tom cruise church of scientology

Did Tom Cruise Ditch Scientology? Here's Why We Think He Didn't

W hen it comes to stars involved with Scientology , no one comes to mind quite like Tom Cruise. For that reason, when reports emerged that he may have left the controversial religion, it certainly came as a surprise. However, we doubt an exit ever happened. 

Murmurings of Cruise's departure from the Church of Scientology began back in July 2021, when The Sun revealed that he hadn't been seen at Britain's Scientology headquarters in East Grinstead --- despite his involvement in developing the property, and the fact that he was living in the U.K. At the time, him not visiting the manor was attributed in part to him being stressed over the making of "Mission: Impossible -- Dead Reckoning Part One." However, a source also told The Sun that some felt he may have had a change in his religious beliefs. 

Two years on from The Sun's piece, questions were once again raised as to whether the actor had cut ties with Scientology. This time, sources told the  Daily Mail that he still hadn't been seen at the organization's headquarters. Considering the fact that Cruise is generally seen as the face of Scientology, that was a shock. However, a few months later, he debunked the very idea that he had left. Enter Cruise arriving at HQ in a helicopter, press in tow. 

Read more: Celebs Who Can't Stand Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise Was Photographed Flying Into The Headquarters

A few months after sources spoke to the Daily Mail about Tom Cruise's absence from the East Grinstead property, he made his triumphant return to it -- and not without a little drama. The day he was photographed flying himself (because, yes, Cruise knows how to do that)  into the property was also the day of the International Association of Scientologists' 39th anniversary bash. However, the press didn't show up to document the event. Au contraire, the  Daily Mail arrived to document a protest taking place against the religion. Catching the actor arrive to the sprawling manor in his helicopter was just the cherry on top.

If Cruise was trying to move away from the religion he's been so closely tied to over the years, showing up to such a high-profile event probably wouldn't have been his first port of call. That's only part of what made this particular appearance a clear sign that he's as devoted to Scientology as ever, though. The protest covered by the Daily Mail had been planned well in advance, and even got media attention in the weeks leading up to it. In fact, The Guardian even reported that it was set to be the biggest protest against the religion on British soil. 

For that reason, we'll go ahead and say Cruise knew there was a chance he'd be spotted entering the event, and that it would quiet anyone who thought he was planning on leaving the organization. No ex-Scientologists here!

Tom Cruise Seems To Speak Less About Scientology

While we have no doubts that Tom Cruise is still very much part of the Church of Scientology, it is worth noting that he has stopped speaking about it quite as much. In fact, a number of outlets have pointed out that while he was once known for his outspoken support of the organization, he barely acknowledges it in public these days. 

Back in the early 2000s, Cruise was so enamored with his religion that he did a Rolling Stone interview from the Scientology Celebrity Center in Hollywood. He also wasn't shy speaking about it with other stars. Case in point: in his 2021 memoir, "Yearbook," Seth Rogen recounted the time Cruise attempted to recruit him and Judd Apatow while they were at a business meeting. So, what changed? Back in 2015, a source revealed to The Wrap that his press team had started demanding that his religion not be brought up in interviews. The revelation came around the same time as the anti-Scientology documentary, "Going Clear" was released, so it's not surprising that the actor and his camp wanted to avoid bad press. However, in the years since, it seems that no-go demand has remained in place. 

So, has Cruise left Scientology? It certainly doesn't seem like it. If anything, it seems he just wants to distance himself from the controversy that comes with the church. 

Read the original article on Nicki Swift

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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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Tom Cruise reveals the ‘weirdest’ conspiracy theory he’s ever heard about himself

Mythology surrounding the star is often linked to his faith in the mysterious church of scientology, article bookmarked.

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Mission: Impossible : Dead Reckoning director Chris McQuarrie has recalled asking Tom Cruise what the “weirdest story” he’d ever heard about himself was.

Cruise has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories over the years thanks, in part, to his ties with the mysterious and controversial Church of Scientology .

In an interview about the 61-year-old action star for The Times , McQuarrie, 54, said Cruise told him the strangest myth he’d heard was that people on set “were not allowed to look me in the eye”.

