Tag, you’re it! Word of advice: Never ask Leah Remini to play hide-and-seek with her adult friends. The King of Queens actress claims in her controversial tell-all, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, that Tom Cruise once asked some of his friends — including Will and Jada Pinkett Smith — to play the children’s game at his Los Angeles home. (The Smiths are not Scientologists, according to former church exec Mike Rinder, but they are close with Cruise.)
Remini, wearing heels at the time, thought that the Risky Business star was joking at first. “I can’t play — I’m wearing Jimmy Choos,” Remini, 45, recalled in her book, which includes several anecdotes about the actor. “Well, good,” Cruise allegedly replied, as quoted by the actress. “So you’re It, then.”
The Exes star claimed that she stayed put as Cruise, now 53, ran off to hide in his “almost three full acres of secluded land.” Remini, meanwhile, pulled aside her husband, Angelo Pagan, to say she was not in the mood to run around.
“Uh, Angelo, you’re going to go ahead and do this, because I’m not doing it,” Remini wrote of the incident. “I’m not trying to play a f—king game of hide-and-seek in five-inch stilettos.”
Remini didn’t reveal if she actually went through with the outdoor activity, but she did claim that “you didn’t just say no to ‘Mr. Cruise’ even when it came to little things.” According to her book, his “entourage” included Jenna and Bodhi Elfman, but not fellow celebrity Scientologists Kirstie Alley and John Travolta. Remini wrote in Troublemaker that she heard Cruise allegedly “didn’t like them.”
As previously reported, the Church of Scientology isn’t pleased with Remini’s allegations. Following her 20/20 interview, the church posted a statement on its official website, claiming that Remini didn’t quit but was expelled.
“Ms. Remini is showing herself to be a shallow, spoiled individual with a sense of entitlement who obsesses endlessly over such petty matters as seating and limo arrangements, the size of her room at a five-star hotel and who inserts herself into the family matters of others,” the statement reads. “Leah Remini knows the truth she conveniently rewrites in her revisionist history.” Read the full statement here.
