A former Scientologist yesterday claimed she was quizzed about her sex life during an ‘audition’ to be Tom Cruise’s wife.
Anette Iren Johansen, 36, told how she was asked ‘very private questions’ during an interview in Copenhagen in 2005, just weeks before he started dating Katie Holmes.
A senior Scientologist demanded to know if she had any ‘sexual perversions’ and whether she had previously had any lesbian affairs or ‘gay sex’, she alleged.
‘Search for a bride’: Former Scientologist Anette Iren Johansen (left) has claimed she was among a number of women ‘auditioned’ to be the future wife of actor Tom Cruise before he married Katie Holmes (right)
The Norwegian was training to be a vet in Denmark when she joined the Church of Scientology in 2002 after it promised to help her mother recover from a serious illness.
As her involvement in the church increased, she says she was pressured to give up her studies and went on to feature in some of its training films.
In January 2005 – a year after Cruise had separated from his girlfriend Penelope Cruz – she was invited to what she initially believed was an audition for another video, but which turned out to be something ‘very different’.
A film crew of four turned up along with a make-up artist and hair stylist who made her look ‘very glam’, she told Australian magazine Woman’s Day. ‘They asked me so many questions about my life, my family background, everything I’d ever done in Scientology,’ she said. ‘Days later, the man who had led the audition phoned from Los Angeles and told me he needed to ask some “very private questions”.
‘He asked, “Do you have any sexual perversions?”.’ During the ‘extremely weird’ interview he also demanded to know if she had had any lesbian affairs.
Miss Johansen said she had no idea why she was questioned until last year when a US magazine reported how Scientology had held a number of similar auditions of women to find Cruise’s next wife.
The auditions for the role of Tom Cruise’s new wife allegedly took place at the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Center in Los Angeles
She said: ‘Every little detail was the same. There is no doubt I was auditioned to be Tom’s wife.’
Cruise got engaged to Miss Holmes in June 2005 and married her in November 2006. The couple separated last year amid claims that she filed for divorce because she feared Cruise would send their daughter Suri to a Scientology ‘boot camp’.
Another former Scientologist, Marc Headley, who claims to have seen a highlight reel of the women’s auditions, said he believed Miss Johansen’s interview was ‘absolutely’ to assess her as a potential lover for Cruise.
He said: ‘Those are the exact same questions that they were asking the other girls.
‘The reason the sexual question came up was that they had some girls with histories that weren’t so great. So they were being careful.’ Miss Johansen has since left the Church of Scientology because she claims that ‘terrible abuse’ is being committed within the organisation. She now lives with her boyfriend in Oslo.
British-Iranian actress Nazanin Boniadi is said to have been similarly ‘auditioned’ and even went out with Cruise for several months in the autumn of 2004.
Last night a Scientology spokesman said: ‘There was no project, secret or otherwise, ever conducted by the Church to find a bride [via audition or otherwise] for any member.’
