Scarlett Johansson Wants You to Know She Never Auditioned to Date Tom Cruise

Here’s a weird one.

Scarlett Johansson has to deal with a lot—like an unfortunate string of box office flops, and not getting her own standalone Marvel movie—but this is a lot.

Johansson has given a statement to the Hollywood Reporter in response to an ex-Scientologist’s claim she once auditioned to date Tom Cruise.

"The very idea of any person auditioning to be in a relationship is so demeaning," she said.

"I refuse for anyone to spread the idea that I lack the integrity to choose my own relationships. Only a man aka Brendan Tighe would come up with a crazy story like that."

Who’s Brendan Tighe? That’d be the man who once served as a member of Cruise’s Scientology security unit, and who claimed on Megyn Kelly Today that he saw numerous reports of women who auditioned to be in a relationship with Cruise shortly after his divorce from Nicole Kidman in the early '00s.

Tighe says Johansson was the only woman’s name on the reports he recognised.

Rumours of Cruise and the Church of Scientology "auditioning" partners is not new, with Vanity Fair alleging Homeland actress Nazanin Boniadi went through the same process in 2004, before they embarked on a two-month courtship.

Gotta say: We don’t hate the idea of a Black Widow movie being a decades-spanning saga about the liberation of Tom Cruise’s romantic partners. Godspeed, Natasha.

Photo: Disney