People in Mumbai Were Paid to Cheer for Tom Cruise

If you have been paying attention to celebrity news over the last decade, then you know that Tom Cruise has fallen from the top to the lower middle of celebrity.  It all happened when he flipped his lid on Oprah during "the couch jumping incident."  He is slowly making his way back up the celebrity ladder but does his people really pay for people to cheer for him in public?

According to the First Post Bollywood:

The 200-and-odd people gathered there didn’t even know who he was and they couldn’t care less. They had been hired at the rate of Rs 150, or $3 per person approximately, by a model coordinator to do the same!

“Tom kaun (Cruise)? I don’t know who he is or what he does. We were told to come here by 1pm today and wait for a foreign VIP to come out of the airport gate and scream and shout when he came. None of us know who Tom is. There was a buffet lunch also for us and we were paid Rs 150 for this job today. We do this for television shows and other such events where crowds are required,” said one of the junior artistes at the airport, who was hired as an excited Tom fan.

I understand that it is a foreign country and they want to make celebrities feel special.   Paying people to cheer, does this happen often with celebrities?

According to the Huffington Post Tom's people said that the story is false.

"Tom Cruise is a massive star and attracts huge throngs of fans as he travels the world promoting 'Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,'" a spokesperson for Paramount said in a statement to The Huffington Post. "The only people paid were performers who danced outside the venue. The idea that fans were paid to cheer is completely ludicrous and entirely false."

Whether it be true or false, the story seems a little far fetched.  Tom Cruise was a huge star before his fall from grace and he is slowly making his way back to super stardom.

Personally, I probably will not see any of Tom Cruise's movies in the theater.  I'll wait til they come out on Blu-Ray.

However, I will forever love him in Top Gun.

His latest movie Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol hits theaters on December 21st.