Cruise’s M:I costar Simon Pegg added to the publication: “I’ve been able to hack my way through all the bizarre mythology that surrounds him.

“On one side he’s Tom Cruise – this enigmatic film star everyone wants to know about. And on the other, he’s just a guy. I like being normal with him.”

In a recent interview with The Independent , another of Cruise’s Dead Reckoning colleagues, Hayley Atwell, attested to Cruise’s normalcy.

She said: “I truly feel you could meet him and go: ‘He’s nice; he’s charming; he’s charismatic; he knows how to make people feel good about themselves. So that’s just a tactic for total manipulation, because he’s probably just an egocentric.’ Or whatever bulls*** people want to make up about people.

“But over time, you’re just watching him, going: he really works hard, he really cares, he’s really interested in people and wants to engage with them, and he believes in the power of cinema as much as he did when he was five years old.”

Cruise is Scientology’s most famous follower, having joined the organisation in 1980. The religion and its leader David Miscavige have been accused of bilking supporters for cash, separating members from their loved ones, and harassing and threatening journalists and critics.

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

Mission: Impossible is about to release its seventh outing, with the second part due to arrive in 2024.

Reviews for Dead Reckoning Part One have been glowing , with its score on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes currently sitting at 98 per cent after 112 reviews.

Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One is released in UK cinemas on 10 July.

Find The Independent ’s review of the film here .

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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’s Dark, Twisted Journey to Scientology’s Top Gun

As audiences take in Cruise’s latest hit, “Top Gun: Maverick,” top Scientology reporter Tony Ortega looks back on how the star became the Church of Scientology’s Maverick.

With Top Gun: Maverick debuting in theaters this week, Tom Cruise is available to the press again, which explains why I was seeing video of James Corden at 5 a.m. on a tarmac waiting to join Cruise in his personal jet aircraft.

The Late Late Show host’s antics on Cruise’s plane delivered the intended effect: Tom as cooler-than-you pilot really is like the superheroes he plays in the movies.

But for me, it had another connotation.

Seeing Cruise pilot his aircraft, I couldn’t help thinking of something Marc Headley told me several years ago.

Headley joined Scientology’s Sea Org as a child, signing a billion-year contract before working 365 days a year, cloistered at one of the organization’s secretive compounds known as “Int Base” near Hemet, California.

Around 1990, Headley explained in his excellent book about that period, Blown for Good , Cruise had come to the base to learn Scientology “auditing,” its version of counseling, and Headley was chosen to be his guinea pig.

Years later, in 2009, the FBI began an intense investigation of conditions at the base, interviewing dozens of former Sea Org workers, including Headley, who by that time had escaped.

The FBI was so serious about its investigation of the slave-like conditions at the base, Headley and other former Scientologists told me, that in the summer of 2010 the agency was making detailed plans for raiding the compound, rescuing workers, and seizing documents.

Headley says the special agents assigned to the investigation told him one of their main concerns was that Scientology leader David Miscavige , who lived at the base, would slip through their grasp.

So, planning for any eventuality, they tried to seal off all escape routes Miscavige might try to use—including, Headley said, the airplanes of his best pal, Tom Cruise.

The FBI agents told him they had taken the step of recording the tail numbers of Cruise’s planes that were at his private hangar in Burbank, California, just in case Miscavige tried to make an escape using them.

Ultimately, the FBI changed its mind about raiding Scientology and the investigation was dropped, for mysterious reasons. (Headley and former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder told me their version of what happened for a piece I wrote years ago. Also, even though I’ve published the full FBI investigative file at my website, Scientology continues to claim that there was never an investigation at all. The Church of Scientology did not respond to request for comment for this story.)

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Even if the raid was cancelled, I’ve never forgotten that the FBI figured that David Miscavige and Tom Cruise were so tight the Top Gun actor might use his piloting skills to jet his two-time Best Man to safety from law enforcement.

That isn’t something you’re likely to hear in all of the press celebration of Cruise’s new movie. Top Gun: Maverick is getting almost universally positive reviews (a notable exception that is worth a look ) and is poised to be Cruise’s biggest movie opening ever. We’ll be seeing a lot of him on our screens in the coming weeks.

