:24:2500:24:3100:24:4800:24:53.

Rebuilding British GQ after Dylan Jones

Taking over British GQ meant stepping into shoes that had been worn for a very long time by one of the most recognizable names in UK media, and Badawi admits the first months were brutal: he arrived post-COVID as a relative outsider, facing a team skeptical of his credentials and his short track record in the country 00:25:2300:26:0600:26:24. He describes surviving that period through sheer decisiveness and what he calls social courage — the willingness to act on conviction even while colleagues were openly questioning him 00:26:0600:26:14.

He characterizes Jones’s version of the magazine as smart, wry, occasionally badly behaved, deeply rooted in classic British luxury and tradition, heavy on business coverage and political cover subjects like Boris Johnson, anchored by a Men of the Year event that functioned as a high-society gathering 00:29:1000:29:2200:29:3000:29:3600:29:42. The turning point in his own strategy came from talking directly to CMOs and clients, who flagged a specific anxiety: the next generation of high earners entering their prime spending years held a markedly different set of values than the old guard, and nobody was sure how to reach them 00:30:0200:30:1500:30:19. That insight married neatly with Will Welch’s broader emphasis on culture and community, and Badawi used it to justify a pivot from traditional luxury toward what he calls “new luxury” — while working hard, as a foreigner running a very English brand, to preserve a specifically British sense of humor through his team 00:30:2800:30:3900:30:5800:31:04. He points to eight British Society of Magazine Editors nominations as external validation that the repositioning worked 00:31:13.

Sherman, who lived and worked in London for years, raises Brexit and the wars affecting Gulf money in London real estate as a macro backdrop; Badawi doesn’t dispute the damage, calling Brexit a consequential mistake the country may not recover from in this generation, and recalling landing at Heathrow into a hotel quarantine in 2021 as a marker of how much the city had changed since his optimistic first stint in 2012 00:33:3200:33:5000:34:02. Still, he remains bullish on London’s ability to keep producing world-class creative talent regardless of the retail slowdown 00:34:1600:34:2300:34:41.

Big tent, high taste: the argument against going niche

Badawi lays out his editorial thesis for GQ globally as three pillars: keep it fundamentally a magazine for and about men, widen its subject range well beyond fashion and celebrity into money, wellness, love and politics, and stop underusing its best talent by saving them for occasional big moments 00:38:5800:39:1400:39:3900:39:51. His example is Zach Baron, whom he says had previously been limited to one or two big print stories a year despite being one of the most talented interviewers around; instead of doing five occasional video specials, Badawi pushed for a weekly show, arguing that readers should build a habitual, parasocial relationship with Baron himself, independent of whoever the guest happens to be 00:40:2800:40:4000:40:5400:41:0600:41:10.

Sherman challenges this head-on, arguing that the conventional wisdom — and the visible failure of broad Condé titles like Glamour and Self — suggests fragmented, algorithm-driven audiences reward narrow, deep publications, not broad ones 00:42:5800:43:0300:42:3000:42:37. Badawi doesn’t concede the point; he counters that GQ predates ESPN and CNN, generated four billion global video views last year, and operates across twenty-one territories, and that shrinking its ambitions to chase a niche would squander advantages smaller titles simply don’t have 00:43:2200:43:2900:43:37. He separates GQ’s business model from the glossy biannuals and quarterlies that thrive in a narrower, often advertiser- or collaboration-driven paradigm, insisting GQ is playing a different, larger game 00:44:0000:44:0600:44:14.

That same appetite for breadth extends to politics: he references a midterms package and an attempt (via writer Malik) to get an essay out of JD Vance, done in what he calls a high-low, cheeky, well-reported spirit rather than a polarizing one 00:44:4600:44:5200:45:52. Sherman notes there’s a real market hunger for less binary political coverage, and Badawi frames the risk calculus explicitly through Puck’s own model — Sherman’s opinionated, occasionally divisive voice as a business asset — arguing he’d rather publish something that gets people talking, even angrily, than something safely pretty 00:46:3100:47:2100:47:28.

Staffing, global covers, and proving the business case

Badawi describes the staffing changes underneath his editorial pivot as unglamorous mechanics rather than dramatic overhauls: building out a video team and producer bench from scratch to support a weekly show that never existed before, and reallocating the features budget so editors like Kat Stoeffel can commission ambitious, expensive reporting — sending John Ronson to hang around the White House, or Chris Heath to Jupiter, Florida to report on Tiger Woods — projects the old budget structure wasn’t built for 00:52:3200:52:3800:52:5400:52:5900:53:0900:53:14. He’s explicit that most personnel change has happened at the mid to mid-senior level rather than through director-level turnover, paired with a push toward the kind of platform-agnostic thinking he absorbed at the Times, moving away from print-production-schedule-driven workflows 00:53:1900:53:2900:53:4100:54:04.

On the question of a single global Tom Cruise cover running simultaneously in twenty markets, Sherman raises a real worry: that homogenized global covers risk erasing the regional personality of each edition. Badawi pushes back with specific counter-examples — GQ Japan’s Junichi Shida, whose art-and-design sensibility drives a newsstand-dependent business that’s thriving, and Milan’s Federico Zarica, whose Kimi Antonelli cover was strong enough that other markets, including the US edition, syndicated it 00:58:2500:58:3100:58:4100:58:4500:59:0200:59:14. He does concede that the global rollout was initially heavy-handed — early on, every market ran the same cover with only interior content localized — and that the lesson learned is that a truly global cover only makes sense occasionally, for subjects like the Odyssey cast, BTS, or Cruise, that resonate everywhere at once 00:59:3500:59:4000:59:5100:59:59.

On the deeper business question — whether these historically modest-revenue prestige brands can actually become large commercial businesses rather than culturally important but comparatively small operations — Badawi points to the New York Times and the New Yorker as proof that giving audiences something worth paying for still works, and states plainly that he intends to prove his own thesis with results before asking the C-suite for more headcount, budget, or a podcast studio 01:02:4501:03:1901:03:2501:03:36. His clearest existing evidence is tripling Men of the Year event revenue during his run at British GQ, and he also cites hiring Amelia Dimoldenberg as GQ’s red carpet host during COVID — a bet that paid off in eventual audiences of 100 million video views in a week — as proof that GQ can still incubate genuinely breakout media talent 01:03:4301:03:4701:04:5901:05:1401:05:21.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.