tom cruise en scientology

How Tom Cruise's Involvement In Scientology Has Affected His Love Life

As former Scientologists will attest, the controversial group isn't something you can choose to dip in and out of. Once you're in, you're in for life — or risk constantly dodging "squirrel busters" riding around in golf carts and knocking on your door wearing T-shirts with your face superimposed on a rodent's body, according to the  Tampa Bay Times . As Scientology's highest-profile member and prized possession, it's pretty safe to assume that Tom Cruise is in forever now. It's also pretty safe to assume Scientology has affected his love life countless times.

Most women's idea of a dream date likely doesn't involve being hooked up to a machine and being quizzed about their deepest sex secrets for hours. However, that's the situation Katie Holmes found herself in mere months after meeting Cruise. "I just started auditing, and I'm taking some courses, and I really like it. I feel it's really helping." Holmes gushed to W magazine while her "Scientology chaperone," Jessica Rodriguez, hovered in the background. "I'm learning to celebrate my own spirit, my own being," Holmes continued.

Cruise was also introduced to Scientology by a love interest. Daily Beast reports that the actor was brought into the fold by his then-girlfriend and now-ex-wife, Mimi Rogers, shortly after the death of its founder L. Ron Hubbard. By all accounts, it was love at first audit. His devotion has been front and foremost throughout Cruise's lengthy dating and relationship history . Begging the question, how has Tom Cruise's involvement in Scientology affected his love life?

A few good candidates

Some of the wildest rumors about Tom Cruise involve Scientology. Per The Hollywood Reporter , Sea Org members – Scientology's management organization – reportedly created a fake field of wildflowers in the desert, so Cruise and Nicole Kidman could romp their way through a romantic fantasy. And leading Scientologists auditioned women to be Cruise's girlfriend and future wife. There's actually credence to the latter, and it's one of the ways Tom Cruise's involvement in Scientology has affected his love life.

Andrew Morton writes in "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography" (via Insider ) that Scientology bigwigs vetted and screened a list of women Cruise had his eye on, including Jennifer Garner, Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Alba, and Sofia Vergara. Vergara made it to second base, meeting with Miscavige at the Scientology Center. However, despite him busting out the full charm offensive, Miscavige ultimately sent Vergara skedaddling after he went too heavy on convincing her to convert to Scientology. Another one bit the dust for Cruise. 

But Katie Holmes didn't escape that easily. Morton claims in the  New York Post that Miscavige's fingerprints had been all over Cruise's divorce from Kidman. He'd deemed her a threat to Scientology and decided she had to be cut loose. "Wives may come and go," Morton writes. "Scientology is forever." Penelope Cruz was "groomed" for the role next, but she was out after refusing to submit to Scientology. Miscavige's wife was then handed the task of finding Mrs. Cruise III, and Shelly Miscavige decided on lucky, lucky Holmes.

True bromance

David Miscavige may have been the determining factor in why Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers divorced too. Former Scientologist Mike Rinder claims in his book, "A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology" (via Page Six ), that when Cruise fell hard for Nicole Kidman on the "Days of Thunder" set, Miscavige used his powers of persuasion to clear the path for Mrs. Cruise II.

But Cruise's involvement in Scientology hasn't only affected the making and breaking of his relationships. Leah Remini claims in her book, "Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology" (via Us Weekly ) that the organization once determined dire consequences for one of Cruise's cast-offs. Remini alleges that Nazanin Boniadi was unwittingly groomed to mend Cruise's broken heart after he split from Penelope Cruz. "She underwent a confidential mission for the church where she thought she was being prepared for a special humanitarian project," Remini writes. "But ended up with the role of Tom's girlfriend."

Remini, who's a former Scientologist and outspoken proponent of the organization, alleges Scientology seniors performed a makeover on Boniadi and then dispatched her to live with Cruise and report back on any mood irregularities. However, after growing bored with his new plaything, Cruise dumped her. A devastated Boniadi cried her heart out to a "friend" who reported her, and Cruise's ex was "subjected to doing four months of menial labor, including tasks such as digging ditches and cleaning public toilets with a toothbrush."

The hollowness of Tom Cruise

How Tom Cruise went from superstar to laughingstock and back again.

by Constance Grady

Tom Cruise has spent this year flying high, literally.

At CinemaCon in April, when Mission: Impossible 7 screened its first trailer for theater owners, Cruise sent along a video intro that he’d filmed while standing on top of a biplane flying over a canyon in South Africa. It ended with him launching into a barrel roll. When he arrived at the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick in San Diego in May, he flew there in a helicopter he piloted himself , emblazoned with his own name and the title of his film.

He’s also flying high on a metaphorical level. Cruise turned 60 on July 3, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Top Gun: Maverick has made over $1 billion since it came out in May , the first film of Cruise’s career to do so and just the second film to manage the feat since the pandemic began in 2020. (The first was Spider-Man: No Way Home .)

In the pandemic era, a lot of movies are making only the most cursory appearance in theaters before they hit streaming, if they make it to theaters at all. Not Tom Cruise movies. The idea of Top Gun: Maverick premiering on streaming instead of in theaters? “Never going to happen,” Cruise said at Cannes in May , even though the completed film languished for two years before seeing the light of day. When Paramount told Cruise that Mission: Impossible 7 would play in theaters for only 45 days instead of the three months Cruise was used to, Cruise hired a lawyer .

For his efforts, Cruise is being hailed as the savior of the cinematic experience.

“Can Tom Cruise save the old-fashioned blockbuster?” asked the Telegraph .

Empire magazine described Cruise’s fight as “the battle to save cinema,” with “the biggest movie star in the world” at the vanguard.

“Cruise is here to remind us that the industry will not die on his watch. Not if he can help it,” said the LA Times . “And honestly, who among us won’t be thrilled if Cruise triumphs in life as in the movies?”

It seems clear that Cruise sincerely sees himself as the savior of the big screen, and all the jobs that depend on it. (Or at the very least, he sees himself as the savior of Tom Cruise movies appearing on the big screen.) During the pandemic, he told audiences at Cannes, he called up theater owners to say , “Please, I know what you’re going through. Just know we are making Mission: Impossible , and Top Gun is coming out.” In December 2020, leaked audio footage from the set of Mission: Impossible 7 showed Cruise upbraiding crew members who violated Covid social distancing policies.

“They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us,” Cruise can be heard to shout on the footage . “Because they believe in us and what we’re doing. I’m on the phone with every fucking studio at night, insurance companies, producers, and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies. We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherfuckers.”

“That’s what I sleep with every night,” Cruise concluded: “the future of this fucking industry!”

By now we should know: Tom Cruise is the hero of a movie that never ends. It’s one where he always, always saves the day.

That wasn’t always the case. Cruise’s stock plummeted in the 2000s after Oprah’s couch and Brooke Shields’ antidepressants . Yet today, Cruise is once again considered a bankable and iconic star. He is no longer a publicity liability for a movie studio.

There’s only one thing that Cruise might not be able to save. That’s the nagging, persistent sense that if the movie were ever to stop, when the lights came up, there would be nothing left of Tom Cruise at all.

“Cruise’s own laugh,” concluded Alex Pappademas in the New Yorker this May, “is the best Tom Cruise impression you’ve ever heard.”

But who says the movie ever has to stop?

Tom Cruise saves chivalry

“I like treating a woman the way that she deserves to be treated.” Tom Cruise to Oprah Winfrey, 2005 .

Here’s an oddity in the latest spree of killer Tom Cruise publicity: For once, the press is really into the way he’s interacting with women.

Over the course of his Top Gun press tour, Tom Cruise has been handed one positive headline after another for his chivalrous habit of taking charge of all ladies present, from Kate Middleton to his co-stars. If there is a woman in the same space as he is, Cruise will escort her up and down stairs and through doorways, present her to the camera, and make sure she is taken care of. It makes for incredible press. In her coverage of Cannes, gossip maven Elaine Lui remarked on how carefully Cruise looked after Top Gun co-star Jennifer Connelly. “I’m told he was never not attentive,” Lui wrote , “always focused on making sure she was looked after, never not ready with a hand to guide her from one place to another, never missing an opportunity to talk about how spectacular she looked, seemingly enthralled by her so that the cameras would pick up on his eyeline and transfer their focus to her.”

This display of “chivalry,” Lui concluded, was “very Tom Cruise.”

Chivalry is part of the old-fashioned action-hero masculinity Tom Cruise has long represented: the hero with the square jaw and faultless manners, kind and attentive to everyone around him. It’s also been central to Tom Cruise’s personal mythology for a long time, in both good ways and bad.

On the good side, Cruise used to be in the press on a regular basis for rescuing regular people: saving a family from a burning sailboat; getting the victim of a hit-and-run to the hospital and then paying her medical bills. Every actor who’s ever worked with him seems to have a Tom Cruise story about him making them some impossibly thoughtful gesture or gift .

On the bad side, quoth Elaine Lui , “Remember how he used to ‘present’ Katie Holmes?”

Cruise’s 2005 marriage to Katie Holmes was marked by its public displays of affection. Cruise was constantly presenting Holmes to the camera, cuddling up to her in public, proclaiming his love for her in ever more enthusiastic ways. Even before he jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch and sent his career into a precipitous downslide, he told Oprah that he covered a hotel room in rose petals for Holmes, and that he took her on a motorcycle ride on the beach.

“I’m a romantic, okay?” Cruise said at the time. “I like treating a woman the way that she deserves to be treated.”

Romantic or not, that marriage also represented a low point in Cruise’s professional life. In the wake of his couch moment with Oprah, Cruise’s popularity plummeted, his reputation took a hit, and he almost lost the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Then came the enormous and damaging wave of publicity in 2012, when Katie Holmes divorced Cruise. Stories rolled out by the day: that Holmes had planned the divorce for two years in order to make sure she would retain custody of the couple’s daughter, Suri; that she had to orchestrate the whole thing with burner phones and secret laptops and lawyers in multiple states ; that she had done it all — developed this whole two-year master plan — because that was how badly she wanted full custody of Suri . Specifically, the story went, Holmes wanted to save Suri from Scientology.

Cruise has since worked diligently to move past the so-called TomKat years. He’s been so effective that all his gentlemanly gestures on his current press tour tend to read as charming, not creepy. But there’s a clear and strong connection between Cruise’s love of chivalry then and his love of chivalry now. They are part and parcel of what appears to be a driving force behind Tom Cruise’s quest to be a hero, win the girl, and save the world: Scientology.

Tom Cruise saves mankind (from thetans)

“That’s what drives me: is that I know we have an opportunity to really help, for the first time, effectively change people’s lives. And I am dedicated to that. I am absolutely, uncompromisingly dedicated to that.” Tom Cruise, Scientology recruitment video, 2004 .

The controversial Church of Scientology, founded by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1953, appeals to the sort of worldview Cruise embodies. The world is under attack from evil forces, Scientology teaches, and all that stops them is one good man who’s not going to let petty rules get in his way.

Scientology is also, despite the number of celebrities it boasts among its ranks, a publicity liability. It’s widely suspected of being a pyramid scheme at best and at worse alleged to be an abusive cult profiting from forced labor and human trafficking , according to lawsuits and reports from former members. Its central cosmology, which teaches that human beings are plagued by immortal alien souls called thetans brought to Earth by the galactic emperor Xenu billions of years ago, is ripe for mockery.

The reporting that exists on Cruise’s connection to the church is both lengthy and damning. In September 2012, Vanity Fair published an exposé by Maureen Orth on the way Cruise outsourced management of his romantic life to the church. Tony Ortega, the closest thing there is to a beat reporter on Scientology, has a dedicated Tom Cruise tab on his website. In 2013, celebrated New Yorker reporter Lawrence Wright expanded his existing Scientology reporting into the book Going Clear , which prominently delved into Cruise’s status in the church. In 2015, Going Clear was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO documentary by the director Alex Gibney, again featuring plenty of Cruise stories. The story they told is dramatic, and it plays heavily on Cruise’s apparent understanding of himself as a savior figure. (The Church of Scientology has strongly denied all these accounts , describing them as lies from disgruntled former members and journalists with grudges.)

Cruise joined the Church of Scientology during his first marriage to Scientologist Mimi Rogers, after Top Gun had already made him a star. According to now-defected former church officials, allegedly he began to drift away from active practice during the ’90s and his marriage to Nicole Kidman, only to drift back as that marriage foundered in the late ’90s. The clincher came, those former Scientologists say in Going Clear , when Cruise said he wanted to tap Kidman’s phone , and the Church of Scientology obliged.