And it couldn’t come at a better time for Scientology, which, all signs indicate, has been hit hard by the pandemic.

It isn’t the first time that Cruise has come to the church’s rescue at a crucial time.

In 1986, when actress Mimi Rogers began dating Cruise and first introduced him to Scientology, the controversial organization was at a critical juncture: Its founder and source of all its written “scriptures,” science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard , had died on Jan. 24 that year.

For a group so focused on one figure, the death of that person can be an extreme challenge. Would Scientology survive it?

Complicating things was that the person exerting himself to push aside others and take over the reins of Scientology was a 25-year-old who was known only to a small minority of the movement. David Miscavige had joined the organization as a child, and had quickly become a favorite of Hubbard, but for years he had amassed power in the rarefied upper reaches of Sea Org—away from view of the vast majority of Scientologists.

So, when Miscavige stepped forward on the stage at the Hollywood Palladium to announce Hubbard’s death to the hastily gathered crowd of Scientologists on Jan. 27, 1986, many of the people who were in the audience that night had never even heard of him.

Miscavige was still consolidating control of Scientology later that year when Mimi Rogers began bringing Tom Cruise around to a North Hollywood Scientology satellite office. Cruise was already a movie star, with films like Risky Business and All the Right Moves under his belt, and the first Top Gun had hit theaters that summer.

Cruise must have taken to Scientology pretty quickly, because he and Rogers tied the knot a few months later, on May 9, 1987. May 9 happens to be one of the most sacred days on the Scientology calendar, because it was on May 9, 1950, that Hubbard published the book that started everything: his turgid, bizarre look at the human mind called Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health . After its publication, Hubbard turned its popularity into a self-help empire that grew in fits and starts.

In 1955, Hubbard announced “Project Celebrity,” telling his followers that there would literally be a bounty on the head of famous actors and actresses brought into what by then he had decided was the “Church of Scientology” (so much for a “modern science”). Hubbard knew that attracting celebrities might help the organization seem more mainstream, and he encouraged members not to talk publicly about what was actually going on: Scientology was past-life therapy that promised godlike superpowers to those who could retrieve memories from millions or billions of years ago on other planets.

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There had been some victories for Project Celebrity since then, with John Travolta (1975) and Kirstie Alley (1979) being among the most well-known bought into the church. But Mimi Rogers had outdone the rest by bringing in a star of Cruise’s stature, marrying him on Dianetics Day 1987, and right when Scientology was on shaky ground following the death of Hubbard.

Just a few years later, Rogers was repaid by being told by Scientology’s leaders to walk away from her marriage to Cruise so he could pursue his new obsession, Australian actress Nicole Kidman .

Kidman wasn’t a Scientologist, but she tried to fit in. Her former Scientology auditor, Bruce Hines, told me that in only a couple of years she was able to rocket up to an auditing level known as “OT 2,” which is pretty astonishing and suggests Kidman was probably putting in daily work to go up the “Bridge to Total Freedom.”

But by 1992, Kidman changed her mind. She soured on Scientology, and not only pulled away from it but pulled Cruise with her . We only found out about this years later, but from 1992 to 2000, former high-ranking executives tell me, Cruise kept Scientology at arm’s length. Mike Rinder has spoken about how much this bothered Miscavige, especially while Cruise and Kidman spent November 1996 to June 1998 filming Eyes Wide Shut in London with Stanley Kubrick.

During this period, Miscavige kept an eye on Cruise with a spy in his household . In 1998, Cruise made a brief return to the Hollywood Celebrity Centre to take a course which had him sitting in a grocery store parking lot with Scientology official Tommy Davis, judging the “tone level” of people walking by, which Lawrence Wright wrote about in his excellent history of Scientology, Going Clear . But it wasn’t until Cruise broke up with Kidman in 2000 that he made his real return to Miscavige’s orbit.

Over the next three years, re-indoctrinating Cruise became Miscavige’s chief mission. And by 2003, Miscavige was ready to test out his newly-zealous celebrity minion.

That summer, Cruise traveled to Missouri to help Scientology hold a grand opening for a new headquarters for one of its numerous front groups, Applied Scholastics, which works to get L. Ron Hubbard’s materials into public schools .

