Photo: BEImages/Jim Smeal.
Juliette Lewis has an interesting theory about Tom Cruise.
Cruise was vilified by the media after he and Today host Matt Lauer disagreed over the use of anti-depressant drugs. The noted Scientologist is against the use of all drugs, and lashed out against Brooke Shields for publicly acknowledging her use of anti-depressants. That was all the way back in 2005, and Cruise's career has since recovered. But, for a while he couldn't make a hit movie to save his life.
Lewis, for one, thinks there was a larger conspiracy at play. When the actress and fellow Scientologist sat down with The Daily Beast recently, the subject of Cruise's blacklisting came up.
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“The mainstream media is funded by pharmaceutical companies," she said. "When you have the biggest movie star in the world at the time — Tom Cruise — coming out against anti-depressants and Ritalin and just saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you put a warning label on there?’… So, when Tom came out about that, I’ve never seen someone get torn down so hard, and they still brutalize him with Scientology pieces to this day.”
Lewis does have a point. Cruise is ridiculed for his religious beliefs far more than fellow Scientologists such as John Travolta (and even Lewis herself). But, a large part of the fallout in 2005 stemmed from the way Cruise delivered the information, rather than the information itself.
"'Matt. Matt, Matt, you don't even — you're glib," Cruise told a stunned Lauer at the time. "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, okay?" It was squirm-inducing television, and it changed the public's perception of Cruise forever.
Lewis fails to acknowledge the actor's combative nature that day, and instead goes on about the virtues of Scientology. “It’s a religious philosophy and self-help movement," she adds. "And you’ll never see a truthful word written about it in mainstream media.” (The Daily Beast)