Giovanni Ribisi is a Scientologist

Demons that put an actor in Heaven

The Herald/August 1, 2002
By Stephen Applebaum

Excerpted from "Giovanni Ribisi tells Stephen Applebaum about how he has survived a crisis in his personal life to land his latest role

Giovanni Ribisi has been steadily making a name for himself with critically acclaimed performances in films such as "Saving Private Ryan," "Boiler Room," and "The Gift." During the past few years, [he has done] some serious soul searching, divorce[ed], and [is] form[ing] a new outlook on life.

Disappointment over the films he was making no doubt contributed to his growing discontentment [such as] "Gone in 60 Seconds."

Ribisi says, "I don't want to coast through my life. I don't want to just go through, especially, the capitalistic mentality of middle-class America where having money and a f****** big house is your happiness. I've bought into that and it was bullshit." "I was miserable," he recalls. "I was living somebody else's concept of what success was, and that's horrible. "Maybe it's true for some people that they can be, like, 'Yeah, this is my happiness', but I don't even think my life is about being happy," he continues. "It's about questioning things, and really asking myself what's motivating my decisions. Is it something I have incurred out of brainwashing or is it really something I want to take responsibility for, and say: 'This is me, this is my shit, take it or f****** leave it?' " Ribisi still lives in Los Angeles (primarily to be near his four-year-old daughter, Lucia), a cultural wasteland synonymous with materialism.

No wonder [his recent film] "Heaven," with its story of runaways who flout society's laws in favor of their own, appealed so strongly to Ribisi. It must also have resonated with the Scientologist in him, given the religion's stress upon personal ethics, although this is an area he is reluctant to discuss. Ribisi will soon be seen opposite fellow Scientologist John Travolta in "Basic," a film he does not appear to have high hopes for.