Jenny McCarthy says Scientology leader David Miscavige gave a roughly 30-minute best man speech at Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s 2006 wedding, telling the room the two were going to be the world’s most important couple.
McCarthy was a guest at the wedding at a castle in Italy, and on a recent podcast she described the toasts as two different worlds colliding.
The maid of honor, she says, kept it small and Midwestern: she and Holmes went to high school together, drank beers, threw parties with kegs, had sleepovers.
Then Cruise’s best man stood up. That was Miscavige, the leader of Scientology, and McCarthy says his speech ran about 30 minutes, all of it about how Cruise and Holmes were now going to be the world’s most important couple, a mega-celebrity duo with no equal.
According to McCarthy, she saw confusion in the reactions of Holmes’s family. She also saw Holmes herself attempting to keep smiling through the speech. “She looked like a deer in headlights,” McCarthy says.
She also described what she saw after the marriage, when the couple would visit and Cruise moved with a group of handlers who followed him from room to room. McCarthy says the handlers were there so he wouldn’t stray, keeping the pair inside what she called a Truman Show bubble.
