Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | October 7, 2026
Glenn Close entered the Criterion Closet to talk about movies. The multi-Oscar nominee, who will next be seen in La Bola Negra and The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, talked about movies like Amarcord, In the Heat of the Night, and The Comfort of Strangers. She has great taste. She’s also had a bananas life. In the closet interview, she casually explains why she has a limited experience with cinema. It’s a cult’s fault!
“I haven’t seen a lot of movies,” Close admitted. “There’s a big part in my life where I was basically in a cult. Not my choice! So I didn’t really go to see movies a lot.”
I mean, if you need a good excuse for not having seen many films, this is one of the better ones.
The cult in question is Moral Re-Armament, or MRA. When Close was seven years old, her parents joined a commune. They went from WASPs (her father was the personal doctor to Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko!?) to commune residents. Moral Re-Armament was founded in 1938 as a “spiritual” movement that focused on the “Four Absolutes” of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Founded by a Lutheran minister named Frank Buchman, MRA was pretty popular in its early years. Buchman was even celebrated by world leaders and celebrities. Harry Trumann said the MRA was a great force against the rise of communism. But the MRA was also weirdly pro-Hitler and cited Spain’s fascist rule as the only way to defeat the reds.
Close is not the only person to have described MRA as a cult. She spent 15 years being told what to do and having every aspect of her life dictated by MRA’s leaders. It would take her until she was 22 to get out. “If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you’re supposed to live and what you’re supposed to say and how you’re supposed to feel, from the time you’re 7 till the time you’re 22, it has a profound impact on you,” she said in 2014.
Acting weas what helped Close to get out of the cult. She has long credited her desire to perform as giving her the strength to leave MRA. But she was clearly destined to be an actress. In the closet interview, while discussing The Black Stallion, she admits, “I thought I was a horse. I pretended I was a horse until my other told me to stand on my own two feet.” Method commitment. We love it.
