This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
Suri, the 20-year-old daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, has legally dropped her father’s surname and is now going by Suri Noelle, according to court-related public records cited by People.
The change surfaced through voter registration documents filed in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where Suri attends Carnegie Mellon University.
Those records show she registered to vote under the name Suri Noelle in October 2024, using what state law requires to be her legal name at the time of registration.
The revelation confirms something fans and outlets had suspected for more than a year without official confirmation.
Suri had already begun using the name Noelle in public settings well before the voter registration records came to light, most notably in the program distributed at her high school graduation.
Neither Cruise nor Holmes has issued a public statement addressing the legal change, and representatives for the pair have not responded to requests for comment from the outlets that have reported on it.
How the Name Change Came to Light
Suri’s use of the name Noelle was first spotted in June 2024, when she graduated from LaGuardia High School in New York City.
Rather than appearing as Suri Cruise in the ceremony program, she was listed as Suri Noelle, a detail that was quickly picked up by outlets covering the milestone.
Noelle is Katie Holmes’ middle name, and the choice was widely read at the time as a tribute to her mother rather than simply a stylistic preference for the event itself.
At the time of her graduation, it was not publicly known whether Suri had taken the legal steps necessary to formally change her surname, or whether she was simply using Noelle informally for the ceremony.
That question appears to have been answered by the voter registration records now cited by People, since Pennsylvania requires residents to register to vote using their legal name.
Suri registered under the name Suri Noelle in October 2024, a few months after her graduation and around the time she would have been settling into her first semester at Carnegie Mellon.
It remains unclear exactly when the legal paperwork for the change was filed or in which jurisdiction, since no matching name change petition has been located in Allegheny County records.
That has led some outlets to note it is possible the filing took place in New York before Suri relocated to Pennsylvania for college, since name change petitions filed there can be automatically sealed or sealed upon request, making them harder to trace publicly.
Whatever the exact timeline, the voter registration documents represent the clearest public confirmation to date that the switch from Cruise to Noelle was a formal legal decision rather than an unofficial preference.
What Has Been Said Publicly, and What Has Not
Neither Cruise nor Holmes has commented directly on the legal name change since the voter registration records emerged.
That silence is consistent with how both parents have generally handled questions about their daughter throughout her adolescence and into adulthood, choosing to keep her out of most public discussion of their post-divorce lives.
Holmes has occasionally addressed her approach to raising Suri in general terms, though not in reference to this specific development.
Speaking with Glamour in 2023, Holmes described her instinct to shield her daughter from public attention given how visible Suri was from a young age.
“What has been really important for me with my daughter, because she was so visible at a young age, is I really like to protect her,” Holmes said. She added, “I’m very grateful to be a parent, to be her parent.
She’s an incredible person,” offering one of her more direct public reflections on their relationship without addressing the surname question specifically.
Cruise, for his part, has previously pushed back on the broader narrative that he has been absent from Suri’s life following his 2012 divorce from Holmes.
In a 2013 defamation lawsuit against the publisher of Life & Style and In Touch, Cruise disputed reporting that suggested he had abandoned his daughter. “The assertion that I ‘abandoned’ Suri after my divorce is patently false,” Cruise said in that filing.
“I have in no way cut Suri out of my life, whether physically, emotionally, financially or otherwise.” At the time, he said he and Suri, then six years old, spoke on the phone nearly every day and that he regularly asked for and received updates about her friends and school life.
Neither Cruise nor his representatives have made a comparable statement regarding the current name change.
Around the time of her 2024 graduation, a source close to the family offered some insight into Suri’s thinking to Page Six, though the outlet described the person only as a source rather than someone authorized to speak on Suri’s behalf.
According to that source, the decision to go by Noelle reflected Suri “showing praise for her mother” while also signaling that she “wants her own identity” apart from her famous last name.
The source added that using Noelle would help Suri “avoid the paparazzi” and “start fresh” as she began college. Those comments have not been independently confirmed by Suri herself, and she has not spoken publicly about her reasons for the change in her own words.
Suri and Cruise have been widely described in prior reporting as largely estranged since her parents’ divorce, though the extent of their relationship has never been detailed publicly by either party in a way that goes beyond the general characterization.
Given that history, many observers have interpreted the switch to Noelle as symbolic of that distance. Because Suri has not addressed her motivations directly, any specific conclusion about why she made the change beyond what her family’s own statements and sources close to her have said remains speculative rather than confirmed fact.
Since graduating high school, Suri has been building a life largely removed from the entertainment industry spotlight that surrounded her childhood.
She is currently a student in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama, where she studies musical theatre, a path she began exploring at LaGuardia High School when she performed in stage productions there.
Her coursework and campus performances mark a notable shift toward pursuing her own creative interests on her own terms, separate from the public narrative that has followed her since childhood.
The legal change to Noelle does not appear to affect Suri’s relationship with her mother, with whom she has continued to appear close in the years following her parents’ split.
Holmes has spoken warmly about her daughter in past interviews, and Suri has appeared in projects connected to her mother’s work in the past.
Whether the new surname changes how Suri is credited or identified going forward in any future public or creative work remains to be seen, since neither she nor her representatives have addressed the matter directly at this time.
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