Keeping Cruise happy apparently became a priority for the Church of Scientology. When Cruise needed a new love interest, the church reportedly recruited a young member for the job , gave her a makeover to Cruise’s specifications, and then broke up with her for him after he tired of her. When the woman told a friend what had happened to her, the church reportedly sentenced her to months of menial labor in punishment.

Around the same time that Cruise was making his grand return to the church, he fired his longtime Hollywood publicist, allegedly because she told him to stop talking about Scientology so much when he was on the publicity trail for The Last Samurai . He brought on his Scientologist sister to manage his image instead.

As Cruise was becoming more and more committed to the church, the tabloid industry was beginning to go rabid . By 2004, Us Weekly had gone from monthly trade magazine to weekly gossip rag, pitting itself against People magazine. In Touch Weekly, Life & Style Weekly, and OK! had all emerged. These magazines thrived on an endless diet of outrageous celebrity soundbites, and as Tom Cruise made the publicity rounds for The War of the Worlds , he kept offering them up, one after another.

“Some people, well, if they don’t like Scientology, well, then, fuck you,” he told Rolling Stone . “Really. Fuck you. Period.”

Citing Scientology’s distrust of psychiatry, Cruise criticized Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression, and then told Matt Lauer he was being “glib” when Lauer suggested he might have overstepped his bounds.

Cruise’s public behavior became more and more erratic. On the same War of the Worlds publicity tour, Cruise infamously jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch, enthusiastically declaring his love for Katie Holmes.

Holmes seemed to be getting caught up in the Scientology swirl herself. A W magazine profile of Holmes saw her conduct an interview with a “Scientology chaperone,” who prompted Holmes with phrases about how much she adored Cruise when she seemed to fumble for words.

The spree of outré quotes took their toll. In 2006, one report found that between the spring and summer of 2005, Cruise fell from 11th most-liked celebrity in the US to 197th .

Fox News predicted the end of Cruise’s career. “It will be all but impossible now for a new generation of film fans to see past his erratic public behavior, the Oprah couch shenanigans, the decrying of psychiatry and now the rejection of Catholicism for a religion invented by a science-fiction writer,” they opined .

Cruise, seeing the writing on the wall, veered away from talking about his religion during his movie publicity tours. But for the next 10 years, Scientology would continue to haunt his public image.

In 2008, a video leaked to the press that was reportedly a Scientology conversion effort, filmed in 2004 . It featured Cruise glassy-eyed and grinning in a black turtleneck, talking about all the ways Scientology has changed his life. “Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anybody else,” he explains. “You know you have to do something about it.”

“Let me put it this way,” said Gawker, which broke the news of the video : “if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.”

In 2012, the Cruise-Holmes divorce cracked open the door of Tom Cruise Scientology stories. A host more came pouring out — and not just in the tabloids, but in legacy print magazines and prestige cable shows: Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the Village Voice, HBO.

According to former Scientology officials, the Church has continued to manage Cruise’s life. Reportedly, it’s granted him the full benefits of its more unsavory enterprises, including the Church’s alleged use of slave labor .

Former Scientologist John Brousseau says the church has custom-built luxury vehicles and sound systems for Cruise and provides the staff who manage his many homes. Because this labor is provided by the Church, it’s done through Sea Org, the Scientologist association that’s been accused of human trafficking and forced labor . ( The Church has described these claims as “both scurrilous and ridiculous.”) According to Ortega , Sea Org members who worked on Cruise’s property “were paid only about $50 a week by the church, even though their hours could reach 100 a week.” Cruise has a net worth estimated at $600 million .

The picture painted of Cruise by former members of the church is not flattering. They tend to describe Cruise as a well-meaning man who, fundamentally, is not curious, and who is happy to have beautiful things handed to him without looking at their cost. Scientology is attractive to Cruise, in this account, because it makes his life easier while simultaneously flattering his ego with the belief that he is a hero.

But as damning as those stories are, they have largely faded out of public memory. In the 10 years since his divorce from Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise has been working hard to change the narrative.

Can Tom Cruise save Tom Cruise?

“People can create their own lives. … I decided that I’m going to create, for myself, who I am, not what other people say I should be. I’m entitled to that.” Parade, 2006 .

Cruise is currently experiencing a late-career renaissance. Cannes Film Festival feted him in May , awarding him an honorary Palme d’Or and marking the occasion with a red carpet air show. The press loves him again. Top Gun: Maverick is a major success, and the next slew of Mission: Impossible films are bound to be as well.

He’s even rumored to have a new girlfriend. If, as the tabloids claim, Cruise actually is (or was) dating his Mission: Impossible co-star Hayley Atwell , she would be his first public girlfriend since his divorce from Holmes 10 years ago.

So did he do it? How did Tom Cruise go from America’s 197th favorite celebrity to a bankable superstar once again?

The answer seems to be deceptively simple: He kept working, and he stopped talking — about Scientology, and about almost everything else too.

Cruise’s PR nadir came during a period of oversharing. Since then, he’s become known for his intense desire for privacy. “When was the last time paparazzi captured Tom Cruise on the street or anywhere but a film set or premiere?” wondered the New York Post in May 2022 . He heavily restricts the questions journalists are allowed to ask him before he agrees to an interview, and both his religion and his family life tend to be off-limits.

Meanwhile, Cruise has kept making movies. Tropic Thunder in 2008 and Rock of Ages in 2012 together proved he had a sense of humor. Edge of Tomorrow in 2014, which saw Cruise ceding much of the spotlight to co-star Emily Blunt, proved he knew how to share the screen with another star. And the Mission: Impossible franchise has churned out hit after reliable hit. “I can attest that I am alarmed at the extent to which I suddenly love Tom Cruise,” admitted GQ entertainment editor Ashley Fetters in 2015 , as Cruise publicized Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation .

Cruise has also benefited from the current cultural shame surrounding the tabloid culture of the 2000s. As the world agrees that tabloid targets like Britney Spears were hard done by in the heady, tacky days of Y2K, everything from the era has been painted with the same shade of remorse. Vilifying Tom Cruise for jumping on Oprah’s couch can feel like the same toxic impulse that led to a decade of mocking Spears for having her mental breakdown in public, even though what Cruise has been accused of abetting within the Church of Scientology is far worse than anything Spears has ever been accused of.

In most ways, this strategy has been successful. The tabloid spectacle of Tom Cruise, Scientologist has been covered over by four decades of hard work from Tom Cruise, one of the last great movie stars .

But it’s not clear that Cruise can ever again reach the heights of public adoration he enjoyed in 2003. There’s a persistent strangeness around Tom Cruise’s image that has never quite resolved itself, a sort of falseness that he’s never been entirely able to weed out. It’s a falseness that’s rooted not in his Scientology but in his movie star core. From the beginning, the world has refused to believe Tom Cruise when he breaks out his giant movie star smile. It especially refuses to believe him when he laughs.

In an early pan of 1983’s Risky Business , Cruise’s breakout film, New York magazine took aim at the young star’s mannerisms. “Cruise has a slight, undeveloped voice and a nervous smile, which he relies on whenever the script reveals one of its innumerable holes,” the review ran .

In HBO’s Going Clear , footage of Tom Cruise laughing in his Scientology recruitment video plays while one ex-Scientologist declares, “Scientologists are all full of shit.”

A 2004 Rolling Stone profile devoted paragraph after paragraph to the oddness of “the famous Tom Cruise laugh.”

“It comes on just fine, a regular laugh by any standards. You will be laughing too,” wrote Neil Strauss . “But then, when the humor subsides, you will stop laughing. At this point, however, Cruise’s laugh will just be crescendoing. And he will be making eye contact with you.”

It’s as though there’s a hollowness at the center of Cruise’s image, some sort of vacancy that he is forever restlessly seeking to fill. As though if he can only save enough people, enough industries, enough worlds — maybe then, at last, he can finally be whole. But can anyone, even Tom Cruise, do that much saving?

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How Tom Cruise Got Us to Forget About His Scientology Ties

• By Jon Blistein

Jon Blistein

There are movie stars and then there is Tom Cruise . Forty years a star, enough classics to make listing even a few here pointless, and, now, someone who can stake a legitimate claim to saving Hollywood (or at least jolting some life into that lazy, bloated monstrosity). Last year’s Top Gun: Maverick , with its millions at the box office, helped rescue the movies and movie theaters from the brink of Covid-19 and streaming. This year’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One , the seventh and ostensibly penultimate installment of the secret agent series, should reach similar heights. Tom Cruise is as big as he’s ever been — a feat as staggering as any Ethan Hunt stunt. 

And yet, none of it’s ever really caught up with Cruise, let alone dragged him down. Even Alex Gibney, who directed the damning Scientology doc Going Clear (based on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name), admitted to Rolling Stone recently that he was “surprised” Cruise had avoided any kind of reckoning.  

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With Tom Cruise, it’s yet to reach the point where we, as a culture, are devastated, disheveled, distraught, screaming, “He can’t keep getting away with it!” He remains deeply beloved, and not even in an unsettling, upsetting way , like some of our other prominent problematic actors. And it has everything to do with the way Cruise has thrown himself completely into his work over the past 10 years or so — the way he’s effectively replaced Scientology with a different public-facing religion : The Movies.

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Shockingly, this didn’t exactly endear Cruise or the Church to the culture at large. A 2008 incident is telling: Hackers obtained and leaked an internal Church video that featured Cruise, full Steve Jobs mode in a black turtleneck, extolling the virtues of Scientology; there was also footage of Cruise accepting the Church’s “Freedom Medal of Valor” and saluting Miscavige. In response , the Church not only tried to wipe the video from the web, but cast doubt on its authenticity, claiming it was “pirated and edited.” By the end of that year, Cruise was apologizing to Lauer for acting “arrogant” and declining to answer interviewer questions about Scientology. 

But by that point, Cruise had weathered the worst of the storm he’d largely wrought upon himself. His M.O. was simple: keep quiet and make movies — and the movies he made were good. Thanks to a creative partnership with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, he revived the Mission: Impossible franchise and also dropped a few fan favorites, like Jack Reacher and Edge of Tomorrow . (The two also worked together on The Mummy , though, so clearly no one’s perfect.)

Action flicks have always been a core component of the Cruise oeuvre; but after a versatile first 20 years as an actor, his focus narrowed on them in the 2000s, and since then, that focus seems to have only hardened into a raison d’être . There’s little doubt Cruise loves these kinds of movies and the work that goes into not only doing the stunts, but building the characters and stories to make those set pieces worthwhile. But “Tom Cruise, Action Hero” is also an appealing prospect and PR win: If you’re an organization beset by controversy and accusation, why wouldn’t you want your poster boy constantly saving the world?

But action flicks have suited Cruise similarly well in this era of muted public association with Scientology. Amidst the ceaseless rise of green screen tech and CGI tricks, and the Marvel-ization of blockbuster cinema, Cruise remains one of the crazy, blessed few still willing to throw himself out of a plane in service of the noble causes of storytelling and entertainment. That willingness to fully embody Ethan Hunt or Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is a great way to make people not necessarily forget, but stop worrying so much about L. Ron Hubbard, or Xenu, or Shelly Miscavige. Or from wondering, when was the last time Tom Cruise saw his daughter? 

Cruise would’ve probably kept chugging along like this, but Covid-19 added a new dimension. When audio leaked in late 2020 of Cruise upbraiding Mission: Impossible crew members for not following pandemic protocols, the overall reaction was less shock, more awe. His dedication to making this movie was absolute, imbued with a clear-eyed understanding of the existential threat Covid-19 posed to the film industry. He backed up those words with the fight to keep Top Gun: Maverick off streaming and ensure it safely landed in theaters. He was handsomely rewarded with box office receipts, rave reviews, and respect from his peers. “You saved Hollywood’s ass,” Steven Spielberg told him at an Oscars luncheon earlier this year, “you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously.” 

Even at the height of his public association with Scientology, The Movies were like a kind of religion for Cruise. In 2002, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences needed someone to validate the existence and value of film and the film industry after 9/11, it called on Cruise , and he delivered. You can see shades of it as far back as 1984 , two years before his introduction to Scientology, in the way he discusses movies as a vehicle for betterment and serenity: “I’m interested in my personal growth, what’s going to make me happy. Not how much money am I gonna make, not what film is gonna really make me more visible.”

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As for the rest of us, we seem to have reached a cordial stalemate with Cruise. We’ve delayed his reckoning — maybe forever, maybe only for now — allowed him to float above the level of a Mark Wahlberg, or worse, a Mel Gibson. And that’s because, as much as Tom Cruise, Action Hero and Savior of the Movies is good PR, it’s also who he is, who he’s always been. Despite everything else he believes, he still believes in The Movies.

