Seth Rogen reveals strange encounter with Tom Cruise

Comedian Seth Rogen has shared details of a bizarre meeting he and Judd Apatow had with Tom Cruise in his mansion in 2006.

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow once had a bizarre encounter with Tom Cruise, in which the actor raved about Louis Farrakhan, blamed “the pharmaceutical industry” for his nutty public image and offered a lecture on Scientology.

The wild tête-à-tête happened in 2006, when Rogen and Apatow were summoned to the Top Gun legend’s Los Angeles mansion to discuss comedy, the Canadian funnyman says in his new volume of essays, Yearbook.

The meeting came as Rogen, now 39, was filming the movie Knocked Up with Apatow — and about a year after Cruise’s basic sanity had come into question when he interrupted an interview with Oprah Winfrey by jumping up and down on her couch.

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow in 2007. Picture: AP Photo/Matt Sayles

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Rogen said he sensed something was weird as soon as he drove up and saw Cruise, his then-wife, Katie Holmes, and their then-newborn baby, Suri, waiting to greet him.

“[Holmes] had a vague ‘please rescue me from this place’ look on her face,” Rogen noted.

After Apatow — whose directing credits include The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Funny People — arrived, the three sat down and had a four-hour-long conversation about movies. Then the conversation gently veered into the public perception of the superstar.

“There’s a co-ordinated effort to make it appear that way,” Cruise explained. When Rogen asked who was behind it, the Top Gun star confidently replied: “The pharmaceutical industry … because my exposure of their fraud has cost them so much money that they’re desperate. They’re scrambling and they’re doing everything they can to discredit me so I won’t hurt sales anymore.”

When Rogen gingerly asked, “Big Pharma made you jump on Oprah’s couch?” Cruise explained that the footage had been edited “to make it look so much worse than it was. They do that all the time. You should see what they do to my friend Louis Farrakhan!”

After Apatow noted that the controversial religious leader had a history of blatantly anti-Semitic comments, Cruise rebutted that Farrakhan was “great”.

Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise in 2005. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

“See, that’s the media,” he explained. “They’re distorting all of it! Take my religion, for example — Scientology. They make it seem soooo f**king different than it is! If you just gave me like an hour to tell you about it, you’d be like, ‘No f**king way?! That’s what Scientology is?! No f**king way!!’ In just one hour I could completely change your minds!!”

Rogen writes that both he and Apatow politely declined Cruise’s offer of a free Scientology introductory course and left.

Cruise’s publicist did not reply to Page Six’s request for comment.

This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission