All posts tagged: Scientology

Scientology ‘speedrun’ TikTok trend has teens mapping Hollywood buildings

Scientology ‘speedrun’ TikTok trend has teens mapping Hollywood buildings

Published by Sam Flores

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is known for its colorful cast of characters. But even by those standards, the scenes of Jesus Christ and Sonic the Hedgehog racing past security guards employed by the Church of Scientology in recent days were a little bizarre. On Saturday afternoon, someone dressed as the Christian messiah was among the dozens of people in costumes and masks seen on a video forcing open the door of a Scientology building on Hollywood Boulevard after a tug-of-war with a security guard. The footage posted on TikTok and Instagram shows the group sprinting up and down stairs and clashing with black-shirted security guards, giggling and gasping to catch their breath while church members scream at them to leave. On their way out — as security guards approach armed with fire extinguishers — one of the sprinters stops and dances to celebrate their successful escape, a move reminiscent of a taunt from the video game Fortnite. For weeks, groups of people have barged into two of the church’s Hollywood properties, racing through hallways …

A TikToker’s Scientology “Run” Inspired a Trend. He Says It’s Too Far

A TikToker’s Scientology “Run” Inspired a Trend. He Says It’s Too Far

Published by Daniella Wilson

On March 31, an 18-year-old content creator who goes by the TikTok handle Swhileyy — pronounced “Swiley” — jogged through the lobby of a Church of Scientology building in Hollywood, laughing as a staffer told him to leave. He made it down a hallway, down a flight of stairs, ducked under a woman’s arm and pushed through an exit. The whole bit lasted under a minute. The clip exploded. Swhileyy says the video has pulled roughly 90 million views to his own accounts over the past month; folded in with reactions and reposts, he estimates the total is “in the hundreds of millions.” A little under a month later, the Scientology “run,” known more generally among the creator community as “deep runs,” has hardened into a format — and, he says, into something he no longer recognizes. The trend is currently being investigated by LAPD. “I do not condone what I did, even though I didn’t break any laws,” Swhileyy tells The Hollywood Reporter. “All I did was explore the building. I was never asked …

Meet the forgotten first wives of Hollywood’s biggest stars – including the woman who introduced Tom Cruise to Scientology

Meet the forgotten first wives of Hollywood’s biggest stars – including the woman who introduced Tom Cruise to Scientology

Published by Daniella Wilson

Tom Hanks and Samantha Lewes © Bei/ShutterstockTom met Samantha at university in Sacramento Tom Hanks is clearly enamoured with his wife, Rita Wilson, and they are the gold standard for long-lasting love in the spotlight. If they ever split up, that means love is absolutely dead in my opinion. Before Tom and Rita became the golden couple, he was married to actress Samantha Lewes (real name Susan Dillingham) for almost ten years. The pair met while studying theatre at the California State University in Sacramento, and said “I do” in 1978, a year after welcoming their son, Colin Hanks – who has followed his father’s footsteps in Hollywood.  They scraped by in Los Angeles as Tom struggled to find work in show business, and welcomed their second child, Elizabeth, in 1982. Tom and Samantha decided to call it quits in 1985, and finalised their divorce in 1987, with the mum of two being the kids’ primary caregiver. The Castaway actor went on to marry Rita, his Volunteers co-star, in 1988, and they later welcomed kids Chet …

Louis Theroux on his hilarious Scientology meta-movie

Louis Theroux on his hilarious Scientology meta-movie

Published by Sam Flores

Louis Theroux, the British TV host and documentary filmmaker, made a movie about the Church of Scientology without quite knowing what he was in for. His perspective as faux-naive or actually naive outsider — “I prefer actually naive,” Theroux said when I put it that way — yields a number of unexpected benefits. His Scientology movie, which is puckishly if appropriately titled “My Scientology Movie,” makes a strange, compelling and often hilarious companion piece to more straightforward investigative works like Alex Gibney and Lawrence Wright’s “Going Clear,” the Emmy-winning HBO documentary from 2015. Theroux stopped by Salon’s New York studio recently for a highly entertaining conversation about the making of “My Scientology Movie,” which to a significant degree is a movie about the making of itself. When I gently suggested that some people might call the film “meta,” Theroux embraced the term: “Yes, it is meta. That’s not a bad thing, is it?” The only possible answer to that is “It depends,” but in this case Theroux’s movie-about-a-movie captures the atmosphere of unreality that permeates …