There’s a famous tidbit about how Thomas Cruise Mapother IV spent a year in seminary school as a teenager before he started acting. Tom Cruise has always insisted Thomas Mapother was never actually close to becoming a priest, but the episode still encapsulates the zealous streak in his character, an irrepressible yearning for knowledge and understanding, his belief in, or need for, a higher calling or power. And before he found an outlet for all that in Scientology, he found it in acting and making movies. It’s still there. The proof is everywhere, even when he’s just looking a camera dead in the eye, smiling, and saying , “I love my popcorn. Movies, popcorn.” 

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Tom Cruise and an Explosive Scientology Book

Mike Rinder, former Church of Scientology executive, talks about leaving the church, ‘Top Gun,’ his new book, and more

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Matt is joined by Mike Rinder , former senior executive of the Church of Scientology. They discuss the moment he decided to leave Scientology, Tom Cruise’s current standing in the church, the impact of Top Gun: Maverick , the internet’s damning influence on the future of Scientology, and more—all detailed in his new book A Billion Years: My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology .

Email us comments, questions, or ideas at [email protected]

Host: Matt Belloni Guest: Mike Rinder Producer: Craig Horlbeck Theme Song: Devon Renaldo

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Tom Cruise and Scientology

In the past seven years, the church has poured at least $45 million into the former Gilman Hot Springs resort. In the foreground is the $18.5-million management building that includes a wing of offices for church leader David Miscavige.

A close view of “Bonnie View,” a $9.4-million mansion that ex-members say was constructed for the expected return of late church founder L. Ron Hubbard. Church officials say the mansion is simply a museum to commemorate Hubbard’’s life and house most of his possessions.

Receptionist Charlotte Heldt at Golden Era Productions. The artwork behind her depicts Scientology’s “Bridge to Total Freedom,” the church’’s path to enlightenment.

Inside Golden Era Productions, staffers produce nearly all the printed materials for the church. Here, a foil is pressed onto a lecture binder cover that will be used for a CD of one of Hubbard’’s speeches that has been translated into German.

Hubbard invented the “e-meter” as a device that could measure the spiritual clarity of his followers.

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GILMAN HOT SPRINGS, Calif. — Nearly 30 years ago, the Church of Scientology bought a dilapidated and bankrupt resort here and turned the erstwhile haven for Hollywood moguls and starlets into a retreat for L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer who founded the religion.

Today, the out-of-the-way 500-acre compound near Hemet has quietly grown into one of Scientology’s major bases of operation, with thriving video and recording studios, elaborate offices and a multimillion-dollar mansion that former members say was built for the eventual return of “LRH,” who died in 1986.

Like the previous owners, the church also has used the property as a sanctuary for its own stable of stars. It is here, ex-members say, that Hollywood’s most bankable actor, Tom Cruise, was assiduously courted for the cause by Scientology’s most powerful leader, David Miscavige.

Scientology has long recruited Hollywood luminaries. But the close friendship of these two men for nearly 20 years and their mutual devotion to Hubbard help explain Cruise’s transformation from just another celebrity adherent into the public face of the church.

The bond between the star and his spiritual leader was evident last year when the two traded effusive words and crisp salutes at a Scientology gala in England. Calling Cruise “the most dedicated Scientologist I know,” Miscavige presented him with the church’s first Freedom Medal of Valor.

“Thank you for your trust, thank you for your confidence in me,” Cruise replied, according to Scientology’s Impact magazine. “I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more tolerant, a more compassionate being outside of what I have experienced from LRH. And I’ve met the leaders of leaders. I’ve met them all.”

Founded in 1954, Scientology is a religion without a deity. It teaches that “spiritual release and freedom” from life’s problems can be achieved through one-on-one counseling called auditing, during which members’ responses are monitored on an “e-meter,” similar to a polygraph. This process, along with a series of training courses, can cost Scientologists many tens of thousands of dollars.

As Scientology’s highest-ranking figure, Miscavige, 45, has found in Cruise, 43, not just a fervent and famous believer but an effective messenger whose passion the church has harnessed to help fuel its worldwide growth.

“Across 90 nations, 5,000 people hear his word of Scientology — every hour,” International Scientology News proclaimed last year. “Every minute of every hour someone reaches for LRH technology … simply because they know Tom Cruise is a Scientologist.”

Cruise and Miscavige declined requests for interviews.

A Scientology spokesman, Mike Rinder, called them the “best of friends,” men who’ve achieved great success through “their force of personality and their drive to excel.”

At the same time that Cruise’s increasingly vocal advocacy of Scientology has drawn attention to his faith, it has collided with his career. While promoting “War of the Worlds” this year, the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, grew concerned that Cruise was talking too little about the movie and too much about Scientology and his wide-eyed-in-love fiancee, Katie Holmes, who turns 27 today.

Their romance generated even more buzz when Holmes was seen in the nearly constant company of Jessica Rodriguez, who is from a prominent family of Scientologists. Holmes, who said after becoming engaged to Cruise that she was embracing Scientology, described Rodriguez as a close friend, though she was widely seen as a church-appointed companion.

Unlike Holmes’ embrace of the church, Cruise’s is not new. Long before he sprang onto Oprah’s couch, jabbed an accusing finger at “Today” show co-anchor Matt Lauer and blasted Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants, Cruise undertook intensive Scientology study and counseling at the church’s compound, according to current and former Scientologists.

The vast majority of Scientologists train at the church’s better-known facilities, including those in Hollywood and Clearwater, Fla. Cruise also has trained at those locations, but for much of his studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he headed to Gilman Hot Springs.

He stayed for weeks at a time, arriving by car or helicopter, according to ex-Scientologists who saw him there on repeated occasions. The former resort, 90 miles east of Los Angeles, was an ideal place for Cruise to get out of the spotlight while focusing on his Scientology training, ex-members say.

Described by ex-members as the church’s international nerve center, the property is largely concealed from outsiders by tall hedges and high walls. The complex’s barbed-wired perimeter and driveways are monitored by video cameras, and motion sensors are placed around the property to detect intruders, ex-members say. Some also remember a perch high in the hills, dubbed “Eagle,” where staffers with telescopes jotted down license plate numbers of any vehicle that lingered too long near the compound.

Behind the compound’s guarded gates, Cruise had a personal supervisor to oversee his studies in a private course room, ex-members say. He was unique among celebrities in the amount of time he spent at the base. Others visited, they said, but only Cruise took up temporary residence.

“I was there for eight years and nobody stayed long at all, except for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman during that period,” said Bruce Hines, who clashed with Miscavige and left Scientology in 2001 after three decades in the group.

He said he once provided spiritual counseling to the actress before she and Cruise divorced. Kidman, who had taken Scientology courses, has largely remained silent about the group in recent years. While at the complex, Cruise stayed in a renovated bungalow near a golf course on the property.

“It was sort of like an upscale country place,” said Karen Schless Pressley, a former Scientology “image officer,” whose duties included interior design and creating military-style uniforms for Scientology staffers.

While hardly palatial, the guest digs where Cruise stayed were luxurious compared with the drab apartments in Hemet, where Schless Pressley and hundreds of other base staffers lived, with few amenities and almost no privacy.

She said she and her ex-husband shared a two-bedroom unit with another couple and were not allowed to make personal phone calls. Schless Pressley said she left the church because of what she alleged were invasions of members’ privacy and other deprivations — a claim church officials say is unfounded.

At the same time, she and other former members say, Miscavige was seeing to Cruise’s every need, assigning a special staff to prepare his meals, do his laundry and handle a variety of other tasks, some of which required around-the-clock work.

Maureen Bolstad, who was at the base for 17 years and left after a falling-out with the church, recalled a rainy night 15 years ago when a couple of dozen Scientologists scrambled to deal with “an all-hands situation” that kept them working through dawn. The emergency, she said: planting a meadow of wildflowers for Cruise to romp through with his new love, Kidman.

“We were told that we needed to plant a field and that it was to help Tom impress Nicole,” said Bolstad, who said she spent the night pulling up sod so the ground could be seeded in the morning.

The flowers eventually bloomed, Bolstad said, “but for some mysterious reason it wasn’t considered acceptable by Mr. Miscavige. So the project was rejected and they redid it.”

Other ex-members say it wasn’t the only time that Miscavige put them to work to please Cruise.

Miscavige, a firearms enthusiast, introduced Cruise to skeet shooting at the compound, according to an ex-member who said the actor was so grateful that he sent an automated clay-pigeon launcher to replace an older, hand-pulled model. With Cruise due to return in a few days, Miscavige again ordered all hands on deck, this time to renovate the base’s skeet range, the ex-member said.

Dozens worked around the clock for three days “just so Tom Cruise would be impressed,” the ex-member said.

Rinder, head of Scientology International’s Office of Special Affairs, said such accounts were fabricated by “apostates,” members who had abandoned the religion.

He said he knew nothing about the skeet range incident. The wildflower planting never occurred and might be a confused version of repairs done after a 1990 mudslide, he said, adding that he couldn’t account for ex-members’ detailed recollections, including those of Bolstad, whom he specifically described as not credible.

“I don’t know exactly how to explain every one of these bizarro stories that you hear,” he said.

Rinder also disputed the contention by numerous ex-members that Cruise’s stays at the facility were exceptional, saying that many celebrity Scientologists had stayed there.

Cruise has made no extended visits to the complex since the early 1990s and has done 95% of his religious training elsewhere, Rinder said. Miscavige, he said, spends only a fraction of his time there and divides the rest of his time among offices in Los Angeles, Clearwater and Britain. He also stays aboard the Freewinds, Scientology’s 440-foot ship based in Curacao in the Caribbean, Rinder said.

However, voter registration records list the Gilman Hot Springs complex as Miscavige’s residence since the early 1990s and as recently as the 2004 general election. Rinder said the church leader simply had not updated his registration. Miscavige’s wife, father, stepmother and siblings also have resided at the complex, according to voting records and interviews.

The base has changed significantly in the years since Cruise spent long days in intensive training, from which he would occasionally take time out to ride dirt bikes or go sky diving with Miscavige, ex-members said.

For years, the property has been home to Golden Era Productions, where Scientologists work around the clock producing videos, audio recordings and e-meters, to be sold to church members. Rinder said nearly all of the members at Golden Era have signed billion-year contracts to serve the church.

Since 1998, the church has poured at least $45 million into expanding the facility and has bought dozens of nearby homes and vacant lots, public records show. The additions include an $18.5-million, 45,000-square-foot management building with a wing of offices for Miscavige.

The most striking building is a mansion that sits on a hill — uninhabited. Dubbed “Bonnie View,” ex-members say, it was built for the church founder, who died in secrecy on a ranch near San Luis Obispo amid a federal tax investigation that was dropped after his death. The mansion has a lap pool and a movie theater and was completed in 2000 at a cost of nearly $9.4 million, property records show.

“It’s high-end beautiful but not ostentatious,” decorated with Craftsman furniture, and draperies and other items that were designed to be changed with the seasons, Schless Pressley said.

Former members say they were told the mansion was built for Hubbard’s return.

“The whole theory of that house was that before Hubbard died in 1986, David Miscavige told us, Hubbard told him he was going to come back and make himself visible within 13 years,” Schless Pressley said.

The mansion, Rinder said, is merely a museum that contains most of Hubbard’s belongings.

“It’s preserved because the life of L. Ron Hubbard is extremely important to Scientologists,” he said.

Miscavige, who spent his teenage years as one of Hubbard’s cadre of young aides, rose to the head of Scientology after the founder’s death. Little known outside the organization, Miscavige in the early 1990s succeeded in gaining tax-exempt status for the church after he and another Scientology official personally approached the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service to negotiate a settlement.

As chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center, which holds the lucrative rights to the Scientology and Dianetics trademarks, he is the church’s ultimate authority — and is treated as such.

Miscavige’s living quarters and offices in renovated bungalows were modest compared with Bonnie View but reflected his taste for the best of the best, including state-of-the-art audio and visual equipment, said ex-members who viewed the accommodations.

“He’s about five-seven, and everything was built in proportion to his body size,” Schless Pressley said. “And everything was the best. You know how everybody has a pen cup on his desk? His pen cup had about 20 Montblanc pens in it.”

Shelly Britt, who joined Scientology at 17, said she was at the base for nearly 20 years before leaving the church in 2002. She said she worked directly with Miscavige much of that time. She recalled a Beverly Hills tailor visiting to measure Miscavige for his suits, and said moldings of his feet were taken and sent to London for custom-made shoes.

“His lifestyle so far exceeds anyone else’s. He had his own personal staff to handle his food and his room and his clothes and his ironing and his dogs,” she said. “His uniforms were specially tailored, and he had, like, Egyptian cotton shirts, special pants, special shoes, special everything. And it was all of the highest quality.”

Although Hines, Britt and other ex-members describe Miscavige as extremely demanding of those under his command, they say he treated Cruise “like a king.” Among other things, Britt said, Miscavige and his wife attended the star’s 1990 wedding to Kidman in Colorado and then followed up with frequent gifts.

“They don’t do that for every celebrity,” she said. “I remember one time I had to go pick up one of those big fancy picnic baskets and china and silver and take it out to Burbank to Tom’s pilot. I even took pictures of it so Dave and his wife could see I took it out to the plane.”

Rinder said that Cruise was treated no differently from other members and that his highly public support of Scientology came straight from his heart.

“It’s a reflection of his own decisions and personal conviction,” Rinder said.

The church’s belief in the power of celebrity to promote Scientology dates to its earliest days when, in 1955, the church issued “Project Celebrity,” a call to arms for Scientologists to recruit show business “quarry” such as Walt Disney, Liberace and Greta Garbo to help expand the religion’s reach.

Although the church failed to enlist those famous figures, it has been successful in attracting many others in addition to Cruise, including John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Juliette Lewis, Isaac Hayes, Anne Archer, Jenna Elfman, Beck and Chick Corea.

More than any other celebrity, Cruise has helped fuel the growth of the church, which claims a worldwide membership of 10 million and in the last two years has opened major centers in South Africa, Russia, Britain and Venezuela. Cruise joined Miscavige last year for the opening of a church in Madrid.

In his own spiritual life, Cruise has continued to climb the “Bridge to Total Freedom,” Scientology’s path to enlightenment. International Scientology News, a church magazine, reported last year that the actor had embarked on one of the highest levels of training, “OT VII” — for Operating Thetan VII.

At these higher levels — and at a potential cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars — Scientologists learn Hubbard’s secret theory of human suffering, which he traces to a galactic battle waged 75 million years ago by an evil tyrant named Xenu.

According to court documents made public by The Times in the 1980s, Hubbard espoused the belief that Xenu captured the souls, or thetans, of enemies and electronically implanted false concepts in them to keep them confused about his dirty work. The goal of these advanced courses is to become aware of the trauma and free of its effects.

At Cruise’s high level of training, ex-members say, devotees also are charged with actively spreading the organization’s less secretive beliefs and advancing its crusades, including Hubbard’s deep disdain for psychiatry, a profession that once dismissed his teachings as quackery.

“When you hear Tom Cruise talking about psychiatrists and drugs,” said one prominent former Scientologist who knows Cruise, “you are hearing from the grave the voice of L. Ron Hubbard speaking.”

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11 Celebrities Who Left Scientology, And 11 Who Are Still In It

Leah Remini isn't the only celeb who got outta there.

BuzzFeed Staff

1. Left: Jerry Seinfeld

Seinfeld was never officially a member of the organization, but he did explain on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast that he took a course way back in the day. "I did do a course in Scientology in, like, '75," Seinfeld said . While he didn't pursue things further, he did say that he "found it very interesting" and got some positives out of the class, like communication skills.

2. In it: Michael Peña

Peña — who has a long list of credits including End of Watch and Ant-Man — says he first joined Scientology because he feared he was drinking too much, and there was a program called Purification Rundown that helped him quit drinking. He also says that one of their other programs made him "a better actor" by helping with his "understanding of scripts." When asked by the Guardian about the organization's many controversies, Peña replied, "I don't read that stuff."

3. Left: Laura Prepon

Prepon joined Scientology around 1999, and was still in the organization when she joined the cast of Orange Is the New Black . However, she revealed in a 2021 interview with People that she is "no longer practicing Scientology," and hadn't been for about five years, meaning she quit sometime around 2016. Previously she had been vocal about praising the organization, but after leaving she spoke about it very little, which upset fellow former Scientologist Leah Remini , who has been very outspoken about the organization's alleged abuses.

4. In it: Elisabeth Moss

Moss — perhaps most famous for her role in The Handmaid's Tale — has been a Scientologist since before she was even a teenager. However, she doesn't speak about it much publicly. In an interview with the New Yorker , she opened up a bit, talking about the ways she feels Scientology is "misunderstood" or wrongly perceived. "It’s not really a closed-off religion," Moss said. "It’s a place that is very open to, like, welcoming in somebody who wants to learn more about it."

5. Left: Katie Holmes

Holmes famously filed for divorce from Scientology's poster boy, Tom Cruise, back in 2012. Holmes reportedly used burner cellphones and laptops in order to leave Cruise along with their daughter, Suri, without alerting Cruise or anyone else in the organization before the fact. It's unclear how involved Holmes was in Scientology during her marriage to Cruise, but simply by association, it's likely she was somewhat embedded.

6. In it: Juliette Lewis

In 2010, Lewis spoke with Vanity Fair about Scientology and said that she was a practicing Scientologist. Her father, Geoffrey Lewis, was also a Scientologist, so she was born into the religion. She appears to still be affiliated with the organization today.

(By the way, there are unconfirmed rumors that Brad Pitt went through some Scientology initiation and/or classes when he was dating Lewis but later decided not to continue, but since all of that is unconfirmed, Pitt won't be in this post.)

7. Left: Nicole Kidman

Like Katie Holmes, Kidman was affiliated with Scientology because of her marriage to Tom Cruise. Journalist Tony Ortega claimed that he spoke with Bruce Hines, Kidman's "auditor" in the church, and that Hines said Kidman took many classes and quickly ascended the ranks of the organization's spiritual ladder. But when Kidman split with Cruise, she stopped practicing Scientology, while her and Cruise's children, Connor and Bella, continued to.

8. In it: Kirstie Alley

Alley is one of the more outspoken celebrity Scientologists, frequently using Twitter and interviews to feud with Leah Remini over the organization and defend fellow Scientologists. For example, when former Scientologist Paul Haggis was facing sexual assault allegations, she tweeted , "Another one bites the dust...karma is a bitch," but took a different approach when Scientologist Danny Masterson was accused of sexual assault, saying she believes in "innocent until proven guilty."

9. Left: Jason Lee

The My Name Is Earl star had been a practicing Scientologist since the '90s, and his ex-wife Carmen Llywelyn even claimed that the religion was a major cause of their split. However, in a 2016 interview with a local paper in Denton, Texas (where Lee and his family moved), he revealed that he wasn't a practicing Scientologist anymore. "Being that we don’t practice Scientology, and that we aren’t particularly interested in opening religious centers in general, we have no plans to open a Scientology center," he said, when asked if he planned on starting a business in Denton.

10. In it: Giovanni Ribisi

Ribisi was raised by Scientologist parents, so he's been a Scientologist all his life. When asked about it, he told the Jim and Sam Show , "It's a personal thing; it's something that works for me, and I think it's that simple."

11. Left: Christopher Reeve

The late Superman actor revealed in his memoir that he did some "auditing" and took some Scientology courses when he was younger. However, he said that one class "completely devalued" his faith in the process. The class was supposed to bring up memories of his past lives, but Reeve basically re-told a story from Greek mythology and passed it off as his own past life experience, and, in his words, "got away with a blatant fabrication."

12. In it: Jenna Elfman

In an interview with Us Weekly , Elfman called the controversy around Scientology — recently intensified by Leah Remini's book and the HBO documentary Going Clear — "boring." Elfman told the magazine, "I know what I know, and how much it helps me ... I think that anything that works tends to get attacked."

13. Left: Mimi Rogers

Rogers' father was a friend of L. Ron Hubbard's, so she joined Scientology at an early age. Tom Cruise joined the organization after marrying Rogers, so it seems as though she was the reason he became a Scientologist in the first place. However, after her split with Cruise, Rogers left Scientology .

14. In it: Ethan Suplee

Suplee is married to Juliette Lewis's sister, Brandy Lewis, and was one of several people involved in My Name Is Earl who were involved with Scientology. Suplee is very quiet about his religion, so it's hard to tell just how devoted he is (or if he is still a Scientologist today), but he was reported to be in the organization back in the Earl days.

By the way, I used those older photos so that you'd recognize who he is. Here's what Suplee looks like today:

View this photo on Instagram

15. Left: Beck

Beck's relationship with Scientology is a bit contradictory if you go by what he's said in the past. His father was a Scientologist , and in the early 2000s, Beck married Giovanni Ribisi's twin sister, Marissa Ribisi, who is an active member of the church. During that time, Beck claimed that he was also a Scientologist. However, after his divorce from Ribisi about four years ago, Beck said, "I think there’s a misconception that I am a Scientologist. I’m not a Scientologist. I don’t have any connection or affiliation with it." It would appear that Beck either never was a Scientologist but was keeping up appearances since his wife was one, or was a Scientologist while he was married but left the religion sometime around his divorce.

16. In it: John Travolta

Although there were reports back in 2009 that Travolta might be leaving Scientology, he remains one of the most famous celebrities in the church today. Travolta was introduced to Scientology back in 1975 by one of his co-stars on The Devil's Rain , and told Kevin Hart on Hart's podcast, "At that moment it worked for me, and it still works for me."

17. Left: Neil Gaiman

While it seems like Gaiman himself never actively practiced Scientology, he did grow up in a very Scientologist household. The Good Omens author's father was the British spokesperson for the organization, and it's been reported — but not confirmed — that his ex-wife and sisters are members. However, Gaiman has outright denied that he is a Scientologist, so it may be that he never practiced, but just grew up surrounded by it. In any case, it's probably fair to say that Gaiman "escaped" Scientology, as many who grow up with parents in the church tend to be involved themselves.

18. In it: Nancy Cartwright

Cartwright — the longtime voice of Bart Simpson — has been an avid Scientologist for decades. She recently spoke to the Associated Press about the organization after the Going Clear book was published, saying, "I don't know what to tell you... It's called prejudice."

19. Left: William S. Burroughs

I don't know if we'd call Burroughs — author of Naked Lunch and member of the Beat Generation — a "celebrity" in the sense that other people on this list are, but the story of his involvement with Scientology is an interesting one. He joined the church all the way back in the 1960s, only about a decade after L. Ron Hubbard published Dianetics , but later grew disillusioned and even published his own book in 1971 called Ali's Smile: Naked Scientology . The book — and Burroughs' own public comments — accused Scientology of using authoritarian tactics to control its members, and even compared it to the CIA in terms of its secrecy.

20. In it: Danny Masterson

Masterson has been a Scientologist for many years, and remains an active member today. The organization has been closely tied to the ongoing sexual assault case against Masterson, as he is facing both civil and criminal complaints from women who were also members of the church of Scientology. Earlier this year, a judge ruled that the case would proceed to a jury trial and would not be resolved through the church's mediation process.

21. Left: Leah Remini

Remini may be the most outspoken former Scientologist, as she has published a book and made an Emmy-winning docuseries about her escape from the church, which she — in no uncertain terms — calls a "cult." Remini has been pushing for the organization to lose its tax-exempt status, and for some high-level members to face prison time. "There are lawsuits and I think they’re going to lose in the courts. They’ll have to pay for their sins," she told THR . "I believe that with every piece of me."

22. In it: Tom Cruise

I mean, you probably know the deal here. Tom Cruise is one of the highest-ranking members of the organization and in many ways may be the lynchpin of Scientology's pull in Hollywood. He has defended the church many times in past interviews, even calling psychiatry a "pseudoscience" in one of them. Seth Rogen, in his memoir, Yearbook , recounted a story when he and Judd Apatow met with Cruise about a project, and Cruise attempted to talk them into joining the religion. At this point, Cruise's name is practically synonymous with Scientology.

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How Scientology almost ruined Tom Cruise's career and the 'Mission: Impossible' franchise saved it

• 2006 was the lowest point in Cruise's career.
• Audiences had enough of him talking about Scientology and his relationship with Katie Holmes.
• Here, we chronicle Cruise's downfall and his rise back to stardom thanks to "Mission: Impossible."

In August 2006, it seemed like Tom Cruise was finished.

In an announcement unprecedented by the head of a major conglomerate, Viacom's chairman at the time, Sumner Redstone, publicly ripped into the star — who for years was one of the most profitable actors and producers at Viacom's movie studio, Paramount Pictures.

"We don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot," Redstone told The Wall Street Journal . "His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

It was likely the toughest and strangest time of Cruise's career. The then-43-year-old actor had a lifetime box-office gross of over $1.5 billion , but his flawless transition from young heartthrob to respected dramatic actor to gargantuan action star seemed to self-destruct as quickly as one of the messages his character, Ethan Hunt, received in the "Mission: Impossible" movies.

