When Tom Cruise met Páidí Ó Sé by John Meagher Weekend Review Irish Independent July 7, 2012

Nicole was weaning Tom off Scientology during their chilled-out months in Ireland

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Nicole was weaning..

By John Meagher
Saturday Jul 7 2012

It was the autumn of 1991 and Hollywood had come to Dingle, Co Kerry, once again. More than 20 years after Ryan’s Daughter had put the town on the map, two of the biggest movie stars on the planet were shooting the most expensive film yet made in Ireland.

There was enormous interest in Far and Away’s Tom Cruise and his wife of nine months Nicole Kidman, not least in Páidí Ó Sé’s pub four miles up the road in Ventry. Cruise became something of a regular in the bar, where he appeared happy to shake off the shackles of A-list fame.

“He was a lovely, quiet fella — very unassuming,” Páidí Ó Sé recalled this week. “He would come in and play pool with the local lads. He loved sport, was obsessed with it. He took a great interest in me and my career and was very interested in the finer points of Gaelic football.”

Cruise had been introduced to Scientology by his ex-wife Mimi Rogers just a few years before, but he never uttered a word about L Ron Hubbard and his bizarre religious cult in Páidí’s pub. He didn’t even appear interested in the business of movie-making.

As Irish Independent sports columnist Billy Keane recalls, he was more interested in hearing tales of Kerry’s All-Ireland final exploits.

“With due respect to Páidí, Cruise knew more about him than Páidí did about Cruise.

“He was clearly very interested in sport and I remember one time he asked if he would have been too small to make it as an inter-county footballer.

“I think it was [the late Kerry GAA legend] Bernie O’Connell who said to him that he would have been too small to make it in any other county, but in Kerry he would have been fine because they had the players that were capable of playing the ball right into his hands.”

The Cruise that Ó Sé and Keane remember — a shy, yet warm and approachable 28-year-old who tended to favour soft drinks rather than alcohol when he was in the bar — cuts a different figure to the man who has been in the news all week because of the acrimonious end of his marriage to third wife Katie Holmes.

It’s been alleged that Holmes sought a divorce over fears that Cruise was pushing their six-year-old daughter, Suri, deeper into the strange world of Scientology.

And there have been several reports in the US media that spies from Scientology have been tracking Holmes and Suri’s every move in New York, something the church’s Californian HQ vehemently denies.

Today, Tom Cruise is the most famous of Scientology’s long list of celebrity devotees, someone who has spoken openly about how the church has transformed his life. But in 1991, when he was making Far And Away in Ireland, his membership of the church was little known to the wider public and his fame was exclusively derived from his star turns in such hit movies as Top Gun and Born on the Fourth of July.

Unlike his pronouncements on the controversial religion in recent years, Cruise was very guarded about Scientology in the early 1990s, preferring instead to let his films do the talking.

As well he might — by the time the Irish shoot of Far And Away kicked off on August 1, 1991, Cruise was the world’s biggest box-office draw.

In the months preceding the shoot, there was enormous interest in the film — then with the working title of The Irish Story — and in its stars.

Cruise and Kidman had married in Colorado on Christmas Eve 1990, having met during the filming of the critically panned car racing movie, Days of Thunder.

During the Dublin leg of the shoot, the pair tended to keep to themselves, dividing their time between lavish suites at the Westbury and Berkeley Court hotels. Some of the filming took place in Temple Bar — mocked up to resemble 19th Century Boston — and each morning the couple were chauffered by limo to the set.

An Irish Independent reporter, Joe O’Brien, who managed to gain access to the shoot, noted that in those rare moments when the couple could be seen off-camera they were utterly devoted to each other.

“Our boy Tom,” he wrote, “only has eyes for the beautiful Ms Kidman and he can’t keep his hands off her. Nor she him.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if there is someone employed on the set, amid all the Best Boys, Gaffers and Key Grips, to follow the happy pair around with a bucket of water.”

The feeling that the loved-up couple were on an extended honeymoon was evident at a press conference given at Ardmore Studios in Bray.

RTÉ presenter Cynthia Ní Mhurchú, writing for the Sunday Independent, noted that Kidman — then just 24 — exuded even more star power than her husband and seemed to be protective of him.

Years later, The Village Voice — the media organ that has been most trenchant in its criticism of Scientology — claimed that early on in their marriage Kidman had attempted to steer Cruise away from Scientology.

It’s said that during their 10-year marriage, Cruise had little contact with the church, save for “auditing” sessions — a central plank of Scientology which aims to erase “negative” thoughts — in 1993 and 1998.

It is thought that in the years after the split with Kidman, Cruise rekindled his early interest in Scientology and by the time he met Katie Holmes in 2004, his devotion was complete.

His Best Man at the wedding was David Miscavige, the enigmatic leader of the church and, in 2005, he attracted much controversy when he went public about his opposition to psychiatric drugs, a key tenet of Scientology.

That year he had dispensed with the services of his long-time publicist, Pat Kingsley, who had counselled him not to go public about his interest in Scientology, and replaced her with his sister, Lee Anne DeVette, who is also a Scientologist.

Cruise’s stock would soon take a battering thanks to the bizarre couch-jumping episode on Oprah, in which he declared his undying love for Katie Holmes, and his aggressive behaviour on the Today Show in which he criticised Brooke Shields for taking prescription drugs to help her post-partum depression.

Then, in 2008, a promotional video for Scientology in which Cruise talked about how the organisation has changed his life, was leaked online. Filmed in 2004, its distribution was supposed to be limited to Scientologists, but was made public by a deserter who had grown disillusioned with the church.

It has been speculated this week that Holmes, who grew up Catholic, had become concerned that Cruise planned to send their daughter to the strict, bootcamp-like Sea Org section of the church.

She had seen how his adopted children, Connor (17) and Isabella (19), had become devotees of Scientology and, for several years, had had limited contact with Kidman, whose antipathy towards the cult intensified post-split with Cruise.

Scientology attorney Gary Soter has denied reports that Suri would be sent to Sea Org, insisting that minors below the age of 16 are not admitted. He also said the organisation was not spying on Holmes or her child.

Now — in the biggest showbiz story of the year — Cruise and Holmes face a bitter battle over the custody of Suri. Curiously, each of the marriages to his three wives ended when the women were 33, leading some Scientology sceptics to suggest that the number has special significance to followers of Hubbard’s teachings.

But 21 years ago, it was all so different. “He just seemed like a normal guy but with an extraordinary job,” according to Páidí Ó Sé. “And he seemed to be a young man who was very happy, without a care in the world.”

– John Meagher
Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/nicole-was-weaning-tom-off-scientology-during-their-chilledout-months-in-ireland-3161237.html

More on Kidman and Scientology:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=CgqKA3w6T2U&NR=1