Cruise continued to grow into the role of highly visible Scientology ambassador. The next year, in September 2004, he made his first and only appearance at the grand opening of a new Scientology “Ideal Org” in Madrid, Spain. The year before, Miscavige had begun a program of replacing older “orgs” (Scientology's word for churches) with gleaming new and very expensive “ideal” cathedrals, a project that continues today.

Although he had broken up with Spanish actress Penelope Cruz earlier that year, Cruise was invited to help Miscavige open the new Madrid building, and he even gave a brief speech in Spanish, which you can watch here . And it was also at this event that Cruise reportedly told Miscavige that he was having some trouble finding a suitable new girlfriend. The church leader then put his wife, Shelly Miscavige, in charge of a program that fall to audition actresses, some who were Scientologists and some who were not, without telling them that it was actually a tryout to be Cruise’s new mate.

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By this time, October 2004, Miscavige was thrilled with how dedicated Cruise had become, and that he was willing to be the public face of Scientology. So that month he rewarded Cruise by giving him special recognition at the annual gala held in England each October when a few exemplary church members are bestowed “Freedom Medals.” For Cruise, Miscavige made a special showing, with a 30-minute video extolling Cruise’s qualities—which included a 9-minute interview with the actor talking about the privilege of being a Scientologist. At the conclusion of the video, Miscavige gave Cruise the unique, larger medallion he’d had made just for him, the Freedom Medal of Valor.

Four years later, video from the event would be leaked to the public in one of Scientology’s most embarrassing PR disasters. But for now, Cruise was being celebrated as the most gung-ho Scientologist in the world.

Meanwhile, Shelly Miscavige’s project had produced a winner: An attractive British-Iranian Scientologist-actress named Nazanin Boniadi was selected from the auditions, and she dated Cruise from October 2004 to January 2005, when, Alex Gibney reported in his HBO documentary Going Clear , things soured. Nazanin admitted she was having a hard time understanding David Miscavige’s thick New Jersey accent, and it was giving her headaches. Scientology had Tommy Davis break up with her for Cruise.

Only a few months later, in April 2005, Cruise and Katie Holmes announced that they were dating, and it happened to coincide with Tom’s most visible (and most disastrous) attempts to be promote Scientology. After firing his longtime publicist and hiring his own sister, a Scientologist, Cruise was doing the rounds for Steven Spielberg’s film War of the Worlds . He openly clashed with interviewers in the U.S. and Australia over Scientology, most notably with Matt Lauer during an episode of Today , appearing arrogant and unhinged as he lectured Lauer about the deleterious effects of psychiatric drugs. (Scientology opposes modern mental health treatments with a white-hot fury.)

And while it didn’t appear to have any connection with Scientology, Cruise’s antics jumping on Oprah’s couch declaring his love for Holmes was seen by the public as a sign that the Scientologist actor had lost his marbles.

Mike Rinder and other former executives tell me that Cruise’s bizarre acts during 2005, with his attempt to so aggressively promote Scientology, was pure Miscavige. And it backfired badly. Cruise has never since been so vocal about his involvement in the church.

Like Kidman, Katie Holmes had no experience in Scientology but she was determined, at first, to be involved in it for Cruise’s sake. The couple welcomed a daughter, Suri, twelve months after they announced they were dating, in April 2006, and then were married that November in a castle in Italy .

It was at that wedding that King of Queens actress Leah Remini , who had grown up in Scientology, noticed that Miscavige, who was once again Cruise’s best man, was there without his wife, Shelly. When Remini asked about it, she was told by Tommy Davis that she didn’t have “the fucking rank” to ask such a question.

It turned out that a year earlier, at the end of the summer of 2005, Shelly Miscavige had vanished from Int Base , the secretive compound near Hemet, and was no longer appearing with her husband at Scientology events .

Katie Holmes, meanwhile, was such a dedicated Scientologist at that point, she wrote up a Knowledge Report complaining about how Remini had disrupted the wedding.

Like Kidman, Holmes tried her best initially to immerse herself in Scientology, only to grow away from it, and in the meantime the church experienced several very public disasters.