The studio he'd called home for 14 years was parting ways with him following a string of bizarre outbursts.

Now, in 2023, that all seems hard to imagine.

Cruise is not only the face of one of the biggest action franchises ever, but film, "Top Gun: Maverick," might just have saved Hollywood following the pandemic.

This month, he's back with another "M:I," Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1," yet another must-see title from one of the last movie stars the industry has left.

But there was a time the veteran actor's career was at a low point.

The couch jump, 'TomKat,' and Scientology

Cruise's strange downfall and subsequent rebirth as one of the most bankable movie stars all began with a seemingly innocent act of love.

When Cruise agreed to go on " The Oprah Winfrey Show " in May 2005 to promote his film, "War of the Worlds," it was a big deal. Cruise rarely did interviews, especially on daytime TV.

As Cruise walked onto Oprah's stage, the crowd went wild. Oprah playfully tousled Cruise's hair, and the actor was clearly in a great mood.

During the interview, Oprah brought up Cruise's latest love interest, Katie Holmes, who was off-stage where no one, especially the cameras, could see her. The excitement of talking about his new girlfriend led him to leap up on Oprah's couch with joy (he did it a second time for good measure).

After the couch-jumping, Oprah even got Cruise to chase down Holmes and get her to come onstage.

It seemed harmless at the time, but thanks to a very young internet video-posting site called YouTube, the image of Cruise on top of Oprah's couch became a pop-culture phenomenon. To some, it felt off. 

A month later, Cruise agreed to go on the " Today " show to continue promoting "War of the Worlds" and also talk about his religion, Scientology. When now-disgraced interviewer Matt Lauer talked about Scientology, and specifically to Cruise not agreeing with psychiatry, the tone changed. Cruise offered his opinion on Brooke Shields' use of antidepressants for postpartum depression .

Here's an excerpt of Cruise and Lauer's uncomfortable exchange:

Cruise: "Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?" Lauer: "The difference is — " Cruise: "No, Matt, I'm asking you a question." Lauer: "I understand there's abuse of all of these things." Cruise: "No, you see here's the problem: You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."

Later in the conversation:

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Lauer: "Do you examine the possibility that these things do work for some people? That yes, there are abuses, and yes, maybe they've gone too far in certain areas, maybe there are too many kids on Ritalin, maybe electric shock — " Cruise: "Too many kids on Ritalin?" Lauer: "I'm just saying — but aren't there examples where it works?" Cruise: "Matt, Matt, Matt, you're glib. You don't even know what Ritalin is. If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt. OK? That's what I've done. You go and you say, 'Where's the medical tests? Where's the blood test that says how much Ritalin you're supposed to get?'" Lauer: "It's very impressive to listen to you, because clearly you've done the homework and you know the subject." Cruise: "And you should. And you should do that also, because just knowing people who are on Ritalin isn't enough. You should be a little bit more responsible … "

Minutes later, the exchange was on loop all over the world.

Within a few weeks, Cruise had gone wild on Oprah and lashed out at Lauer, and by then, the tabloids had gone into overdrive with the Cruise-Holmes relationship, which they called "TomKat."

It was time for Cruise to get off the grid, but he couldn't.

Cruise's star power takes a hit

For most of his career, an experienced publicist named Pat Kingsley reportedly kept Cruise's private life out of the tabloids. According to a 2014 LA Weekly story, she even talked Cruise out of being more vocal about Scientology when he did press for his 2003 film "The Last Samurai."

A year later, according to the LA Weekly story, Cruise let Kingsley go after 14 years and formed a publicity team that included his sister, Lee Anne De Vette, and fellow Scientologists.

Now in a typhoon of backlash that Cruise had never experienced before, his team may have been too inexperienced to protect him.

Despite all the negative attention, "War of the Worlds" still went to No. 1 at the box office during its opening weekend ( $65 million ), and ended up with a worldwide take of $592 million.

It would be the last time a film starring Cruise would make over $500 million worldwide for the next six years .

Following the "War of the Worlds" release, TomKat was still daily tabloid fodder, especially with the news that the two were expecting a child. And then, in March 2006, Cruise went global again with the controversial "South Park" episode "Trapped in the Closet."

The episode originally aired in November 2005 and revealed what Scientologists believe is the origin of life, but it also depicted Cruise as an insecure person and played on rumors of his sexuality .

In the episode, one of the main characters on the show, Stan, is thought by Scientology to be the second coming of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard . This leads Scientologists, including Cruise, to flock to Stan's house to pay their respects. But when Stan insults his acting ability, Cruise hides in Stan's closet, leading to Stan saying, "Dad, Tom Cruise won't come out of the closet."

Comedy Central delayed reairing the episode in March 2006 because allegedly Cruise declared he would not promote "Mission: Impossible 3" unless Viacom (which owns the film's studio, Paramount, and Comedy Central) canceled the rebroadcast.

Cruise's reps denied he ever threatened not to promote the film.

The controversy made headlines all over the world and led "South Park" fans to declare they would boycott "Mission: Impossible 3" until Comedy Central aired the episode.

The episode was finally reaired in July of that year.

"Closetgate," in what it would become known, was the last straw.

The constant tabloid coverage of TomKat, plus rumors that Cruise and Holmes' relationship was allegedly arranged by the church had turned people off. (Cruise and Holmes married in November 2006 and divorced six years later.)

The bad press soon began to affect Cruise's career. "Mission: Impossible 3" opened in theaters in May 2006 and Cruise's Q score — the appeal of a celebrity, brand, or company to the public — was down 40% .

Though the film was No. 1 in the US on its opening weekend ( $48 million ), it lost appeal as the weeks passed. Ticket sales dropped 47% during its second week in theaters and 53% in its third week.

"Mission: Impossible 3" is the lowest-grossing film in the franchise to date, with a $400 million worldwide gross.

It was at this point that Redstone gave Cruise his wake-up call: "We don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot. His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

The long road back to superstardom

After being kicked off the Paramount lot, Cruise hired a publicist with more experience and buckled down for a comeback. He brought his production company over to MGM and took partial ownership of the iconic United Artists studio.

Cruise also became less vocal about Scientology in public, though he was apparently still very much involved privately. In 2008, a Scientology-produced video went viral on YouTube of the actor explaining what the religion meant to him.

Cruise hit the pause button on doing action movies, turning to dramas like "Lions for Lambs" and "Valkyrie."

In between those films, he agreed to star in pal Ben Stiller's 2008 comedy " Tropic Thunder " as the overweight, bigger-than-life movie exec Les Grossman. It was the best move Cruise had done in years. In doing something so out of character, he began to win back fans.

"Tropic Thunder" reunited Cruise with his former studio, Paramount. Although Cruise's production company was kicked off the lot, it didn't mean he couldn't still be cast in the studio's films. The wheels were now in motion for Cruise to get back on Paramount's good side so he could make more "Mission: Impossible" movies.

Being a hit in "Tropic Thunder," the biggest comedy of the year for Paramount, was a good starting point.

Director J.J. Abrams, who directed Cruise in "Mission: Impossible 3" and was in Paramount's good graces after directing the studio's hit "Star Trek Into Darkness," was also working to get Cruise back in the franchise.

In the summer of 2010, news broke that Cruise would be starring in "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol," with Abrams as producer. But this installment in the franchise would not be titled "Mission: Impossible 4," because the idea was that the film would be a refresh on the franchise, with Cruise stepping aside as the lead and giving way to rising star Jeremy Renner.

Cruise didn't get the message.

Back in the Ethan Hunt role, Cruise cemented his place in the franchise by scaling the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, without a stunt double.

That, and the other insane stunts featured in the film, led to "Ghost Protocol" earning the biggest worldwide box office in the franchise's history — $695 million . It was also the second-highest earning film for Paramount in 2011, just behind "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."

Following "Ghost Protocol" it wasn't all box-office wins for Cruise. " Knight and Day " and the " Jack Reacher " franchise didn't do as well as expected. And he could not help Universal's Dark Universe get off the ground as 2017's "The Mummy" bombed at the box office.

However, he laid the seeds of what could be another profitable franchise with 2014's "Edge of Tomorrow, which — even with a slow start when it opened — ended up passing the domestic $100 million mark (the first time in nine years that a non-"Mission: Impossible" Cruise film hit that landmark number) and only grew in popularity when it got onto home video and streaming.

And then there are the "M: I" movies.

In 2015, "Rogue Nation," with its insane stunt of Cruise hanging from the side of a plane as it took off, earned over $682.7 million worldwide and was the top-grossing film for Paramount that year. And 2018's "Fallout" did even better, taking in over $791 million worldwide .

Despite Alex Gibney's explosive 2015 HBO Scientology documentary "Going Clear," in which Cruise is criticized for being the face of the controversial religion, Cruise remains one of the world's top movie stars. 

And with "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" out this month, it doesn't seem likely that he'll be knocked off that mantel anytime soon.

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Scientology film director ‘surprised’ there hasn’t ‘been a reckoning’ for Tom Cruise

‘going clear’ filmmaker alex gibney claimed the ‘top gun’ star is ‘not the kind of ambassador for scientology that he used to be’, article bookmarked.

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The director of the Scientology documentary Going Clear has said he is “surprised” there hasn’t been a “reckoning” for Tom Cruise .

The Top Gun: Maverick star is one of the highest profile members of the Church of Scientology , having joined the controversial religion in the 1980s.

Alex Gibney is a filmmaker known for directing the 2015 film Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief .

The film, which was vehemently denounced by the Church of Scientology upon its release, made a number of shocking allegations about the organisation, involving claims of abuse inflicted upon members and misconduct among its leadership. Representatives of the church denied the allegations.

Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine in a new interview, Gibney was asked what it was like to see Cruise endure as the “King of Hollywood”.

The interviewer begins by suggesting that Cruise “hasn’t had to answer a single question about [his involvement in Scientology] in the eight years since Going Clear ”.

“I agree,” replied Gibney. “And I’m kind of surprised. I think he took a step away, so he’s not the kind of ambassador for Scientology that he used to be — not like he was back in the day when he was making [2005 blockbuster] War of the Worlds and had a Scientology tent on the set.

“Being a star is super important to him,” he continued. “I agree, there hasn’t been any reckoning for him. It’s surprised me.”

The Independent has contacted a representative of Cruise for comment.

Earlier this year, Judd Apatow took aim at Cruise’s links to Scientology in a series of jokes while hosting the the Directors Guild of America Awards.

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“Every time he does one of these new stunts, it does feel like an ad for Scientology,” joked the comedy mogul. “I mean, is that in Dianetics? Because there’s nothing about jumping off a cliff in the Torah.”

At the Golden Globes in January, Cruise was also roasted for his association with the Church , as host Jerrod Carmichael made reference to Shelly Miscavige, the wife of Scientology leader David Miscavige who has not been seen in public since 2007.

“Backstage, I found these three Golden Globe awards that Tom Cruise returned,” joked the comedian. “I think maybe we take these three things and exchange them for the safe return of Shelly Miscavige.”

The Church has denied that Miscavige is missing. Last year, the LAPD issued a statement confirming that officers had personally made contact with Shelly Miscavige in 2014, and they had subsequently closed the missing persons investigation.

Gibney’s latest project, Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker , is out now on Apple TV+.

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Entertainment | To be a superstar again, Tom Cruise downplayed…

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Entertainment | statewide poll shows runaway support for prop. 36 measure to toughen theft, drug crime penalties, entertainment, entertainment | to be a superstar again, tom cruise downplayed scientology as his ‘driving force,’ report says, in recent years, being associated with the controversial church of scientology has become a liability for stars such as cruise and john travolta, who used to talk openly about their dedication to the organization.

But to accomplish this feat, Cruise didn’t just line up the right director, insist on the use of “practical effects” for the thrilling aerial sequences or demand that the film only open in theaters. Cruise also had to downplay what a new report says has long been the actor’s “driving force” to be a Hollywood hero: His devotion to the controversial Church of Scientology.

The organization, founded by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1953, “appeals to the sort of worldview Cruise embodies,” Vox said . “The world is under attack from evil forces, Scientology teaches, and all that stops them is one good man who’s not going to let petty rules get in his way.”

As Vox and other outlets have reported, being associated with Scientology has become a P.R. liability for stars such as Cruise and John Travolta, who used to talk openly about their dedication to the celebrity-friendly organization. Scientology has been accused of being “a pyramid scheme at best and at worst, alleged to be an abusive cult profiting from forced labor and human trafficking,” Vox said, citing lawsuits and reports from former members.

