These are photos of Tom Cruise in front of the Taj Mahal during a weekend visit to promote Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. While interacting with fans and preening for the media, Tom appeared to be acting like his usual overenthusiastic self for at least two hours running. At one point, the Cruise even expressed some unequivocal interest in going Bollywood.

Yes, you read that correctly.

If he’s serious and not blowing random praise out his unhinged ass, this would be an interesting career move. Tom still remains something of a sexy yet botoxed movie star even though it’s difficult to take him seriously because he’s always trying so hard to prove his manliness while unwittingly revealing an acute sensitivity over his lifts. Still, Hollywood isn’t done with Cruise yet for at least a few more years, but can you imagine him in a Bollywood flick? Now that’s an endeavor for which Tom would probably sing and dance 10 hours per day in preparation, right? That prospect might be closer than a mere joke, according to Tom himself:

Tom Cruise rounded off his two-day India visit Sunday night with a red carpet screening of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, held at an IMAX cinema in Mumbai.

Arriving in a motorcade of BMWs branded with the Ghost Protocol logo, Cruise — clad in a blue shirt and jeans — was greeted by screaming fans, with whom he spent almost two hours in between talking to the media.

“I love watching Hindi movies. There are many Hindi movies that come out every year but I do watch a few of them. (If offered a Bollywood film) I would never say no. I would love to do it,” the 49-year-old actor told reporters.

Ghost Protocol will release in India on Dec. 16 — including dubbed versions in Hindi and regional languages — distributed by Viacom18 Motion Pictures. Viacom18 is also promoting its upcoming Bollywood title Players, an adaptation of The Italian Job, directed by the brothers Abbas-Mastan and starring actors Abhishek Bachchan and Neil Nitin Mukesh and actresses Sonam Kapoor and Bipasha Basu.

[From Hollywood Reporter]

You just know that some Bollywood film producer with a whacked out sense of humor will now offer a project to Cruise, but will he keep his word and sign onto the film? If the price is right, I don’t see why he wouldn’t. Meanwhile, Tom is in route to the Dubai Film Festival, where Ghost Protocol will hold its world premiere on Wednesday night amidst a city full of skyscraping phalluses (including the Burj Khalifa Tower from which Ethan Hunt provocatively dangles during Ghost Protocol). Good plan, Tom.

In less sunny Tom-related news, an ex-member of Scientology named Valeska Paris has spoken to Australian media regarding her 12 years of forced labor upon a notorious CO$ cruise ship known as the “Freewinds,” which often hosts courses for upper OT-level training as well as VIP bashes. One such party just happened to be Tom’s 42nd birthday blowout, which he described as “the best birthday ever ever ever ever … and I mean EVER!.” While video of the news report is available here, there are also more details in print from The Independent:

Valeska Paris told a TV interviewer that she was 18 when she joined the crew of the Freewinds, a vessel the Church describes as its floating “cathedral” and which once hosted Tom Cruise’s birthday party. She alleged that her passport was confiscated, and that, until she was 24, she was prevented from setting foot on dry land without an escort.

Her troubled relationship with the organisation spans three continents and several decades. Born in Switzerland, to parents who were both involved in Scientology, she moved to the UK at the age of six, and spent her formative years at the Church’s headquarters in Sussex.

After turning 14, Ms Paris graduated from the organisation’s youth wing, the “Cadet Org” to its senior volunteer wing, the “Sea Org.” She signed a contract agreeing to remain a member for the ensuing period of no less than one billion years. Trouble began, she now claims, when her mother defected from Scientology in 1995, and began denouncing it on French television. Ms Paris says church elders then ordered her to “disconnect” from her parent.

A year later, when she was 18, Ms Paris joined the crew of the Freewinds. “I was sent to the ship for two weeks,” she told ABC, adding that for a salary of $50 a week, she was often required to work long shifts in the vessel’s engine room.

“It’s hot, it’s extremely loud, it’s smelly, it’s not nice,” she said. “I was sent down there at first for 48 hours straight on almost no sleep and I had to work by myself… I did not want to be there, I made it clear I did not want to be there.”

Among the landmark events of her time on board was the 2004 birthday party of the actor Tom Cruise. In a second interview, with the Village Voice newspaper, Ms Paris recalled helping to decorate the ship, but claims she “wasn’t allowed” to attend, because she was suffering from a cold sore.

Video of the ensuing celebration later leaked to YouTube shows Cruise performing the song “Old Time Rock and Roll.”

Ms Paris left the Freewinds in 2007, and moved to a church facility in Sydney with her husband, the former Australian rugby league star Chris Guider. They eventually decided to defect from the church and now have a young son.

The Church meanwhile denies that it ever holds anyone against their will. In a two-page statement, it described the Freewinds as a “wonderful place,” saying Ms Paris was free to leave at any time and made numerous unaccompanied trips to dry land.

“She certainly wasn’t ‘forced’ to be there,” it read. “Her allegation that she could only leave the ship with an escort is totally false… That she is now attacking her former religion and former friends, and fabricating these stories, speaks volumes about her. She is a true apostate.”

[From Independent

For those who’ve read up on the inner workings of Scientology slaves (and their billion-year contracts) that are readily available in various online establishments (including the amazing wealth of info available on Wikileaks), this story will sound entirely believable. The detail about the cold sore relates to the tenet that Scientologists in good standing are not vulnerable to illness or disease, so any evidence of physical ailments necessarily means that the member is either losing his faith (and in need of much rehabilitative auditing) or is somehow being influenced by a suppressive person in their lives. So of course anyone with a cold sore can’t be allowed to celebrate and party down with the likes of Tom Cruise … unless that person happens to be wife Katie Holmes or ex-wife Nicole Kidman, who both, interestingly enough suffer from cold sores. Not that Tom could possibly be a connecting factor, right?

On final note about the word “apostate,” which is a term that the CO$ is quite fond of using to describe defectors and was also used in a tongue-in-cheek manner by The New Yorker in its 2009 article about director Paul Haggis’ break with the cult. “The Apostate” was once the working title of Paul Thomas Anderson’s anti-Scientology film, The Master, which is now in post production and will star Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I can’t wait to see this movie, and Tom Cruise’s lifts are gonna hit the roof.

Photos courtesy of WENN