In the new interview in the podcast Friend in high positions with Matt Friend, Actor John Stamos revealed that he almost joined the Church of Scientology in the late 1970s, but luckily he was so annoying that they kicked him out.
“I was in an acting class and there was this hot girl who said, ‘We’ll all meet at this address on Hollywood Boulevard, come afterward,'” said the Full house Star explained, “So I went there and it was the Scientology building… I was 17, maybe 16.”
Stamos continued, “So they brought me in there, and there was this guy, (he said) ‘Come here,’ and they have this E-meter where you hold these two cans…”
An E-meter, or electropsychometer, is a device that Scientologists claimed could read people’s emotions. To the young Stamos, however, the device looked very similar to the Wayback Machine from the 1960s cartoon The Rocky and Bullwinkle Showespecially the recurring segment “Peabody’s Unlikely Story.”
“I did a Peabody on the Wayback Machine,” Stamos explained. “They didn’t like that. And then I was joking around so much that they said, ‘Go away, go away, go away,’ and they just kicked me out.”
“So you’re telling me you weren’t allowed into Scientology because you fooled around too much?” Matt Friend asked in astonishment. “You were too annoying for Scientology?”
“Yeah,” Stamos said. “That’s pretty bad. I must have been awful.”
Stamos didn’t want to be one of the many Hollywood actors who were heavily involved in Scientology. Big names like Leah Remini and Laura Prepon were famously members of the church for years before eventually leaving, whereas stars like Tom Cruise, Elisabeth Moss and John Travolta never left. It was Travolta, in particular, who got Stamos’ story started in the first place.
“I wanted to be John Travolta,” Stamos said. “I still want to be John Travolta, but without, well… whatever that is.”