The video of Cruise talking bizarrely about what it meant to be a Scientologist (which was prepared for the 2004 awards ceremony) was leaked to the internet in January 2008 and became a sensation. When Scientology tried to suppress the video, it motivated the internet collective known as Anonymous to target the church with months of high-profile protests and trolling.

In early 2011, New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright revealed that the FBI had investigated Scientology in 2009-2010.

And the next year, 2012, Holmes decided she’d had enough of both Cruise and Scientology . At that point, with Suri turning 6 years old, she would have been old enough to begin early Dianetics courses. And Katie would also have seen Cruise’s older children, Isabella and Connor, going through Scientology auditing and interrogations.

How Tom Cruise’s Wedding to Katie Holmes Changed Scientology

Katie then made her famous escape from marriage in June 2012 while Cruise was in Iceland shooting scenes for Oblivion , his first collaboration with Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski.

Eleven days later, she and Cruise had worked out a settlement to end their marriage. Katie got primary custody of Suri, and Cruise got generous visitation rights. But in recent years he seems to have largely cut her out of his life.

People often ask me if Tom Cruise is being groomed to take over Scientology from Miscavige, or if he’s the No. 2 figure in the church. But that ignores the basic structure of the Scientology movement—that it is run by the Sea Organization.

The Sea Org is not a legal entity, but it has ultimate control of the church, and the captain of the Sea Org is David Miscavige.

If Miscavige left, another Sea Org official would take his place. But in order to qualify for the Sea Org, a Scientologist has to sign a billion-year contract and work around the clock for the organization for pennies an hour, a commitment that Tom Cruise is not likely to make.

Tom Cruise’s value to Scientology is not as an executive, it’s as an ornament. That’s always what the celebrities have been: symbols. But he’s the most important celebrity, and an incredibly important symbol for the church.

There are plenty of secretive, high-pressure groups that some people call cults, but there is only one Scientology. Why? Because of its celebrities, and primarily because of Tom Cruise. He is Scientology, as far as most of the public is concerned.

And if he were to leave and speak out like Leah Remini has? I doubt Scientology could survive it. That’s how important he is to it.

The tabloids, every few months, publish stories claiming that Cruise is leaving, but it is never backed up with any evidence.

In fact, in 2019, Cruise for the first time since I’ve been watching attended not one but two of those international events, both the LRH Birthday Event in Florida in March and the IAS gala in England in October. And there was evidence that suggested he took his children Isabella and Connor with him to the IAS event, again for the first time ever.

So, based on that, my feeling was that as of 2019, Cruise was more dedicated to Scientology than ever.

It was harder to get information out in 2020 and 2021 because Scientology had to stop holding its international events owing to the pandemic .

People often ask me if Cruise is only staying in Scientology because the church is blackmailing him with information he has given up in auditing sessions. But again, that misinterprets the facts. The real situation appears to be that Tom Cruise is a true believer. He really does believe that L. Ron Hubbard was the greatest human being who ever lived, and that David Miscavige is the greatest human being living today.

In the words of John Brousseau, who worked closely with both men for many years, “Tom Cruise worships David Miscavige like a god.”

I see no reason to change that assessment today.

Finally, Suri. There’s no doubt that the way Katie Holmes left Cruise in 2012 caused a huge public relations disaster for Scientology. That would make it possible that David Miscavige might have declared her a “suppressive person,” which would make Suri a “potential trouble source” because she’s connected to her SP mother—as is common among those who’ve defected.

We don’t know for sure if Miscavige made this determination. However, it’s pretty obvious that if Tom Cruise were not a celebrity, he would probably be instructed by the church to cut off contact with his ex-wife and Suri.

However, Tom is a celebrity, and the most important celebrity, and celebrities get to ignore those rules if they want. As Scientology’s most important celebrity, he could continue to be a part of Suri’s life he wanted to.

But for now, he’s once again the most successful movie star on the planet, and he will face only highly-controlled interviews where none of this history will be raised.

His popularity will be a huge boost for individual Scientologists, who will see the success of Top Gun: Maverick as a vindication of Scientology, even if the movie has nothing to do with it.

They love it when a Scientology celebrity gets positive press.

And Miscavige will be beside himself.

Tony Ortega

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