What brought Tom Cruise to Scientology in 1986
It would take a movie star of Tom Cruise’s calibre to overshadow his ties to a cult like the Church of Scientology, especially when you consider that the most high-profile person talking about his ties to the controversial church is Tom Cruise himself.
Yet despite all that, we still think of him as… y’know, Tom Cruise, the biggest movie star in the world with vanishingly few rivals. The man trying to singlehandedly save movie theatres and y’know what, that’s a fight the mad bastard is winning. Never forget that Top Gun: Maverick made well over a billion dollars at the box office, fresh out of the Covid-19 pandemic. With a B.
While the Mission: Impossible pictures he made as an attempt to cash in on his status as the biggest star in the game kinda flamed out, the fact that his sheer drive was enough to get them made speaks volumes.
It seems that in the big 2026, he seems dead set on finally getting the Oscar he’s been gunning for with the mysterious Alejandro González Iñárritu picture Digger. Yet despite all that, the discussion of Scientology is never that far away. He’s not quite as gung-ho about rehabilitating the Church’s… shall we say, challenging, reputation as he was 20 years ago, but nowadays, he doesn’t have to. It’s as much a part of his image as that winning smile and frankly unnerving intensity.
So, how did his association with the church begin? Infamously, other famed practitioners like Elizabeth Moss and Giovanni Ribisi were born into the church and remain a part of it to this day. The likes of Beck and Juliette Lewis were born into it but managed to extricate themselves from it. Is Cruise one of them? Not quite, but neither was he one of the people cornered on the street and asked if he wanted some help with the stresses in his life by an overly friendly guy carrying a stack of L Ron Hubbard books.
No, instead, Cruise was introduced to the church by his first wife, actress Mimi Rogers. Her father, Phillip Spickler, was a high-ranking auditor within the Church. While information is thin on the ground about the organisation’s inner workings (understandably), many have gone on the record to say that the Church’s leader, David Miscavige, became obsessed with recruiting Cruise the moment he settled with Rogers. This was in 1986, the very same year that Cruise became the World’s most famous man with the first Top Gun.
Having the world’s biggest celebrity proselytising about your church would do numbers for your ratings, so Cruise got the star treatment. Personal meetings with Miscavige, tours around the offices, the kind of access to the higher ranks of the church that a regular person would have to wait decades for (not to mention pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for). I’m sure the fact that Cruise’s wife was all in on the church was the main reason that he signed up, but the star treatment must have helped.
Thus, Rogers must have felt pretty peeved by what (allegedly) happened next… Several ex-members of the church have gone on the record saying that the moment Cruise met and fell for his Days of Thunder co-star Nicole Kidman, they urged him to leave the church for her, because after all, there’s only one thing better than having one of the biggest movie stars in the world as a fully paid-up, fully on-board and card-carrying member of the Church of Scientology.
Having two of the world’s biggest movie stars as members.