Over the years, the church has repeatedly and strongly denied accusations that it has financially exploited its members or engaged in other forms of abuse. It says these allegations have been concocted by disgruntled former members and that its critics are engaging in a form of religious bigotry.

Nonetheless, Cruise’s popularity plummeted in the mid-2000s after he indulged in some high-profile oversharing about Scientology and his personal life, according to Vox and other outlets. He jumped on Oprah Winfrey’s couch to declare his love for third wife Katie Holmes and publicly railed against Brooke Shield’s use of anti-depressants to alleviate her postpartum depression. In 2008, Cruise appeared manic and laughing in a leaked Scientology recruitment video, talking about how the church inspired him to become a savior figure in everyday situations.

By 2011, Wired declared that Scientology is one reason “no one takes Tom Cruise seriously anymore.” More negative publicity for Cruise and Scientology came the following year after Holmes suddenly filed for divorce. Stories emerged about how Holmes was eager to retain full custody of their daughter, Suri, and save her from Scientology’s influence. It’s also been reported that Cruise has since had little contact with his daughter because she and her mother didn’t become Scientologists.

Scientology is trending… It's a REMINDER that Tom Cruise chose this religion over his daughter pic.twitter.com/63CXhWeTDf — Neo Jane (@Neo_Jane8) July 22, 2022

The divorce opened up the floodgates for more “damning” reporting on Cruise’s connections to Scientology and his close friendship with leader David Miscavige, Vox said. A 2012 Vanity Fair exposé looked at the way Cruise allegedly relied on the church to find his next girlfriend after his split from Nicole Kidman, while Lawrence Wright’s 2013 book, “Going Clear,” reported that Cruise benefitted from Scientology ordering its members to fix up his homes or vehicles.”

In the 10 years since his split from Holmes, Cruise has worked “hard to change the narrative,” Vox writer Constance O’Grady has said. He has stopped his oversharing and almost turned himself into “a blank,” IndieWire reported . He rarely gives interviews and only talks to journalists if they agree to not ask him questions about his religion and family, Vox said.

One notable exception was in 2016 when a reporter for ITV managed to catch Cruise at the premiere of his film, “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” and ask him about Scientology, The Guardian reported. 

Cruise replied in general terms, saying, “It’s something that has helped me incredibly in my life. I’ve been a Scientologist for over 30 years. It’s something that is, you know … without it, I wouldn’t be where I am. So, it’s a beautiful religion. I’m incredibly proud.”

As more information about the organization’s alleged abuses has become public, through such vehicles as Leah Remini’s A&E show, “Scientology and the Aftermath,” “no Scientologist wants to be put in a position having to respond to questions about it,” Remini’s co-host, Mike Rinder, said to the Bay Area News Group in May.

Indeed, it’s hard to see Cruise these days letting himself be put in the same position as Elisabeth Moss. The star of “The Handmaids Tale” was pressed to explain her dedication to Scientology while sitting for an otherwise glowing New Yorker profile that was published in April.

For the publicity blitz for “Top Gun,” Cruise has avoided these kinds of one-on-one situations with reporters, while still generating enthusiastic headlines by landing a helicopter on an aircraft carrier at the film’s San Diego premiere, or gallantly escorting Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, into a theater in London.

Cruise’s effort to change the narrative has mostly been successful. He’s enjoying a late-career renaissance, with “Top Gun: Maverick” raking in both money and accolades. Writers also have hailed Cruise as the “biggest movie star in the world,” while serious talk has emerged that his performance in “Top Gun” could put him in contention for an Academy Award for the first time in more than 20 years, according to Vanity Fair.

“Maverick is not Cruise’s best performance, sure,” said Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich. “But as a distillation of everything that has made Cruise a generation-defining star, Maverick is pretty much perfect. If the Academy wants to finally award Cruise a statue, it’s not likely there will be a better opportunity to do so.”

Then again, Rich points out why a modern Oscars campaign could be challenging for an actor who has long “been protected by his tower of mega-fame and Scientology.” He’d need to “to embark on some kind of authenticity tour,” Rich said.

For megastars, that usually means addressing past scandals and personal demons in at least one major interview that’s guaranteed to go viral and shape the conversation about them. When Brad Pitt was in contention for a best supporting actor Oscar for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” he generated a lot of public good will by opening up to the New York Times and other outlets about his  struggles to overcome alcohol abuse, toxic masculinity and his painful divorce from Angelina Jolie.

It probably wouldn’t be so easy for Cruise to let go of his tightly controlled public image. “It’s one thing for Cruise to fly onto an aircraft carrier or hold court in front of a crowd in Cannes, and another entirely to open up for the kind of profiles or roundtable conversations that are ever-present in modern Oscar campaigns,” Rich said.

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Tom Cruise’s Commitment to Scientology Questioned By L.A. Community: He Used to Be a ‘Huge Presence’

Tom Cruise ’s ongoing commitment to Scientology is once again being called into question, as insiders exclusively tell In Touch that he’s way less vocal or reliant on the beleaguered faith than ever before – and going out of his way to build a new life for himself outside of it.

“Tom is only in L.A. every six months or so but he used to be such a huge presence among the church community and at the church facilities and gatherings in Hollywood and in Los Feliz and that’s simply not the case now,” a source close to L.A.’s Scientology community exclusively tells In Touch . “It’s clear he comes to L.A. when he has movie business stuff to attend to but if he needs to practice Scientology, he’s doing it out of Florida, if at all.”

The source says that Tom, 61, doesn’t “relish spending his precious downtime with Los Angeles Scientologists” as most are “mixed up in the entertainment business or still trying to ‘make it.’”

“He’s got bigger and better things to do. But it really takes the air out of the Scientology community in L.A. that was once his home base,” the insider explains. “You also see him chasing after women who clearly have no interest in Scientology, which is very telling about where Tom’s heart truly is at the moment. How great for the church would it be if Tom actually dated a longtime, true-blue member? But that’s not what’s happening at all!”

Tom, who discovered Scientology through his first wife, Mimi Rogers , in 1986, has become one of the religion’s most famous faces. Scientology “is a religion that offers a precise path leading to a complete and certain understanding of one’s true spiritual nature and one’s relationship to self, family, groups, Mankind, all life forms, the material universe, the spiritual universe and the Supreme Being,” according to the organization’s official website.

According to the religion, the ultimate goal is “true spiritual enlightenment and freedom for all.”

“It’s something that has helped me incredibly in my life. I’ve been a Scientologist for over 30 years,” Tom said about the religion in a rare public statement in 2016. “It’s something, you know, without it, I wouldn’t be where I am. So it’s a beautiful religion. I’m incredibly proud.”

Deal of the Day

In 2004, the actor was awarded the Freedom Medal of Valor, which is awarded to those who have done “humanitarian work that reached a larger global population,” according to The Guardian.

“I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist and it’s something you have to earn,” he said during his speech. “If you’re a Scientologist, you see life, you see things the way that they are. In all its glory, all of its complexity. The more you know as a Scientologist, you don’t become overwhelmed by it.”

The religion has had its negative effects on Tom’s personal life. It was reportedly one of the main reasons for his divorce from Katie Holmes , as the actress didn’t want their daughter, Suri , to be a member any longer.

“I know now [Katie] did what she did … because she had to protect her daughter,” former Scientologist Leah Remini commented on the split in her book, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology .

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How Scientology Protected Tom Cruise and John Travolta—and Banished Nicole Kidman

In this exclusive excerpt from his riveting memoir “A Billion Years,” former Church of Scientology senior exec Mike Rinder writes about the church’s courting of Hollywood celebs.

Mike Rinder

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty

Mike Rinder served as a senior executive within the Church of Scientology from 1982-2007, both on the board of directors and as head of their Office of Special Affairs, lording over the cult-like religion’s public image. He often acted as the public face of Scientology, speaking to the media and putting out PR fires.

Since leaving Scientology in 2007, he’s become one of the world’s premier Scientology whistleblowers, appearing in the HBO documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief , co-hosting the Emmy-winning A&E docuseries Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath , and currently co-hosting the Scientology podcast Fair Game (also with Remini). His new memoir, A Billion Years: My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology , out Sept. 27 from Simon & Schuster, chronicles his time within the shadowy organization, the alleged abuses he witnessed, and his dealings with its leader David Miscavige.

In this exclusive excerpt from A Billion Years , Rinder writes about Scientology’s web of celebrities.

One thing Hubbard wouldn’t have wanted omitted was his brushes with celebrities. He was fascinated by them, and he name-dropped constantly, claiming association and interaction especially with Hollywood figures even during his time as a writer of pulp fiction. This fascination continued into Scientology, where he began to see them as a means of gaining publicity and acceptance. He even had a list of “target” celebrities to be lured into Scientology to help make it popular, and in the early ’70s he created the Celebrity Centre—a Scientology organization dedicated to the recruiting of celebrities in Hollywood. Miscavige also believed in the value of celebrities, and devoted a lot of time and attention to them. What was important to Miscavige became the priority for his underlings. –Mike Rinder

My days were endless, crammed with keeping track of Scientology’s enemies, conducting programs to neutralize them, putting out fires on the internet, and dealing with the constant celebrity issues.

Simon & Schuster

Perhaps the strangest celebrity encounter I had was with Michael Jackson. I became the go-to person in Scientology for Lisa Marie Presley during her marriage to Jacko. Her mother, Priscilla, had become involved in Scientology when Lisa Marie was young, and so she had been raised a Scientologist. She enlisted me in her efforts to convert Michael to Scientology, or at least to convince him to accept it. I gave them both a private tour of the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition. Throughout the tour, Michael was extremely paranoid. He repeatedly dove to the floor, whimpering that he had seen someone taking photographs of him through the windows, though there was no line of sight to any publicly accessible location. Lisa Marie laughed it off and explained that he was always worried about the paparazzi. He was so soft-spoken I could hardly hear him, and his comments and questions were disjointed and childish. She had told me she thought Michael understood her because he had grown up in the media spotlight and never really had a childhood, similar to her own experience as the daughter of the King. But it was not to last—they divorced in 1996.

In March 1995 I flew to Wichita, Kansas, to attend the grand opening of a special Scientology mission. Miscavige had been pushing hard for celebrities to become more active in promoting Scientology, and Kirstie Alley was the first to take the step of putting money into opening a mission in her hometown. After the 1982 mission holder fiasco, few people had stepped up to open new missions, which had diminished the flow of new recruits into Scientology. Celebrities doing so would popularize the idea again. Alley was a longtime Scientologist who credited Scientology with curing her drug addiction. She had become a star on Cheers and was close friends with John Travolta, who had been at the top of the Scientology celebrity heap before Tom Cruise, though his career was now on a downward trajectory at the time when Cruise’s was heading to the stratosphere.

Travolta in fact piloted us all on his Gulfstream from LA to Wichita. I sat across from his wife, Kelly Preston, and played cards with Isaac Hayes and Lisa Marie Presley in the back (they would subsequently be persuaded to open a mission in Memphis). Kelly stunned me when she told me she had lived in Adelaide during her teen years, just a mile from where I lived, and had attended the sister school of the all-boys school where I had spent many years.

Tom Cruise didn’t attend, as he was shooting Mission: Impossible , but his presence in the Scientology orbit loomed larger than ever before. He was the biggest star in the world, and Miscavige was using this to his advantage. Despite the IRS victory, the German government still refused to recognize Scientology, believing the organization contradicted the country’s values and constitution. The idea of creating a world of supermen (Clears) and replacing wog law and government with Scientology principles cut too close to the bone of the earlier master race and its “Deutschland über alles” thinking for their liking. Miscavige wanted a campaign conducted against Germany, based on the Hubbard dictate of always attacking: in this case, claiming that the German government was persecuting Scientology just like the Nazis had persecuted the Jews. I was instructed by Miscavige to get Hollywood powerhouse lawyer Bert Fields, who was Cruise’s attorney, to help out. With Tom’s blessing, Bert took the cause of the supposed persecution of our religion in Germany personally. In January 1997, he bought a full-page ad in the International Herald Tribune designated “An Open Letter to Helmut Kohl,” signed by many of his clients and friends, including Goldie Hawn, Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Stone, and others, decrying the acts of the German government against Scientology. The country stood its ground, but the attempt did prove the mettle in Tom Cruise’s star power.

Tom Cruise speaks during the inauguration of the Church of Scientology in Madrid, Spain, on Sept. 18, 2004.

Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty

With Tom as Miscavige’s most important asset, the actor’s concerns became Scientology’s concerns. When Cruise became aware of an unauthorized biography by British author Wensley Clarkson, Miscavige told Cruise, “I will take care of this for you.” I was dispatched to London with Scientology in-house lawyer Bill Drescher to deal with the publisher and make sure nothing negative appeared in the book. Yes, a church lawyer and the head of the Office of Special Affairs were acting on behalf of Tom Cruise, paid for by the Church of Scientology. With a lot of persistence and veiled threats, we persuaded the publisher to allow us to “review and correct” anything related to Scientology in the manuscript. We went to the Blake Publishing offices in West London and collected a copy of the manuscript from the editor. We took it back to our room at the Savoy hotel and spent two days cleansing it of anything negative in return for a promise not to sue. In truth, the book didn’t reveal anything new, but it did contain some of what we considered the usual “inaccuracies” about Scientology—calling the E-Meter a lie detector and saying that Scientologists believe in aliens and that it costs a lot of money. In the overall scheme of things, had we done nothing to the manuscript, it would have made no difference to Scientology or Cruise, but it was another “see what I can do for you” feather in Miscavige’s cap with Cruise.

In 1997, cracks started to show in the relationship between Cruise and Miscavige during the filming of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut . Costars Tom and Nicole were effectively cut off from the world for a year as the notorious perfectionist Kubrick demanded reshoot after reshoot on the highly secretive closed set in London. Losing the day-to-day interaction with Miscavige and spending his time with Nicole had an effect on Tom. He was not checking in with Dave or even returning his calls. Miscavige, fretting that Nicole was pulling Tom out of Scientology, sent me to London to meet with Tom’s sister Lee Anne at the Dorchester hotel to try to find out what was going on. Lee Anne, a dedicated Scientologist following in the footsteps of her brother (he got his three sisters and mother in), claimed everything was fine and they were just busy, but Miscavige didn’t buy it.

Kelly Preston, John Travolta, and Priscilla Presley attend the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center 42nd anniversary gala held at the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center on Aug. 6, 2011, in Hollywood, California.

Ray Kachatorian/Getty

Not one to give up, Miscavige tasked Marty Rathbun with getting Cruise back in the fold. Rathbun began auditing Cruise under the direct supervision of Miscavige. As Cruise was gradually drawn back into the world of Scientology, he rededicated himself to the cause. This created a distance between him and Nicole. Rathbun worked with Bert Fields to hire infamous PI Anthony Pellicano to spy on Nicole and tap her phones. Rathbun also turned their two adopted children, Isabella and Connor, against Nicole by indoctrinating them into the Hubbard teachings of Suppressive Persons. When Tom and Nicole divorced, Miscavige was happy that the “negative influence” of Nicole was no longer dragging Tom away. Cruise thereafter became more fervent in his vocal public support of Scientology—and Miscavige.

While Marty was dealing with Cruise, I was tasked with the job of helping John Travolta with some public relations issues. Since the beginning of the ’90s, Travolta had been hounded by stories from various alleged male lovers, including one of his former pilots as well as a porn star. I met with John and his attorney, Jay Lavely, to help navigate these land mines. The National Enquirer reached out to Travolta and the church for responses. Realizing the potential PR damage a story of gay sex would have on the perfect Scientology couple of John and Kelly, we dug up dirt on the sources of the stories and threatened the media with lawsuits. The stories were shut down, and I became a trusted person in John’s life. Similar claims have continued to pop up over the years and they have been denied by Travolta or shut down. Gay allegations are land mines for Scientology. Scientology publicly claims it is not anti-gay (despite Hubbard’s writings to the contrary), yet the threat of a story describing a Scientologist as gay would cause panic internally because for a Scientologist, not being “cured” of homosexuality would indicate that the tech doesn’t work.

When convenient, our public statements were “We do not get involved in commenting on the personal lives of our parishioners, celebrity or otherwise.” In truth, we were very much involved in all aspects of their private lives. This was not reserved exclusively for the two big headliners, Cruise and Travolta. Kirstie Alley and her actor husband, Parker Stevenson, were brought to the Int Base to “resolve their marriage,” though Miscavige was not so interested in them personally—Kirstie was past her peak in Hollywood. I was the couple’s designated companion while they got their “marriage counseling.” I joined them for meals each day for the week or so they were there and engaged them in small talk. They ate in the tiny bar/café in the building that had been converted, theme-park style, to look like an old four-masted clipper ship, next to the large swimming pool reserved for Miscavige and his guests. Despite the circumstances, Kirstie was an entertaining mealtime companion—outrageous, funny, and sometimes inappropriately gross. Parker was an extremely pleasant man whose only apparent flaw was his lack of interest in Scientology. We didn’t talk about their marriage at all; that was off-limits. But I could tell Kirstie had decided there was no future for her with Parker and so the result was inevitable: divorce. Parker was “not into” Scientology. And to the organization, that was all that mattered.

Excerpted from A BILLION YEARS by Mike Rinder. Copyright © 2022 by Michael Rinder. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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READ THIS LIST

Celebrity Scientologists and those who left the church: Tom Cruise, Leah Remini, more

L . Ron Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology in February 1954 and since then, the controversial religion has been met with a lot of criticism for its “cult-like” beliefs.

However, many people, including several celebs, have turned to the faith for spiritual guidance.

Below are the stars who have remained loyal to the Church of Scientology — and those who quit the religion.

Tom Cruise is widely considered to be the celebrity poster child for Scientology. His first wife, Mimi Rogers, introduced him to the religion in 1986 and he’s been a devout follower ever since.

The “Mission Impossible” star is allegedly “ considered a deity within Scientology” and Leah Remini, who left the church in 2013, once said he is second in command to leader David Miscavige and considered “the savior of the free world.”

However, Cruise has reportedly felt “persecuted” for his beliefs because many of his life decisions have come under severe scrutiny — and Scientology has been said to be behind them.

The church allegedly facilitated the “Top Gun” star’s split from Rogers and helped him get together with his second wife, Nicole Kidman. Scientology has also been blamed for keeping Cruise from his daughter Suri , whom he shares with his third wife, Katie Holmes, and whom he has not seen in 16 years .

Holmes, who was raised Catholic, divorced Cruise in 2012 and did not want Suri to be a Scientologist to “protect” her from the controversial religion.

Remini had been part of the Church of Scientology since childhood. Her mother, Vicki Marshall, introduced her to the religion .

Page Six exclusively reported in July 2013 that Remini quit the church after years of being allegedly subjected to “interrogations” and “thought modification” because she reportedly once asked about leader David Miscaviage’s wife, Shelly Miscavige, who had not been seen in public since 2007.

The “King of Queens” alum then launched a crusade against Scientology after leaving to expose their alleged misdeeds.

In 2016, her docuseries, “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath,” which told the stories of former church members, premiered on A&E. It ran for three seasons.

Remini then sued the Church of Scientology in August 2023, claiming they had stalked, harassed her and caused emotional distress.

The church denied any wrongdoing in a statement and called Remini’s allegations “lunacy.”

John Travolta was raised Catholic but converted to Scientology in 1975 at age 21 after his former “The Devil’s Rain” co-star introduced him to the religion.

“He was extremely unhappy and not doing well,” Joan Prather said at the time, per the Hollywood Reporter .

After signing up for the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist Course at the Celebrity Centre, Travolta reportedly boasted that his career had taken off.

The “Grease” star has been a staunch defendant of Scientology over the years. The Church was widely criticized following the deaths of his close relatives, which many believed could have been avoided .

In 2009, Travolta’s son, Jett, suffered a seizure at age 16 that led him to fall and fatally strike his head on a bathtub at a hotel. The Church of Scientology reportedly discouraged the use of medication for seizures.

Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston, then died in August 2020 at age 57 after a secret breast cancer battle .

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It’s unclear if she received treatment, as Scientologists teach that through “Dianetics,” church founder Hubbard’s official theory about the religion, auditors within Scientology can treat and even cure some of their mental and physical diseases. 

Travolta, however, has praised the church for being there for him during difficult times, saying in 2015 after Jett’s death, “I’ve been brought through storms that were insurmountable, and (Scientology has) been so beautiful for me, that I can’t even imagine attacking it.”

Travolta’s longtime pal and “Look Who’s Talking” co-star, Kirstie Alley, was also a Scientology member.

After being introduced to the religion by a neighbor, the actress joined the church in 1979 in an effort to free herself from her cocaine addiction .

Alley told “Entertainment Tonight” in 2012 that she was then admitted into Scientology’s rehab network, which reportedly promoted long hours in a sauna and an increased vitamin intake.

“Miraculously, and I do mean miraculously, I had one Scientology session and never did cocaine again,” she told the entertainment news program.

Alley died in December 2022 after a short battle with cancer at age 71. She reportedly received treatment at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla.

Tony Ortega of the long-running Scientology blog “The Underground Bunker,” told Page Six at the time that Scientology is “against psychiatric care and psychiatric drugs” but followers are “not stopped from seeking medical treatment if they have cancer,” adding members are not told to not go to the hospital.

Scientology members reportedly believed Alley achieved superhuman status , reaching OT VIII, which according to Ortega is the highest you can go on the “Bridge to Total Freedom,” Scientology’s primary action plan toward spiritual freedom.

Danny Masterson was raised in the Church of Scientology as his stepfather, Joe Reaiche, and mother Carole Masterson, were members of the Sea Org, the church’s clergy.

The “That ’70s Show” alum reportedly tried to woo some of his famous buddies, including Ashton Kutcher, into practicing the faith as well.

Before his May 2023 convictions for rape and 30-year prison sentencing thereafter , the Church of Scientology’s alleged secrets were aired out during the trial.

One of the accusers testified that a church official told her to put in writing that she would “take responsibility” for a 2001 sexual assault Danny allegedly committed.

Another claimed a church lawyer showed up to her family’s house and threatened to expel her from the congregation if she told police the “Men at Work” alum raped her.

After Danny was found guilty, it was rumored that he had gotten expelled from the church because he had been deemed a “suppressive person,” which is an individual whose behavior seeks to impede the spiritual progress of those around him, but the allegation was never confirmed.

Danny’s estranged wife , Bijou Phillips, also practiced Scientology alongside the actor.

However, the Daily Mail reported in January 2024 that the former model quietly left the church “a few weeks” after her ex was reportedly declared a suppressive person.

An insider said at the time, “It’s never an easy decision to leave Scientology because you face being ripped apart from your family and friends who are still members. 

Danny’s “That ’70s Show” co-star Laura Prepon was raised Catholic and Jewish, but later converted to Scientology in 1999.

Prepon revealed in August 2021 that she quit the church five years prior, noting that she and her husband, Ben Foster, who never practiced Scientology and whom she wed in 2018 , preferred meditation.

The “Orange Is the New Black” alum also said at the time that motherhood “forced [her] to look at a lot of things in [her] life that [she] wasn’t looking at before.”

Elisabeth Moss’ parents joined Scientology before she was born, so the “Mad Men” alum was raised in the church since childhood. She is currently still a member.

Moss has said that she thinks Scientology is “misunderstood,” telling the New Yorker in April 2022 that it’s “not really a closed-off religion.”

The “Handmaid’s Tale” star added at the time, “It’s a place that is very open to, like, welcoming in somebody who wants to learn more about it.”

Lisa Marie Presley was introduced to Scientology as a young child by her mother, Priscilla Presley, following her father Elvis Presley’s death.

Amid her struggles with drug abuse as a young teen, the songstress underwent three Scientology Purification rundowns , but they reportedly didn’t work.

Former top-ranking Scientologist Karen de la Carriere previously told The Post, “She would always relapse.” However, a Scientology rep denied Carriere had any firsthand knowledge of the situation.

Lisa Marie also raised her children , including Riley Keough, in the church, but she decided to leave the institution in 2014 after reportedly getting into an argument with Miscavige.

The “Lights Out” singer later opened up to Ortega about her time in the church, reportedly alleging that after she got Elvis’ inheritance at 25, church members “started grooming [her] to be this person who would go out and get everyone else in.”

She also said of Cruise, “I f–king hate Tom. I met him 20 years ago. I said I never want to be in a room with him again.” Lisa Marie died in January 2023 of complications from a small bowel obstruction .

Doug E. Fresh confirmed to Essence Magazine, per AllHipHop.com , that he practiced Scientology after being introduced to it by his ex-girlfriend and Hot 97 radio personality, Miss Jones.

“I am the first hip-hop artist to do it,” he told the publication at the time. “Miss Jones stopped going but I continued. I found it fascinating. It changed how I thought.”

