14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since Katie Holmes filed for divorce and “broke free” of Tom Cruise, the media has been siding with her. She's been portrayed as nothing short of a heroine who ran for her life just because she realized her daughter was in danger from the Church of Scientology.
Maybe that's not how it happened at all, Vulture argues in a lengthy, recent piece.
While the media and the public are siding with Katie in the divorce, assuming the worst about Tom Cruise, Vulture proposes a new, very interesting take on the whole scandal: what if we had Cruise wrong all along.
This doesn't mean that he's innocent of the weirdness so frequently attributed to him because of his involvement with Scientology, or that he did not do something to make Katie fall out of love with him and finally file for divorce.
However, there's a good chance Katie planned it all along – and made every possible step to ensure the whole world was watching and taking her side.
This could all be a PR move on her part to boost the film career she never really got to see take off properly before she married Tom.
“'I’m convinced that she’s the most fame-hungry person the world has ever seen,' says someone who’s worked with Holmes. Holmes’s entire divorce M.O. suggests an alternative gloss on her great escape. It’s implausible that Cruise’s workaholic lifestyle, or the rigors of Scientology, came as any surprise to her. To embrace the portrayal of her as a victim is to deny her agency,” Vulture writes.
She is not a victim, but a very skilled player of the fame game: she always makes sure she's papped wherever she goes (especially when she's with Suri) and that paparazzi get just the right expression on her face, whether it's of boredom, exhaustion or happiness (at her newfound freedom).
Because she hated that she'd become the joke of Hollywood in recent years (while former “Dawson's Creek” co-star Michelle Williams was building a name for herself as one of the most talented actresses of her generation), it could just be that Katie saw in the divorce a way to boost that acting career that was nearly forgotten.
“Scientology, or rather its terrible reputation, offered a way out. Holmes, unable to get the kinds of roles she wanted, realized she could cast herself in the part of a lifetime. Like Truman in The Truman Show, she finally grasped her ontological status as a character in a fiction, and that self-awareness propelled her out of the story and crashing through the fourth wall. She knew a good third-act twist when she saw one,” Vulture writes.
“'It’s not like she ever had a huge career to begin with. She was a rising star. Now she will have a huge career,' says an editor at a leading celebrity magazine. Holmes, emerging from a seven-year, one-on-one apprenticeship with the world’s most famous action hero, simply rewrote the script,” adds the same report.