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Nighy Defends Costar Cruise

By WENN | Wednesday, August 01, 2007

HOLLYWOOD – British actor Bill Nighy has defended his costar Tom Cruise’s religious beliefs after filming on their new movie was jeopardized by German authorities’ Scientology concerns.

Cruise is playing World War II hero Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg–who led an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler–in Rubicon.

However, efforts to shoot the movie on military sites were thwarted in July by Germany’s Defense Ministry, allegedly because Cruise’s Scientology beliefs are viewed as a “moneymaking cult” instead of a legitimate church by the German government.

But Nighy–who has already defended the film as a “heroic tale that deserves to be told”–is now urging greater tolerance for Cruise’s views.

He says, “It doesn’t make sense. I can’t see the point of persecuting an individual for what they believe. Whatever they believe.” (Source: Hollywood)

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August 1, 2007   //   Movie News and Valkyrie   //   1 Comment   //  

One Comment to “Nighy Defends Costar Cruise”

• August 17, 2007 at 11:59 am
  Robert Leibold says:

  Hollywood writers have recently proclaimed Tom’s “Valkyrie” an honorific to Colonel von Stauffenberg, and they then tout Stauffenberg as one of Germany’s few military heroes of World War II. If Tom and film-producers genuinely hope to gain solid philosophical ground with German officials regarding filming on German military sites, they’ll first need to rein in columnists who offer such thoroughly obsurd statements without regard for the surviving families of countless bona fide German military heroes of that war. Ill-educated Americans may know little outside the superficial context of Hollywood film, though Germans are supremely well-educated, and they know well the history of their myriad military heroes. To snub Germans is to embarrassingly highlight or revisit our own already glaring ignorance of social etiquette and world history.