The famous beatboxer concluded, “I’ve learned how to look at things and not judge them but respect them and use it in a way that people understand that I respect them, show them love and respect their reality.”

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Nicole Kidman Makes Rare, Heartbreaking Comments About Scientology and Her Children With Tom Cruise

Nicole Kidman seldom speaks about her two grown children with Tom Cruise—Isabella, 25, and Connor, 23, both of whom decided to live with their father and, like Cruise, practice Scientology, after the couple split in 2001. But promoting her new film, Boy Erased , in which Kidman plays the mother of a gay son ( Lucas Hedges ), has predictably sparked questions and prompted Kidman to break her silence on Isabella and Connor.

“They are adults,” Kidman told Australia’s Who magazine . “They are able to make their own decisions. They have made choices to be Scientologists, and as a mother, it’s my job to love them.”

In comments that would apply both to her role in the film and her own life, Kidman—who is also mom to two daughters, Sunday and Faith, with her husband, Keith Urban—went on to stress the importance of tolerance in mother-child relationships: “That’s what I believe—that no matter what your child does, the child has love, and the child has to know there is available love and I’m open here. I think that’s so important because if that is taken away from a child, to sever that in any child, in any relationship, in any family—I believe it’s wrong. So that’s our job as a parent, to always offer unconditional love.”

Her words are heartbreaking in the context of Kidman’s past statements about her children choosing to live with Cruise and to practice Scientology, which seems to have driven a wedge between them. (See the account from ex-Cruise friend and Scientology whistle-blower Leah Remini saying Isabella once referred to Kidman as a “fucking SP”—Scientology lingo for a “suppressive person” outside the religion.) Kidman told Who that she is very private about her eldest kids but is secure in the knowledge that being a mother is her “purpose”: “I know 150 percent that I would give up my life for my children.”

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Screen Rant

Icons unearthed: tom cruise creator on exploring the movie star’s personal & professional lives.

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Top Gun 3 Story Update Given By Producer Jerry Bruckheimer

Ghosts season 4 story update: showrunners confirm one spirit won't discover their powers in new episodes, supergirl's melissa benoist & 5 other actors join mindhunter star's netflix thriller series.

Vice TV and The Nacelle Company’s Icons Unearthed series steps away from film and TV franchises for the first time with Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise . Instead of exploring well-known properties like Star Wars, The Simpsons , and Marvel, Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise charts the rise of one of the world’s biggest movie stars. Starting with Cruise’s origins in movies like Taps and The Outsider, the series aims to highlight a different aspect of Cruise’s life in each of its six episodes, which have titles like “The Stuntman”, “The Producer”, and “The Mentor”.

Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise marks the 10th season of the series, which was created by The Nacelle Company founder Brian Volk-Weiss. Volk-Weiss has directed every season of the series, from the first Star Wars -focused series to Icons Unearthed: Spider-Man . He also led the charge on The Nacelle Company’s other well-known series like The Toys That Made Us and The Movies That Made Us .

Exclusive: Producer Jerry Bruckheimer provides an update on Top Gun 3's story and when the sequel will be made considering Tom Cruise's busy schedule.

Screen Rant interviewed Volk-Weiss about finally getting to dive into Cruise’s life and work for his series (Volk-Weiss revealed his desire to cover Cruise during a 2022 interview with Screen Rant about Icons Unearthed: Star Wars ). Volk-Weiss detailed the tricky task of choosing which of Cruise’s projects to focus on over the season’s 6 episodes and revealed the movie that inspired his interest in the subject. Plus, Volk-Weiss shared his account of meeting Cruise for the first time.

Brian Volk-Weiss Reveals The Impetus & Thought Process Behind Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise

“this was the first time we covered a human and not a franchise”.

Screen Rant: When I interviewed you for Icons Unearthed: Star Wars [in 2022], you told me you would love to make an Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise one day. How long have you been working on this idea and trying to make it come together?

Brian Volk-Weiss: I would say, honestly, 90 seconds or less into Top Gun: Maverick. My favorite movie of the century is Mad Max: Fury Road. My second favorite movie of the century is Top Gun: Maverick, and I’m not even that big a fan of the original Top Gun, believe it or not. It’s funny you said it was apropos Icons Unearthed: Star Wars. I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but there are a lot of similarities between Top Gun: Maverick and Star Wars. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I always loved Tom Cruise—A Few Good Men is one of my favorite movies of all time—but after Top Gun: Maverick, he might be the first person to dethrone Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington as my favorite actor of all time.

Top Gun: Maverick is pretty recent. How’d you decide on where to pick up and stop with Tom Cruise’s career?

Brian Volk-Weiss: It's really hard, and it's a really tricky formula, because you need to balance a lot of competing interests. Essentially, we need to tell the story. While in 2024, you might not hear people talking about Risky Business every five seconds, you really can't do a Tom Cruise documentary without talking about Risky Business. [That] also covers his life leading up to Risky Business. Consequently, you really can't do a doc about Tom Cruise without talking about Top Gun. So, you really need these story points. Then, this was the first time we covered a human and not a franchise, so there were different rules we had to follow. What we tried to do with Tom Cruise is break him down into sections of his life. There’s the guy who comes to Hollywood and ends up dominating—that’s section one. Section two is about how Tom Cruise decided he wanted to win Oscars, which he never did as an actor, so you can’t do that section without talking about Rain Man. Then, there’s Tom Cruise becomes Jackie Chan, so there’s that part of his career. We broke the rule here, [but] I’m really into failure. I find failure a very interesting topic. Tom Cruise has had some interesting failures. Eyes Wide Shut is a failure on many levels. I think it’s a failure as a movie, and that’s subjective, but I think it’s undeniable that during the two years he spent making that movie—in possibly some of the most bizarre circumstance anybody has ever mada movie in—he lost out on a lot of other jobs. What’s very interesting about Tom Cruise, that I hope we were able to capture, is that as talented as he is, he really is a businessperson. He was very smart about when he would go back to Mission: Impossible or [make] Top Gun: Maverick. He’s had this really interesting career where, other than Steven Spielberg, very few people have been able to balance commerce with entertainment [like that]. That’s what we tried to capture with this season, and that premise really affected how we picked the movies that we picked.

The Series Touches On Cruise’s Personal Life

“it affected the movies he made”.

Did you have to make a decision about how much to even attempt to talk about his personal life?

Brian Volk-Weiss: I don’t think you can do something like this without talking about his personal life, because the personal life affected his career. He and Spielberg didn't talk for, I think, 20 years after the Oprah couch thing. Spielberg said War of the Worlds would've done another 50 million [dollars] had he not done that. His personal life with Scientology and his various marriages are a part of who he is. It's a tiny part of our series, we don't go crazy into it, but it affected the movies he made. After War of the Worlds, he made these strange—strange for Tom Cruise—movies, and a lot of them are now retroactively perceived as classics. Oblivion was absolutely not a classic when it came out. It barely made a profit. He made weird [choices] not compared to other movies but compared to all his other work. Eyes Wide Shut is a good example. He’s made some choices that didn’t work before, but you understand why he took the swing. That’s what we tried to balance in the episodes we picked and in telling the story of the human that he is, and you really can’t do that without talking about Scientology and his various wives, because they affected the movies he made.

Cruise Is “Insanely Intense”, According To His Collaborators

But also a driving force behind the scenes.

You spoke with a lot of his collaborators. Did you feel like there was a prevailing opinion about him that was shared by everyone?

Brian Volk-Weiss: Everybody loves this guy. Everybody said the same thing. We interviewed people who worked with him when he was 21, and we interviewed people who worked with him when he was 58. They said the same thing: He's insanely intense—and by the way, I’ve met him. I’ll tell you a great story—it can make you a little bit uncomfortable and on edge, but you get used to it and realize he will have a lot to do with why you’re working on something that will be important forever. I’m paraphrasing, [but that’s the idea]. And he really took care of people. This is obviously in the doc, but we interviewed Jay Mohr [for the] Jerry McGuire episode. Tom Cruise is doing a scene with Jay, it’s Jay’s scene, and Tom is just standing there so they could do the scene together. All Tom has to do is just stand there and do nothing, [but] while Jay is saying his lines, Tom Cruise, under the frame of the camera, is [making hand motions], telling him where to stand so he looks his best. Everybody had stories like that. They were like, “Is it nice that the biggest celebrity on Earth is there at 4:30 in the morning and you feel like you also need to be there at 4:30? No, that's stressful.” But he was prepared, he was organized, he did his research, and he wanted to do a lot of takes. I didn’t hear anything about him being an a**hole. A couple of people were like, “He did his Scientology thing on his own time, and we knew he was doing it, [but] he never was pushing it on anybody.” A couple of people went out of their way to tell us that. And we got very frank stuff. We interviewed the first AD of Top Gun: Maverick—it was all Tom. Tom was there at every meeting. He was there at every rehearsal. He was the one who came up with the schedule for how many flights they could do a day. He was the guy liaising with the military. That was the other thing that came up frequently. Imagine you’re a mid-level executive at the Navy, and you answer the phone and it’s like, “Hey, this is Tom Cruise. Nice to meet you. We’re trying to shoot on the leeward side of the base six months from now, and they’re saying that because of this other thing going on that day, we can’t shoot on the leeward side. Is it possible for us to come maybe two hours early and shoot what we need to shoot? We’ll be out of there by the time the parade practice is going.” This is Tom Cruise. This is literally Tom Cruise calling about minutiae that, if I’m being honest, if I were producing a movie, I don’t know if I would be making the call about.

Volk-Weiss Shares An Unforgettable Tom Cruise Interaction

It involves volk-weiss, dane cook, and dax shepherd.

You said you met him once?

Brian Volk-Weiss: Not to brag about my resume, but I did produce the classic Jessica Simpson film Employee of the Month. The last day of filming, we're saying goodbye, [and] I'm with Dane Cook, who I used to manage. It's me and Dane, and we're driving to the airport together. We're saying goodbye to Dax Shepherd, and Dax says something like, “So what are you guys up to?” Dane was like, “We’ve got to get back today because I'm doing the Tonight Show tomorrow.” Somehow it came up who the guests were, and it was like, “Tom Cruise is the other guest.” Dax goes, “If you can get away with it, try not to shake his hand.” We're like, “What?” Dax was always deadpan—I would bet you everything I owned [that] he was joking. He was like, “Yeah. When you shake his hand, the only way I can describe it is, it’s like he's trying to tear it off of your shoulder.” We all thought he was full of s***. Another weird Dax Shepherd joke. I remember this like it was 10 minutes ago. We walked into the green room, and the way the green room works is there’s a huge room for everybody, and then the dressing rooms are connected to it. Dane walks in—and you have to remember that Dane Cook is the biggest comedian in the world at this time—and Tom Cruise is standing right there. He sees Dane and is like, “Oh my God. Dane Cook. I’m obsessed. I have so many questions.” [Tom] runs up to him and—I seriously thought about turning around and walking out—it looked like he was trying to tear his arm off of his shoulder. Then, [to me], he’s like, “Hi, I’m Tom,” and you’re literally sitting there going up and down while he is shaking your hand. It was the weirdest thing ever. If he wasn’t famous, I [still] would’ve been telling this story forever. It would have been my weird handshake guy story. And true to his part, he asked Dane a billion questions. By the end of it, I was starting to say to myself, “I think Tom Cruise is thinking of trying standup comedy.” He was asking so many questions. “How do you do this? How do you do that? How do you know when to wrap up?” He had so many logistical questions. Dane kept saying, “Oh, that’s a good question, actually. I never thought about that,” and was walking him through it. Even if he wasn’t famous, I never would’ve forgotten the interaction.

About Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise is a lot of things - movie star, producer, stuntman, an unstoppable force who never gets tired. From his breakout role in Risky Business with his unforgettable slide and famous grin, to saving the movie business with Top Gun: Maverick, Tom has pushed himself and those around him to make the best movie possible. After rising to superstardom in the high-flying Top Gun, Tom focused on working with top directors. With his carefully chosen roles he tested himself as an actor, in search of an elusive Oscar. From there he moved on to producing his own successful franchise built on doing his own stunts. But after a few public false steps he nearly lost it all. His unshakable commitment to excellence and willingness to put his body on the line quickly lands him back on top, and a return to the skies would take him farther than ever before.

Icons Unearthed: Tom Cruise airs Wednesdays on Vice TV.

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Icons Unearthed is a documentary television series that digs up some hidden secrets behind film history's biggest blockbusters. Each episode focuses on a new film or franchise and sees prominent industry experts, film cast/crew, and more as they try to debunk rumors and lift the veil on the cinema magic that made these movies the juggernauts they became.