If only Tom Cruise would ditch his cult

I keep reading that Tom Cruise is the Last Great Movie Star, as if he’s some noble but endangered animal. I think his people must be putting it about as part of the PR for Top Gun 2, though Lord knows what his peers make of it. Think of Tom Hanks, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, De Niro… all of them Oscar winners (unlike Cruise) and all with a better claim to being the Last Great Star.

Tom Cruise himself seems comfortable with the idea. He walks and talks like the L.G.M.S. – controlled, confident, impeccably dressed with just a hint of a helpful Cuban heel. But the higher his star rises, the odder it seems that no one mentions the cult he belongs to, or how it behaves. Former members of the ‘Church’ of Scientology have testified to bullying, blackmail, slave labour and a form of child abuse: separating children from their parents. This is the call-out era. No one can so much as retweet a joke without being cancelled. So where are the crowds with placards outside Top Gun: Maverick at the LA multiplex?

It’s not as if Tom’s a casual or junior member. In Scientologist circles he’s a sort of Hercules, half-man, half-god. He lives, at least part-time, in a two-storey penthouse of an apartment block built by a Scientologist, just a few feet from the organisation’s global HQ. His sisters and two older children (all Scientologists) live on the third, fourth and fifth floors. His very bestest friend, and two-time best man, is Scientology’s CEO, a pint-sized troll called David Miscavige, who runs the Sea Org, Scientology’s managing body. Miscavige is by all accounts (including his own father’s) a rage-filled narcissist with a hair-trigger temper. His former spokesman has said that his boss regularly screamed at him and beat him over 50 times.