Tom Cruise’s former publicist, Pat Kingsley, admitted in a new interview that she asked the Top Gun actor to stay away from talking about Scientology publicly.
Kingsley worked with Cruise for over a decade before he fired her, meeting him on the set of A Few Good Men in 1992. He said he “grilled” her before calling her and offering her the job to represent him. “I was quite taken with him,” she recalled.
In a candid interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kingsley talked about her attempts to get Cruise to stop talking about the controversial church he is associated with.
“I did have that conversation with him, about cooling it [with the Scientology talk],” she said. She also said the church did try to get involved, “but it was taken care of very early in the game.”
She explained, “I felt that they were involved in a story I was doing on Tom, and I said, ‘It’s not your story, it’s Tom’s. You have to step aside.’ And they did.”
Kingsley, who has fond memories of working with Cruise, even saying they “could almost finish each other’s sentences,” said she remembers a particular conversation with him before his press tour in 2003 for the film The Last Samurai.
“‘Scientology is fine. You want to do a tour for Scientology? Do a tour for Scientology. But Warner Bros. is sponsoring this tour,’” adding, “He did not discuss Scientology on that European tour.”
Last month a deposition revealed that Cruise admitted Scientology played a part in his split from ex-wife, Katie Holmes.
image: ABC