When John Stamos was 17 years old, he was allegedly recruited to join the Church of Scientology though his membership didn’t last long.
“With me, I was in an acting class and there was a hot girl, [who] said to me, ‘You know we’re all meeting at this [place] on Hollywood Boulevard, you should come after [class],’” Stamos, 61, recalled on the Sunday, August 25, episode of the “Friends in High Places” podcast. “I was working at my dad’s restaurant at the time and I said, ‘Dad, I gotta go.’ So, I went and it was the Scientology building.”
It was both the “hot girl” and his acting idol, John Travolta, who inspired Stamos to go to the meeting.
“Seeing [Grease] was like, ‘I wanna be that,” Stamos recalled. “I wanted to be John Travolta, I still do. Well, minus the whatever it is that they do.”
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Travolta, 70, joined the Church of Scientology in 1975. Stamos, meanwhile, never made it past one of the introductory sessions.
After Stamos arrived at the church, he was brought into the Scientology building and introduced to a machinery known as the “E-Meter,” which was made out of two cans. (The church claims that its electropsychometer device can indicate changes in emotional states to identify stored engrams and “levels of spiritual distress,” per a website description.) The Full House alum immediately started playing around with the device, pretending to hold a fake phone conversation.
“I was doing a Peabody and Sherman [impression] and they didn’t like that,” Stamos claimed. “Then, I was just f–king around so much, they said, ‘Get out [and] get going.’ They just kicked me out.”
After podcast host Matt Friend joked that Stamos was “too annoying” to join the controversial group, the actor concurred.
“That’s pretty bad, I must have been terrible,” Stamos quipped.
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Stamos previously detailed his experience with the Church of Scientology in his 2023 memoir, If You Would Have Told Me.
“I’m walking to my car and Mia runs out and hands me my workbooks,” Stamos wrote in the book. “‘Hey, you forgot these.’ She adds an extra book, the size of a brick, to my stack. ‘Start with this one,’ she says, smiling. ‘I think it will open your eyes to some amazing things.’”
When Stamos opened the book, he read a passage about control and “controlling your reactionary mind, controlling energy, controlling space and controlling time.”
While the book intrigued Stamos to stop by the Church’s venue, he soon found the location to be “creepy as f–k.”
“[One man] begins to question me about committing crimes, asks if I have negative thoughts about Scientology or [founder] L. Ron Hubbard and probes into some strange sex inquiries,” Stamos wrote. “The Wayback Machine needle jumps in the corner, and Mia looks disappointed. Apparently, I’m not Scientology material. Darn it.”
The church, meanwhile, has not publicly addressed Stamos’ claims.
